Hey Match-heads, Shag here! Today our good friend Tim Wallace continues his monthly coverage of DC’s weekly event, The New 52: Futures End! If you missed the previous installments, click here! Warning, Tim’s entries contain SPOILERS for the related issues of The New 52: Futures End. Consider yourself warned! Be sure to follow Tim’s regular work over on his exceptional site, Kord Industries: A Blue Beetle Blog! Get all your Ted Kord, Jaime Reyes, and Dan Garrett goodness there! Get even more Tim-time over at the Legion of Super-Bloggers! You can also stalk Tim on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. And now, let’s turn it over to Tim…
Last month, we found out Oliver Queen was alive, and the Earth 2 heroes escaped from Cadmus Island. It was chaotic, costumes and capes everywhere. A couple weeks ago Shag posted some speculation, based on some previews and solicitations, that the new Firestorm may be a woman. I went back and looked at the E2 breakout again and spotted something…check out this panel from THE NEW 52: FUTURES END #18, page 14…maybe the female Firestorm isn’t new…maybe, she’s from Earth 2?
The New 52: Futures End #20
Five years from now in Metropolis, Cal Corcoran aka Tim Drake aka Red Robin breaks into Lois Lane’s office. He’s looking for whatever info she has on him, seeing as she just outed Shazam as Superman, and ends up finding that she was expecting him. He tells her how he was injured and believed dead in the war with Apokolips, how he claimed amnesia and created a new life. She shows him her box of clues, and he recognizes the arrow (Red Arrow killed a parademon with it) and believes Roy wanted her to find him, but he refuses to go with her to the coordinates.
Thirty-five years from now, Brother Eye and Mr. Terrific talk about “other father”, aka Bruce Wayne. Brother Eye has extracted info from Bruce’s brain, info proving that Bruce has sent an assassin back in time to stop Brother Eye. “Eye will travel time and stop other father’s assassin.”
Five years from now, on Cadmus Island, Deathstroke, Grifter, E2 Lana Lang and Fifty Sue meet up with Faraday to formulate a plan. Brother Eye has taken over the island, and controls all the systems so they can’t teleport off the island. They come up with exactly nothing, so Fifty Sue suggests they go to her secret bunker to work on it some more.
At Terrifitech the “five years from now” Mr. Terrific questions Key and Coil about their break-in, and they give up Bruce Wayne as their employer. Cal and Madison have a talk in his apartment above “The Wounded Duck”. She thinks it’s a break-up, but it’s really him coming clean after his talk with Lois. He tells her he really is Tim Drake…and she promptly walks out!
The New 52: Futures End #21
In a tropical paradise, Mr. Roarke and Tattoo greet the latest visitors to Fantasy Island…I mean Oliver Queen and Red Arrow welcome Barda, Diggle and Emiko to Green Arrow Island. They also spend the entire issue filling us in on what happened during the War. Here’s what we learned. Apokolips invaded Earth 2.
The heroes of E2 tried to save as many people as they could by evacuating their world in giant spaceships. It was Mr. Terrific’s idea to come to this Earth, claiming he received some sort of beacon, but Red Arrow didn’t quite believe his story. Barda was already trying to disguise herself and mix into the general population (of E2 civilians) even before she ended up in Toronto. As they crossed from their dimension into ours, the armies of Apokolips followed. Trying to buy time, Mister Miracle set the self destruct sequence on his ship, ready to sacrifice himself and several other heroes to delay the parademons. It was E2 Red Arrow, not Arsenal, that saved Red Robin during one of the many battles.
Paranoia took over and government groups like GPA (Global Peace Agency) and Cadmus took full advantage of it. Green Arrow and Red Arrow teamed up to uncover what was going on, and found out that the Brother Eye satellite had teleported Mister Miracle and the other E2 heroes to Cadmus Island for experimentation, while the world believed them dead. Ollie faked his own death to dodge Cadmus, who was closing in, and has now put together an army of “Outsiders” to take down Cadmus and expose the truth.
