Written by Daniel H. Wilson, Marguerite Bennett, & Mike Johnson
Art by Scott McDaniel, Tyler Kirkham, Jack Herbert & Vicente Cifuentes, Jorge Jimenez, Robson Rocha & Guillermo Ortego, Stephen Segovia & Jason Paz
Published by DC Comics
With now thirteen issues out, Earth 2: World’s End has reached the halfway point until the series’ conclusion this March. Sad to say, this issue casts a poor image for the second half to come as it does absolutely nothing to improve any of World’s End’s flaws.
To beat the dead horse once again, this series has major hang ups by delegating the pencil and ink duties of its massive team by subplots instead of whole issues. This week, like every last one, is a downright mess with constantly changing teams every two to six pages. Such a management style could have worked if it were not for almost everyone drawing the book ranges from merely average to terrible. One would think an artist who only has to draw two pages for a full week could turn out something that didn’t look like chicken scratch. This weekly series is halfway over, and no one in this unwieldy cast has really undergone anything resembling a character arc.
On the more specific side of flaws, one of the most infuriating is the massive brawl between the Avatars of Earth and Furies of Apokolips. What should feel like a giant epic battle between the guardian spirits of entire planets reads more like a bunch of children making up powers to counter each others’. This fight scene has been split up over the course of the last six issues and any dramatic weight has long been deflated. At this point, the battle’s almost comical. There’s a scene where the new Fury of Famine has Green Lantern’s former boyfriend by the throat and decides to let him go because Alan Scott asked her to, really. Once again, this series has characters sprouting all new powers that they never had before or had never been implied to have, and now World’s End has dragged one of the founding members of the book out of bed just to kill him off. It’s a scene that at first seemed like a joke, but is clearly a case where the no one in the writer’s room had any idea what to do with this character. It is the definition of a pointless character death.
The only real positive attributes of this issue is that the artist responsible to the wretched looking Flash and Hawkgirl scenes has been replaced. The new artwork is nothing to write home about as this new talent has trouble keeping simple character designs consistent, but just about anything is better than what had come before. The genuine highlight of this issue was the return of Ted Grant. He doesn’t do much, but after his several issue disappearance, it’s a welcome return. Mostly what he does is punch this world’s dull version of Dick Grayson in the face so he’ll stop whining for five minutes.
With time almost up, Earth 2: World’s End #13 does nothing new or surprising. It’s just halfway through a morose funeral march for what was once one of the New 52’s genuine masterpieces.