Originally published on Patreon
The world as we know it is over, vampires rule , humanity is reduced to a food source trapped inside blood farms, the few that are free are being hunted to extinction, and the worlds most powerful heroes are now monsters. Things have never quite looked as bad for Earth as they do here.
With things being so dire, the remaining heroes are barely holding on to their will to keep fighting, let alone coming up with a plan to save everything. The magic users are trying to find a way of reversing the vampire infection, to little success, and the more scientifically minded are experimenting on Harley Quinn to try and turn her now deadly blood into a weapon to use on the undead.
The heroes have rescued Supergirl, but without her powers there's not much that she can do yet. So, a plan is formed to get her to Australia, where they hope that they will be able to find a spacecraft that will get her above the permanent night that surrounds the planet, allowing her to recharge in the sun's light.
But this isn't the only plan, as other survivors are coming up with last ditch moves of their own. Barbara Gordon, Black Canary, Harley Quinn, and Frankenstein set out to journey into Gotham, the seat of the vampire king's power, in hope of locating Dick Grayson and putting an end to him. Knowing that the mission doesn't hold much hope of success, and that another vampire will probably just take over as king anyway, the four of them still feel like it's about all they can do to challenge the oncoming end of everything.
Green Arrow also seems to have a mission of his own, and in the last pages of the book we see him having gone off alone; though it's not clear yet just what he's doing.
This kind of feels like a weird issue in the series, as everything before now has been focused on the destruction that the vampires are causing, on the killings, the loss of our way of life, on everything that's been taken. But this issue instead takes a slightly different approach, and looks to what might be left. We slow down and spend time with the survivors when they're not fighting for their lives, when they're trying to justify to themselves why it's worth fighting anymore rather than giving up.
In some ways this issue feels kind of hopeful, like there could be a way of changing things and saving the world, yet that hope feels so faint and so remote that it feels like a foolish one. James Tynion IV and Matthew Rosenberg have done a good job at capturing the emotions you'd feel living through the end times, of wanting to believe in a better tomorrow, yet feel a sense of hopelessness at the same time.
There are only four issues left of this series (apart from the tie-in's) and it feels like we're moving towards the end game now. But honestly, I don't know if they even have a hope in hell of surviving, let alone winning.
This article, and many others, can be read a month early on my Patreon for as little as $3 a month!
No comments:
Post a Comment