The New 52: Futures End #22
We haven’t seen Ronnie or Jason since issue #11…spoiler alert, they both appear in this one! At Columbia University, Jason runs into Madison Payne as she hands out flyers for an equality rally for the E2 refugees. After a quick conversation Jason heads to meet the increasingly unstable Dr. Yamazake. The good doctor interrupts his review of the Superman/Shazam news long enough to berate Jason for being late, before they get back to work on the teleporter project.
A few blocks away, at the “Wounded Duck”, Billy Batson gets carded by Cal/Tim as Ronnie Raymond enters the bar with an apology.
In Vegas, Voodoo, Mercy and a British duo using the nicknames Banger and Mash tear their way through a hotel under someone’s watchful eye.
Batman Beyond and Plastique have a heart to heart about the future. He explains that thirty years into the future nearly all of humanity is dead, or assimilated. Brother Eye, created to help mankind, decided that man was its own worst enemy. She volunteers to help, however she can to avoid becoming the robo-bug version of herself she saw at Terrifitech.
A.L.F.R.E.D. advises Bats that the Brother Eye satellite is currently inoperable…its consciousness having been transferred to Cadmus Island! While in space, Frankenstein is feeling things he hasn’t felt in years…hundreds of them! He’s feeling pain, discomfort, nausea, dreaming…and he doesn’t know why. Before he think too long about it the Brainiac converted Engineer reappears and sends Frank, Amethyst and Hawkman to meet her master. Just as Brainiac appears, and welcomes them to his Blood Moon, the cavalry appears in the unlikely duo of the Atom (surprisingly shrunk down considering what he said a few issues back) and Black Adam!
The New 52: Futures End #23
Picking up right where we left off, Frankenstein’s Army are fighting with Brainiac and his robot army. Black Adam is quickly brushed off by Brainiac, “I have seen multiples of you before.” The villain is more interested in Frank, Amethyst and Hawkman, “I do not have anyone like you.” Outnumbered, the heroes decide a retreat is their best option for survival. Black Adam calls down several lightning strikes as a distraction, while the rest of the team makes its way to their ship the Nan-Knight. Hawkman makes what I believe will be a very bad decision by grabbing the Brainiac infected Engineer and bringing her along. They don’t even clear the Blood Moon’s atmosphere before an army of Brainiac drones are on their tail!
In New York, Madison jogs through Central Park, remembering Cal’s coming out conversation about being a hero and their subsequent breakup. She gets the feeling she’s being followed and low and behold it’s Ronnie, coming to apologize for hitting on her. In the process of apologizing he asks her out for coffee and she accepts…as Cal/Tim watches from a distance.
In Vegas, Voodoo and company find out that the man who has been watching them is Sgt. Rock…or used to be. Now he’s “Frank Rock, black ops scum wad” with a weird cybernetic eye implant. He wants the ladies to go to Cadmus Island and kill Fifty Sue. The little “girl” has the powers of a god and the world would be much safer without her.
Jumping ahead thirty-five years again, Mr. Terrific does tai chi while chatting with Brother Eye. It’s pretty one sided. Brother Eye says that “other father” (Bruce Wayne) tried killing him many years ago, and when he failed he created a time travel device to try doing it much sooner. Eye explains that “other father” broke the binds of time, and now Eye has broken him…as Bruce walks in, converted…and with the Joker’s head attached to his own!
Ok…that’s both cheesy and nightmarish! Joker’s head attached to Batman? It’s like some twisted sci-fi version of Edward Mordrake, or Ray Milland and Rosey Greer in “The Thing with Two Heads”. The longer this story goes, the odder it gets…I kind of like that. There’s an almost silver age quality to the story. And by that I mean nothing is too far out there, too ridiculous, to include!
Shag here again! That’s it for this month! Thanks again to Tim for this fantastic coverage! Next month Tim will return with further coverage of, The New 52: Futures End! Let us know what you think of this weekly series in the comments.
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