Flashpoint: Deathstroke and the Curse of the Ravager #3 – Review

By: Jimmy Palmiotti (writer), Tony Shasteen & Alex Massacci (artists), Rich and Tanya Horie (colorists)

The Story: I’ll be a sea monkey’s uncle before I let my daughter get daddy issues!

The Review: If you want people to care about something, you have to let them spend some time with it.  That goes double for fictional characters.  To really get a connection out of them, they need actual things to do, scenes where they can react and show their personality, instead of merely entering a room and laying out a bunch of information just to get the story moving.  When you reduce their roles that severely, it’s impossible to be affected by them, for good or ill.

So despite this issue ending on what’s clearly intended to be a heartwarming note, you don’t feel any warm or fuzzy feelings coursing through you at all.  All the pieces you need for a satisfying conclusion are there: father and daughter reunited, new friend and lover standing by, the bad guys (relatively bad, of course, in context of a whole cast full of scumbags) defeated and dispersed, a ship sailing into the sunset and a metaphorical brighter future.  But the word that best describes your reaction to all this is, “Whatever.”

You can’t possibly expect yourself to give a fig about Rose, even though she’s the focal point of the plot and the title bears her heroic namesake.  In an entire mini, she gets twelve panels of page-time and her number of lines barely surpasses that.  Besides a spirited headbutt against her captors, she does nothing else the whole issue.  She has no value except as a prize to motivate Deathstroke into action.  She’s a living treasure chest, pretty much.

Flashpoint: Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown #2 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Ibraim Roberson & Alex Massacci (artists), Pete Pantazis (colorist)

The Story: You grew up in a swamp?  You really are from the sticks, aren’t you?

The Review: The vast majority of Elseworlds turn out either uninspired or middling, leaving a much smaller percentage with premises strong enough to support an enjoyable one-shot series.  But every now and then you get a really terrific story that gets you attached to its parallel world and characters.  In those cases, you’re almost always out of luck, because chances are they won’t come back anytime soon, a real waste of creative potential.

So right around now seems a good time as any to thank our lucky stars Lemire will be back with Frankenstein and the Creature Commandos in the fall, because it’s easy to see there are a lot of great stories left to be told with these characters.  Don’t take that to mean this issue is perfect or even particularly outstanding, because flaws do riddle the script.

For one thing, the plot is a bit slow to get moving in a productive way, as last issue acted mainly as a prologue and this one only just manages to give our heroes a vague destination (Romania—because that place is just a hotspot of fun lately), but no real mission statement.  There still lingers a question about what they’ll do with themselves in this modern world they’ve woken up in, especially with their former military commissioners gunning for them.

Maria Shrieve, monster-hunting descendant of original ally Matthew Shrieve, may prove the answer.  It can’t fail to puzzle you how she clearly knows the difference between the original Commandos and those who ultimately turned on her family (“…these creatures weren’t loyal foot soldiers like you…”), yet she still nurses a rash, misdirected resentment against the ones her grandfather held dear.  But amidst all that somewhat unnecessary drama you can definitely see how our heroes will prove useful to her personal crusade.