By Chris Fenn
DC is currently producing two weekly series that I’ve been keeping up with; Batman Eternal and Futures End. I have to say neither one of them have really grabbed me like I thought they would, but Futures End does seem to be the most engaging.
The story is split across a fair few characters; at first I found this confusing but lately I’ve read all of Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldier of Victory, and Futures End isn’t so difficult to follow after that!
Linking to Seven Soldiers we start this book with my good friend Frankenstein. I’ve found this element of the story to be a lot less engaging, especially as we, the readers, have already seen what happened to Stormwatch at the very beginning of this story.
Tim Drake’s story has been quite fascinating and did grab my attention for some while; I want to know what happened in Paris and I want to know how Tim survived and what happened to the rest of the Titans. I understand why they would want to progress the character of Tim’s girlfriend, Madison, but having her have a breakdown and namedrop her father isn’t the way to go about it. Also I have no idea who Maxwell Payne is, and all google gave me was the Max Payne computer game series!
I found Firestorm quite interesting in that one half of him was being held hostage and there is a lot of guilt and blame being shared between the two. In this issue though it just felt like the Firestorm story was only included as a reminder that these characters exist, and there was little advancement or development. We did learn that Ronnie Raymond lost his mother in ‘The Battle of Pittsburgh’ but it didn’t impact me emotionally and we are still none the wiser to the war that happened four years ago.
I am liking the Grifter story: Grifter was a New 52 book I owned from start to cancellation, and it was really good until Rob Liefeld kind of ruined it. The same can be said for the other focus on Cadmus Island; Deathstroke! I was sort of disappointed that Team 7 wasn’t mentioned; Grifter clearly recognized Slade’s name, but in a more “I’ve read about this guy” kind of way than actually working with him; no big deal though! Having a clearly very powerful little girl seems a bit too cliché for me; it reminds me of Locus from Justice League 3000 and I’m not a huge fan of that character either.
The closing segment is about Terry, which I feel is the backbone of the Futures End story. It feels to me like the team of Coil, Key and Plastique have been talking about this plan for days and gotten nowhere, and I can’t tell if this part of the story needed more space or what, but it felt like a lot of treading water for Terry to just fly off and leave the cyborg Plastique with Mr. Terrific.
I really want to like this weekly series, but I feel it and Batman Eternal suffer with trying to juggle too many characters and components with not enough space. I am keen to learn about the war, why Superman wears a mask and see Terry and Grifter save the universe, but I’m still not sold on these weekly events.
For more comic views and reviews follow Chris on Twitter at @fenneth1989
Posted on June 20th, 2014
Category: OUT OF THE LONG BOX, REVIEWS
Tags: Chris Fenn, DC Comics, Firestorm, Frankenstein, Futures End #7 Review, Maxwell Payne, Tim Drake