Cover by: Mikel Janin
Variant Covers by: Taurin Clarke and Cully Hamner
Editor: Chris Rosa
Group Editor: Paul Kaminski
Man, DC really loves creating the most awkward titles possible. Regardless, Beast World is a very interesting event. It began with Beast Boy transforming into a Starro to defeat a similar creature known as the Necrostar. But before he could back, a villain known as Doctor Hate took control of his mind, causing the Starro-Beast Boy to flood the Earth with spores that turn people into mindless animal/human hybrids. Impulse can be seen in the background of the first issue of this event, but he doesn't say or do anything, so I decided to skip it. He does, however play a slightly larger role in this tie-in issue, so here we are.
Our cover shows Wally, Irey and Irey's friend, Maxine, battling a bunch of animal/humans. Maxine is Animal Man's daughter, so it's only natural that she'd play a big role in a story like this. However, I would prefer to see more members of the Flash family out here. It's a perfectly serviceable cover, but not very exciting. And, as usual, none of the variant covers feature Impulse, so let's dive in.
Written by: Si Spurrier
Art by: Scott Koblish
Colors by: Hi-Fi
Letters by: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
The untitled main story bookends several separate stories by different creative teams. We open with Barry trying to have a romantic evening with Iris, but he's still suffering from the debilitating headaches that have plagued him ever since that strange rainbow phenomenon showed up above his statue. Irey suddenly bursts through the door, telling Barry what's happening in the city. Barry initially refuses to help, until he learns that one of his old foes, Godspeed, has turned into a man-sized hornet with super speed. After a quick pep talk from Iris, Barry dons his costume and races off with Irey to contact the rest of the Flash family. (This begins the side stories, but we only care about one of them.)
Invitation to the Speedster Ball
Starring: Julien "Jules" Jourdain as Circuit Breaker, Hartley Rathaway as Pied Piper & Bart Allen aka Impulse as ... ?
By Al Kaplan
Lettering Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Edits Andrea Shea & Chris Rosa
Circuit Breaker (a new hero connected to the Still Force) and the Pied Piper have figured out how to combine their powers to pull Beast Boy's spores out of infected people and destroy them. Their efforts are abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Impulse, who has been turned into a very large frilled-neck lizard.
Circuit Breaker creates an "energy lasso" of sorts to wrap around Impulse's neck and ride him like a small horse. The Pied Piper, however, can't use his sound waves to lure the spore out like the others, to which he remarks, "That kid could never hold a steady beat." The Impulse lizard goes wild and tries to buck off Circuit Breaker, but the self-proclaimed "rodeo queen" manages to hang on.
The Pied Piper then receives word that the Flash family is meeting up at Iron Heights, so he suggests they forget about trying to extract the spore from Impulse and focus on "herding" him back to the rest of the speedsters.
We then return to the main story, where Animal Girl decides to experiment on the Lizard Impulse by trying to turn him into an ostrich. The process would have worked — had Impulse been able to stay still long enough. Poor Bart is grotesquely split between the two animals before being reverted back to lizard form.
Jay, Wallace, Avery, Irey and Jai are all present, but Wally has apparently chosen to work with the Titans during this crisis. And Barry is struggling to contain the Hornet Godspeed, who can move fast enough to essentially turn himself into a swarm. For some reason, Irey believes the best way to stop Godspeed would be for Animal Girl to turn them all into wolves with Barry as the alpha to lead the pack. Everyone points out how stupid that idea is, so Jai offers an alternative — bees.
And for reasons I'll never understand, everyone agrees with this plan and willingly ingests Beast Boys spores. Animal Girl turns Barry, Jay, Bart, Wallace, Ace, Hartley and Jules into giant bees, but leaves Jai and Irey as humans just because. The bees quickly close in on Godspeed and vibrate to create heat, which burns away the spore inside him. Animal Girl then gives Iris the powers of a queen bee so she can control all our bee heroes and direct them to rescue the infected civilians and slowly burn out their spores one by one.
This may be a fun event, but this tie-in issue didn't quite do it for me. Mainly because the ending was so forced and unnecessary. Turning everybody into bees accomplishes nothing! These heroes are much stronger in their normal human form! If they were already infected, and there was no possible way to remove the spores, then that'd justify this silly ending. But, no — they all had to willingly infect themselves. Well, all except for Impulse, that is. Don't ask me how he became infected — I had assumed that speedsters would have been too fast and/or able to vibrate through the spores. Bart just gets to be special, I guess.
His design as a frilled-neck lizard was pretty neat, I'll admit. I just wish they did something more with him. I also was a bit confused by his size. Bart must have been over 10 feet long in that lizard body. I'd say that's an inconsistency with this event, but this issue in particular didn't have much consistency. Some of the animal hybrids still had more or less human bodies with the heads and arms/legs of animals. Others, like Captain Cold's polar bear, completely changed into an exact copy of an animal. Some of the infected people got smaller. Some got bigger. Nobody really seemed to iron out exactly how these Beast Boy/Starro spores affect people.
The inconsistencies didn't stop there. In one story in this issue, Jai looked about four or five years older than he did elsewhere in this issue, and his muscles didn't inflate when he used his powers, like they did just a few pages later, when a different artist was drawing him. Look, I get not wanting to be the "bad guy" and tell the artist to redraw a couple of pages, but in cases like this, I think any good editor would have to make that call.
Next time, we'll continue this event with Titans: Beast World #3, which technically takes place before this Central City tie-in, but wasn't published until after it came out (speaking of editorial annoyances).
