This is the fourth month in a row that this book has sold out from my local comic shop the day that it arrived in stores. Do that many people really buy this book? Why? Is it selling on name alone, because if so it’s not even spelt the same as one of the most recognizable titles of all time World’s Finest? Exactly who is buying this and for what purpose, and why does it keep getting above-average reviews from seemingly everyone besides me? Is there something I’m missing? This book is terrible, right? Someone please tell me. I feel so alone.
I’m having a weird existential crisis reading this book and others like it. It’s like watching the Star Wars prequels if those movies had an even worse script, characters with less chemistry, and a plot with more holes. We know what’s going to happen to literally every character in this book – they’re going to die. All of them. Multiple times in some cases. The entire world is basically going to end; World’s End is seeing to that on its own. There is no purpose for this series to have continued once its two main characters went to another dimension and were transported into TWO other books. It was like the creative team said “Hey we have a contract for another six books but we ended the story too early. Quick! To the prequel machine! The people want Batman and Superman? We’ll give it to them! John, don’t be silly. We don’t need anything like coherency or competence to keep this line a-rollin’!”
Reading this book actively puts me in a bad mood. I’ve turned against the artwork entirely, the relationships between all the main characters are cardboard at best, the plot is going to be cut short and left basically unfinished (oh, because it was finished in another book), and the dialogue is an atrocity of nightmare proportions. Did the person who wrote and edited Catwoman’s lines have a contract clause where they had to include that awful “Kitten” reference to Helena? It is one of the most cringe-worthy things I’ve read ever.
Oh yeah, the comic. Apokolips starts attacking Earth 2, which is kind of the entire point of what’s been going on in Earth 2 and World’s End. Except this is the First Apokolips War – you know, the one that killed the Wonders – and is only the very beginning of the war. Seeing as how Lois is going to die, spoiler alert, she doesn’t know anything about the war, so for all intents and purposes she is probably going to get hit by a satellite or something and die and Superman is going to cry or some nonsense.
Can we talk about Apokolips’ plan to throw satellites at Earth 2? It is stupid. It’s actually so beyond stupid it defies the laws of thermodynamics and physics. Any object of that tiny size rocketing through space is going to get burnt up or break up on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. I’m old enough to remember MIR falling to Earth, and that thing lasted about a quarter of a second before it was reduced to little more than ash. And that was one of the bigger pieces of junk floating around up there. All these tiny ones wouldn’t last one minute falling to Earth. And why only attack the major cities? Sure, they would have the most concentrated population, but to do any real damage you would need an insane amount of satellites with pinpoint accuracy. Even if you could take out the major cities, there are still billions and billions of people on the planet who live, well, everywhere else.
Superman and Batman end up having a weird conversation, Catwoman says some awful things, Lois does the whole “my job is more important than survival” shtick that got old in the first thirty minutes of the first Superman movie. Alfred is on the cover and isn’t in the book. Is he supposed to be hanging off the Earth 2 Bat-Plane-Wing-Thing? Because that, lovely people, is impossible. This comic was written by Paul Levitz and the artwork was Jed Dougherty. I would imagine when all is said and done neither one would want their names stuck on this book.
I apologize for the awful things I’ve said. There is just zero purpose to anything this book is doing, and it’s a waste of good opportunities for new creative teams and ideas to do better things.
- Lois is going to die.
- Superman is going to die.
- Batman is going to die.
- Catwoman is going to die.
- Did you not know that already? Then what are you doing here?
Favorite Quote: “Are you sure you’re not doing this to hurt yourself?” – My therapist
Recommended If…
- You’re the kind of person who will buy a comic just because it’s part of a series that is really popular and you think that will help you turn it into a profit down the line.
- You have money to waste and have poor decision-making skills.
- You really want an incomplete history of Earth 2 from the perspective of a character who died halfway through the events they are describing.
Overall: One more month. One more issue. Lois is going to die next issue and that will be the end of this series. We’ve only know that for about six months now. Once this is over, there will be another, hopefully better, book to replace it. That’s all I have going for me every time I pick up this book.
SCORE: 1.5/10
