Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Captain Atom: Armageddon #9 (August, 2006)



"Listen, Atom. You're a nice guy. Tough, honest, pure of heart. But I'm afraid there's no other solution to this little problem of ours. You have to die. Sorry. No hard feelings."

With that last bit of arrogance and monumental hubris, Jack Hawksmoor turned on the meat grinder. Apollo tried to kill Captain Atom, and instead started the reaction that would end everything. Apollo tried to absorb Atom's rising energy output, and talked just a little bit more crap before being flash fried into a skeleton. Hostile idiot Midnighter reacted as one would expect to the death of his lover, and was swiftly roasted. Hawksmoor had the Doctor rouse
Mr. Majestic, who understandably wanted to kill Hawksmoor. Jenny Quantum returned from Reality 440 to chastise Hawksmoor for his poor leadership and deal with Captain Atom. The preteens's eyes and teeth flew out of her head as she died.

Nikola Hanssen finally (and conveniently) transcended her humanity to become Void, and removed the splinter of her being from Captain Atom to make herself whole again. Captain Atom returned to his familiar silver and red appearance, and was sent back to the DC Universe. However, it was now Void who was set to explode.



"This world... it's gone wrong. Too wrong to continue. And we're to blame. We tried to save it, but we destroyed it instead. We reshaped it into our own twisted image. It's not a sane place to live anymore. Not if you're a normal person, just struggling to get through the day... It's all going to start again. Like it has a million times before.

After the World Storm, the Wildstorm Universe started over again with a page drawn by Jim Lee. He'd draw about twenty-two more story pages for the first and only issue of a "relaunched" Wildcats title, and Gene Ha would manage two issues of a new Authority "series," before this bold new beginning would start unraveling. Seeing as this entire series seemed to drift from fight scene to contradictory story point before petering out halfway through and phoning in a final few issues, the reboot didn't fall far from the initiating event mini-series.

Captain Atom fell back to his Earth, which looked really trashed and post-apocalyptic. As it turned it, it was just a craphole where the closing moments of Infinite Crisis was taking place. That's a set of editorially mandated plot points strung together into a "story" for another time...

"The End" couldn't come soon enough for Will Pfeifer, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Sandra Hope, Jim Lee and Scott Williams.

DCnÜ Year's Wildstormin' Eve

2 comments:

The Irredeemable Shag said...

I've enjoyed your recaps, but I'm still glad I skipped this series.

The Irredeemable Shag

Diabolu Frank said...

I only wish I could have read somebody else's recaps, even though they took more time to read than the actual books. The extra time was in sitting there after an issue in an existential crisis over the injustice of garbage like this seeing print. Twice!