Deathstroke #49

All the King's Men

Marv Wolfman – Writer
Sergio Cariello and William Rosado – Pencillers
Will Blyberg – Inker
John Costanza Letters
Chris Matthys Colors
Keri Kowalski Asst. Edits
Pat Garrahy Editor
Deathstroke created by Marv Wolfman & George Perez

The cover is by Sergio Cariello, and it's a pretty standard action shot of Deathstroke and all the guest heroes of this issue. Impulse doesn't look in the bottom right corner, but as a whole, Cariello isn't that talented of an artist. He especially seems to have a problem drawing feet — look at how tiny Deathstroke's feet are and how many people simply don't have feet at all.

Continuing with the complete and utter lack of consistency with the Crimelord-Syndicate War, this issue follows the standard of Deathstroke #48, which broke the story up into a bunch of tiny chapters. We'll skip ahead to Chapter Twenty: Deathstroke, which features the New Titans and Deathstroke finally gaining an upper hand in the three-way war thanks to the sudden arrival of the Darkstars.

Seeing that they're completely outmatched, Crimelord's Force-Troops call a hasty retreat and teleport away. I'm not sure why they arrived at the battle in a ship instead of directly teleporting there in the first place, but whatever. The chapter comes to a quick end after two pages, which brings us to Chapter Twenty-One: Sla-Gorann. The alien leader of this group of the Syndicate, Sla-Gorann, kills the corrupt Senator Baron, who had been working with the Syndicate for whatever reason. Sla-Gorann also initiates a self-destruct on himself, his men and his ship, forgetting that last issue he wanted to tell Donna Troy where Crimelord's nuclear warheads were. But Donna and Deathstroke remember this vital piece of information right as everything begins exploding, and conveniently off page, Deathstroke manages to learn the location of eight of the nukes.

Let's skip ahead to Chapter Twenty-Eight: Zarina. The only important stuff that happened in the last seven chapters was Sargent Steel gathering up a whole bunch of heroes to find the bombs, including the Blood Pack (which is surprisingly still running its reality show), Extreme Justice and the Outsiders. They have to go all around the world to find these nukes, including the Vltava River in Prague — a place I know very well, having lived there for two years. Steel was especially worried about the Czech government getting its hands on the warhead, which I find fairly laughable. By 1995, the Czech Republic was no longer communist and really in no position to cause any problems to anybody with or without a nuke.

Anyway, the Titans are sent to Boston Harbor, where the warhead was apparently hidden on an old-timey ship. But in the last chapter of this issue, we learn that the Crimelord has secretly been watching everything, and he is interfacing with something or someone named Zarina. And then, his identity is finally revealed as Steve Dayton — formerly the Doom Patrol hero Mento!

Whew! We are finally done with the Crimelord-Syndicate War! It ended just as abruptly and disappointingly as it began. And after four issues, I still don't know why Crimelord and the Syndicate were fighting. This was a wasted crossover that failed to live up to any of its potential. And this issue only gave me one shot of Impulse — happily disarming people in the battle, which he should have been doing from the start. Oh well. I won't have to worry about Crimelord or the Syndicate ever again. ... I hope.

There is no letters column this month, nor are there any new ads. So I'll leave you until next time, when we explore The New Titans #123.