Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Earth 2 #26 - A Review

It is a rare thing for a comic writer to recap the events of the previous issue in-story for the benefit of new readers in these days where dozens of websites can give you a synopsis of the on-going story-line of nearly any comic you can name.  It is rarer still for this action to be taken in a story's final chapter!  Yet Tom Taylor opens Earth 2 #26 with such a sequence.


Taylor has made Earth 2 his world, after inheriting the title from James Robinson.  Taylor plays the tapestry of the DC Universe like a virtuoso pianist, putting forth ideas that are uniquely brilliant yet obvious expansions on what has come before.  A good example of this is Taylor's method for using this world's Queen of Atlantis to stop a telepathic New God.

Such cleverness is sure to please old-school comic book fans but not half so much as Taylor's understanding of these characters, as they are viewed in a new light through the prism of another reality.  Though Jimmy Olsen may now be a hacktivist with built-in WiFi and Lois Lane an android, they are very much the same people we know and love on Earth One.  And Val-Zod - the new Superman of this world - is cut of the same heroic cloth of idealism that formed the core of The Silver Age Superman.


This issue shall be the last for artist Nicola Scott and she will be sorely missed.  For my money, Scott is one of the most consistently underrated artists to work at DC Comics in recent years.  Thankfully, though Scott will not be on Earth 2 anymore, her Twitter feed has promised that big things are in the works.  I look forward to seeing them.

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