Forever Evil: Rogues Rebellion 5
Brian Buccellato, Scott Hepburn
Forever Evil Crossover
Spoiler alert! You have been warned!
The penultimate chapter of the less-than-stellar miniseries spinning out of the events of Forever Evil is a slight improvement over the last issue. Not much, but it’s almost over, so maybe I’m getting excited to save 2.99 every month and giving it more credit than it deserves. Or maybe I’m just getting used to Scott Hepburn’s artwork. But no matter what my reasons end up being, one thing still remains the same: Brian Buccellato messed up big time by taking the one interesting aspect away from the Rogues: their leader. Without Captain Cold, this series was destined for failure. The first issue was good, at best, and then they lost their leader (and the great pencils of Patrick Zircher). It was all down hill from there.
The Gothamites are gone. But the Rogues still have to deal with the Royal Flush Gang. (Yawn.) None of the characters are likable and all of the jokes fall flat. There isn’t a sense of urgency because Buccellato has never made me care about any of these characters, not even when they were in The Flash. But then something magical happens about half-way through the issue: The Crime Syndicate’s very own Johnny Quick and Atomica show up. And though they are totally feeding off the Geoff Johns story that made them cool (their origin story in Justice League), props to Booch for making it work. The issue (and series) takes it up a notch and shows them in all their brutal glory, as everyone shares a laugh (albeit insanely) at the concept of the Rogues being cops on Earth-3. The brutality and the violence is over-the-top and almost Mark Millaresque in all its glory. And though they are pulled from the battle by Grid, the fight is quite possibly one of the most visually-impressive ones from the entire event… And this is coming from a reviewer who is on-record for not liking Hepburn’s previous work. We then get a cliffhanger (which is to be expected) when Gorilla Grodd shows up (as if the Rogues haven’t been through enough already) and declares himself King and wants to kill a bunch more people.
The last issue shows promise. Giant monkey villain fighting a beaten and battered group of completely and utterly expendable D-list villains might just yield some excitement. I hope they just destroy the entire dynamic of this team and kill a bunch of them off. It would be literally the first interesting thing since their New 52 debut. I’ll be glad when this one is over, to be honest. It should have been a one-shot. Maybe then it would have worked, but as a six-issue miniseries, it simply falls flat on just about every level. One more issue. See you there.
My Rating: 3/5
