Welcome back to Earth 2! After the debacle that was Future’s End Month, we’re back to the present and Earth 2 is catching its breath following the death of Bizarro and the attack by Apokolips. I’ll come right out and say it: There’s a lot of recap and a lot of story, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but after the insanity that was the last arc, this serves as a respite in the maelstrom that is the Second Apokolips War. It’s not like there’s no action, it’s just action for the sake of story-telling.
“Collision” opens up with flashbacks about Helena and Kara’s childhoods, with Kara discovering her powers and Helena being saved by Thomas from one of those rampant daytime muggers. Full of sentimentality and fun, light moments, it shows the connection between two characters in particular and how their past will affect them going forward.
The rest of the story centers around Kara, Helena, Thomas, Val, and Red Tornado Lois as they liberate the C.E.R.N. Headquarters in Geneva from the leftover forces of Apokolips. They’re some sort of zombie/monster/radiation residue thing (?) that infects everyone but the Wonders by touching them. The Wonders can just go wailing on them but anyone else gets turned into them. It’s a weird oversight but nitpicky. Once again, the crux of this story is its story-telling, so there’s little to talk about.
One of the few qualms I had with the writing, besides the slight clichés was how Bennett and Taylor wrote Helena and Thomas. There’s one point where Thomas seems excessively apologetic; granted, he hasn’t seen his granddaughter for over five years, but to take time out of a mission to appeal to Helena. Then, Helena finds out that Thomas is using Miraclo, and immediately asks to use some. That, to me, was as if Bruce had resorted to Venom (oh, hey, copy of Batman: Venom) The Waynes must just be hard to write by nature.
The artwork is shared between two separate pairs of artists – Andy Smith and Trevor Scott are in charge of the meat of the issue, while Marcus To and Scott Hanna illustrate the first four and last two pages. I’m come to be a fan of Trevor Scott’s work, so I would have liked to have seen him do the whole thing, but like I said before, the opening pages were a positive. There were no jarring moments that made me question the quality of the work, and the action is exceptional, with a cast of mostly bruisers dealing out tons of kick-ass.
For anyone looking to jump on now, do it. It’s a good start that has its own summarizing of the events leading up to this issue.
- And next arc’s villains are…The Furies of Apokolips. See more in the Earth 2: World’s End review
- The whole slam-together-to-form-a-neuron-bomb thing was borderline cheesy, but was still a cool image.
Favorite Quote: “It’s wonderful to see another Kryptonian in action.” “Thanks, Val. The secret is granola bars.” – Val and Kara.
Recommended If…
- You want a good point to jump back on.
- You enjoy some well-done Wonder overkill.
- You want to continue following Kara’s and Helena’s story.
Overall:
A solid start to a new arc that acts more like an epilogue to the last few issues than a prologue to the next ones. Characters who we knew little about before are fleshed out in a well-written, though nearly cliché, story. The action more than makes up for it, but the strength of this issue lies in its writing.
SCORE: 7/10
