Written by Daniel H. Wilson, Marguerite Bennett, Mike Johnson, & Cullen Bunn
Art by Scott McDaniel, Tyler Kirkham, RB Silva & Walden Wong, Jorge Jimenez, Robson Rocha & Guillermo Ortego
Published by DC Comics
Once again Earth 2: World’s End rears its ugly, ugly head as the book is wont to do. The title has now entered its middle zone from being a complete waste of time to needing to tie into DC’s other weekly title Futures End. One has to wonder how that will work out. While Big Barda is an irredeemable villain in World’s End, she’s actually heroic in the other book. This review is going to be a bit on the skinny side as previous issues often have some plot point or character that proves impossibly frustrating, this outing is simply dull. Perhaps it’s simply with every terrible issue of this series, that having an issue that’s just boring is a strange and new feeling.
The story progresses albeit in tiny pointless fragments The monster known as Darkspawn is making his way into the center of the Earth. The most incredible thing about that is how everyone says that name with a straight face. It seems the only to stop Darkspawn is to combine all the powers of Earth into Alan Scott. Once again it seems World’s End’s modus operandi is to cobble together powers out of nothing. There’s moments with Batman and Helena Wayne, which were the few saving graces of the last two issues but here they do very little but continue on their chase to find Ollie Queen. There’s also a moment of completely pointless drama for about two panels where Sandman and Mr. Terrific almost die.
The art retains its consistent terrible look. Not even the Batman/Huntress scenes provide any levity as most of their segments involve everything being an ugly shade of bright red. One artist whose work has gone uncommented on is Tyler Kirkham. Once again, since World’s End doesn’t think to credit its artists properly the only way to recognize him is with style. Kirkham is a decent artist and served well on the early arcs of Green Lantern: New Guardians, but here is where his work turns ugly. It shows how much pencils and inks live or die by the colorist. Kirkham’s scenes are ugly swirls of energy that end up looking like nothing. It’s a real shame. Also the atrocious Dick Grayson storyline pops up and as expected it has the worst art of the series.
Earth 2: World’s End does nothing special, for good or ill. It’s a book made up of the most generic parts of the series as of late with the expected bad artwork and disjointed story telling. One should tell you to avoid this issue, but better advice would be to avoid this series.