Fight!
Joshua Williamson & Scott Snyder Writers
Dexter Soy pgs. 1-10 & Scott Koblish pgs. 75-80 Artists
Veronica Gandini Colorist
Tom Napolitano Letterer
Our cover by Dan Mora is a perfect reflection of the incomprehensible insanity of this story. Snyder just threw hundreds of characters into the pot to fight against hundreds more of corrupted versions of themselves. And they just fight and fight and fight. Not one bit of it makes any sense. And very little of this story — if you can even call it a story — appeals to me. Mainly because Impulse has not been involved at all. And this cover is a good reminder of that. Barry, Wally and Jay are present. But no Bart.
Bart does make a brief cameo in the main story of this issue, which focuses on Wonder Woman’s battle against The Batman Who Laughs. We briefly see Bart standing with Arrowette, who brags about bringing a lot of arrows to take down the approaching horde of evil Robins. But I think this glimpse of Impulse was a mistake, because we later see him make a “dramatic” entrance with the other speedsters who stayed behind in the Speed Force back in Speed Metal.
And that’s it. The long promised arrival of reinforcement speedsters was woefully underwhelming. And also besieged by editorial mistakes. Jay addresses Jesse, who wasn’t even speaking, and then specifically calls out Max and Avery, but not Bart. This is a level of sloppiness that is far beneath Joshua Williamson’s standards. In fact, if it weren’t for yet another diatribe about how awful Heroes in Crisis was, I’d suspect Williamson wasn’t involved at all. (Wally had to briefly confront an evil version of himself who was filled with bloodlust after killing all those people at the Sanctuary.)
I’m not mad at this story. Just disappointed. An army of speedsters is potentially the most powerful thing in the universe. But here, they were presented as nothing stronger than a couple of people with a bow and arrow. It’s a common problem with stories like this and try to involve everybody. The endless battle invariably reduces all characters to identical clones of each other who just fight and fight and fight, never doing anything unique or interesting.
The good news is we are now officially done with Dark Nights: Obnoxious Title. So let’s wrap up this post (and the year 2020) with some house ads:
DC Future State: The Next Batman. Hunted by the magistrate!
Dark Detective. The original Batman meets the next Batman!
Batman/Superman: The Dark Knight must save the Man of Steel from a powered-up Professor Pyg!
DC Future State: Superman: House of El. Being super runs in the family!
Superman of Metropolis. If these Kryptonians clash, nothing can save the city!
Superman: Worlds of War. It’s the main event: Superman versus Mongul!
Superman vs. Imperious Lex. Superman and Lois against the universe! Could the last days of Lexor be here already?!
Kara Zor-El: Superwoman. The Fortress of Solitude under siege!
Next time, we’ll hand out the awards for 2020, before jumping into Future State: The Flash #1.
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