Nightwing #31: In a great example of pet peeve #2, this issue has nothing to do with Orca, despite the title on the cover promising it does. In fact, one of the Whale Enders gang members Dick and Helena confronts specifically mentions Orca isn’t in the game. Other than that, though, this issue is mostly solid. We get a fun comment about Dick being good at what he does (between the sheets) from Helena, but it all ends predictably when she realizes Blockbuster - a mafioso - was the one to give Dick the tip on where the Whale Enders were going to pull a heist. In retrospect, I probably should’ve realized Dick and Helena weren’t long for this world as a couple. Meanwhile, Shawn goes to Pigeon’s place to warn her about the impending metahuman war in Blüdhaven, but discovers Raptor’s mask, realizing they’re working together. Raptor goes after Blockbuster in full view of a group of kids from the future business-leaders club, and he’s forced to become Blockbuster in front of them. Dick later eavesdrops on him refusing to allow his henchmen to kill them (he pays for college instead), and he’s assured Blockbuster does have a moral code, as he swore to Helena. Higgins is making it pretty clear, though, Dick is playing with fire, and Raptor really does seem the perfect guy to call him on it.
The Realm #2: We have a lot going on here. Will and his party start on their journey, and we learn Dr. Burke, one of the two scientists in the party, has a secret cargo. Molly tries to convince him to tell Will what the cargo is and what his plans are, but Burke says the fewer people who know about them the better. Will continues to be his charming self; as I said last issue, it's a refreshing break from the taciturn ranger we've gotten ever since Stryder made his first appearance in "The Fellowship of the Ring." Molly is also fun, and their banter is a highlight of the issue, especially when it comes to teasing Rook about being exactly the taciturn ranger Will isn't. We also get some additional information about the setting. Molly's associate Laszlo gives David, the other scientist in the party, a gun, and David expresses his discomfort with it. We learn Burke outright refused one, and Laszlo finds this pacifism ridiculous; as he says, it's been ten years since the "weird shit" started and it's unlikely to stop. Other characters and stories appear in short sequences: the bearded sharpshooter we saw last issue takes out some goblin and orcs attacking his town; Eldritch tries to convince his master's council he's not hiding anything from them; and a boy awakens inside a ring of fire on a farm. It's all a reminder of Haun and Peck's grand plans. The issue ends with the party under fire from goblins and forced to flee into a the basement of a collapsed building. They're under pursuit, and a teenager offers to help the party escape. I'm sure he has no ulterior movies or anything.
The Wild Storm #8: Ellis has Marlowe do something unprecedented here: he tells Angie the truth (more or less). Marlowe walks her through the history of his people, or, at least, the parts of that history he's OK with her knowing. The races on his planet were a "cooperative clade;" in the Earth context, it would mean Neanderthals and all other forms of humans evolved with us. (As Angie observes, it's why he's distinct biologically from John and Kenesha.) Eventually, an expedition was sent to find other intelligent life, but our Universe doesn't have much of it because of the Gaia Bottleneck, where life develops too slowly to survive. (Davis-Hunt does an amazing job here, showing us abandoned or nearly abandoned planets that make the imagination swell, each panel a story untold.) Eventually, they found Earth, but they had problems with their ship; since interstellar travel and communication is expensive and difficult, they were presumed lost. I thought this entire description was fascinating. Most science-fiction stories portray alien civilizations with an almost unlimited amount of resources, but Ellis' story is all about restraint: few planets host intelligent life, it's hard to communicate and travel interstellarly, etc. In the present, Jacob says the Halo Project's goal is to help humanity move past the Bottleneck by combining his people's materials with our technology's cutting edge. Good stuff, right? Of course, it's not that simple, as we learn when Kenesha asks Jacob whether he told Angie why they came to Earth and he confirms he didn't. But, he's given her access to his lab to fix her suit, on the condition she gives him a data dump on it now and later when she's finished. His goal is to find out how advanced IO really is (mostly so he can figure out whether they know how to kill him).
Meanwhile, at IO, one of the teams going through the Razor C.A.T.s' camera managed to get a shot of Cole before he put on his mask; Jackie (who we learned last issue is IO's chief of analysis) tells Craven that Cole was an IO operative they thought was dead. She and Craven then focus on Adriana's spacesuit and come to the conclusion the wild C.A.T. might actually be a Skywatch C.A.T. operating outside "the Treaty" on Earth. To Jackie's mind, it explains why they can't ID Adriana or Kenesha, because they're not technically on Earth. I thought this entire sequence was fascinating, because it's really, really hard as an author to have characters believe something the reader knows isn't true. It usually robs the storyline of suspense, since you know the characters will inevitably know what you know. But, it's the opposite here, because you wonder what havoc IO is going to wreck before they discover the truth, that they've got an entirely different player on the board. Separately, in an amazing sequence showing just how talented the art team is, we're introduced to the Doctor in this issue, a woman from a long line of such doctors who psychically heals people. One of her patients doesn't awaken from one of her sessions, and she has to go into her subconscious to find her. It turns out she was hiding from the Doctor in order to evaluate her. In her hunt, the Doctor encounters an odd-looking creature with a beak who I assume is like the Daemon Zealot encountered in issue #6. This experience confuses her, so she goes to the Doctors' private heaven (called the Hospital) for a consultation. It turns out the woman is the one we saw in issue #3 who can hop through technology. Her name is Jenny Mei Sparks (aha!), and she's a techne, "a spirit of the mechanical arts and sciences" the Doctors say is usually a planetary defense mechanism for times when the Earth is threatened.
It's clear from this recap Ellis is telling an incredibly detailed story; sometimes I just don't know what to say. It's amazing to me that he and Davis-Hunt managed to get all that information in this issue, while Davis-Hunt still had the space for long sequences of wordless panels, from Jacob's interstellar exploration to the Doctor's guided trip. One thing that intrigues me, flipping through the last eight issues, is we have all sorts of stories they've barely even touched upon yet, like Voodoo's and Zealot's. Moreover, Ellis is doing a great job of making it clear - to us and the characters - that the discrete developments over the past few days - Angie activating the suit, Michael Cray leaving IO, etc. - were unexpected and troublesome. Curiouser and curiouser.
Also Read: Batman: The Drowned #1; Titans #16
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