52 week 4
John Jack
Recap
Montoya has been watching a building in Gotham for 2 weeks, on assignment from the mysterious Question. She finds more than she bargained for when she stumbles onto a strange monster moving alien tech, she and the Question barely manage to take the monster down using some of his own tech.
Meanwhile a team in space are looking through all of existence trying to find heroes missing since the crisis. They feel hope when they find a low frequency zeta beam in space, the means of travel Adam Strangr uses to travel back and forth. With some help from the Rannians they get the beam to hit in Australia, what lands is a horror of transporter shenanigans that would make a star trek episode blush.
As this happens Booster and Fire argue over whether Booster should be seeking sponsorship leads while so many of their friends are missing, Booster blows up a little and doesn't let on that his heroics follow a schedule he doesn't control, and that the one who does control that is having issues of his own.
Steel rehearses a talk with his niece where he tells her he's retiring, as he talks his condition degrades and he collapses. In the instant of the collapse his apartment explodes!
Ralph Dibney meets with the cult of krypton for answers, wonder girl tells him he must give up something important to him and go into a river. He doesn't see anything but when he rises his wedding band is gone.
Review
A much more lively issue this time around, the stories move quickly and although no answers are found, it does feel like we got some progress. I particularly liked the Question bits, it felt very film noir to start the issue on a stakeout that goes sour and it set the tone well.
The Booster Gold portion of the issue was very quick and didn’t give us much but did build the tension a bit within Booster’s relationships and show us a bit of his standing with other heroes. I like the depth this adds to his story and it really fleshes him out a bit more.
The Steel section was a bit confusing but I’m sure it will expand later. At one point he says he was poisoned and I’m curious if Luthor is to blame after the circus last issue, really cool and much less high school than the previous issues.
Also how cool is this page?!
The Ralph Dibny bit was somewhat underwhelming after the buildup in the second issue, is this really a full two weeks later? Did he sit on his hands all last week? This brings to light an issue with the real time passing between events, when characters are dealing with time sensitive issues or in this case seemingly in the middle of a conversation the premise fails a bit.
The zeta beam incident is just plain cool, with some characters fused to the point of being unrecognizable and Hawkgirl seemingly grown to a gargantuan size. I love pages like these, where I can look at everything shown and try and pick out extra details, really fine work by the art team.
Speaking of the art team this is the first issue to not feature a Booster Gold fight scene, with the Question and Montoya fighting the monster instead. The fight is really well plotted and flows excellently. The colors by Alex Sinclair really shine in these scenes with the muted pallete selling the action in the dark room really well.
The cover is very evocative of Tomb Raider, which was a huge hit of the era (as evidenced by the full page ad on the back of the issue), I really like it.
Final Thoughts
A much better issue than last weeks, this issue brings back my hopes for this series.
52: Week 4 -Showtime
- Writing - 9/109/10
- Storyline - 9/109/10
- Art - 9/109/10
- Color - 10/1010/10
- Cover Art - 9/109/10
