Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: N/A
Written by: Joe Casey
Pencilled by: Dustin Nguyen
Inked by: Richard Friend
Colored by: Randy Mayor
Lettered by: RS and Comicraft
Editor: Ben Abernathy
Publisher: DC / Wildstorm / Eye of the Storm
Quick Synopsis: Grifter spills the beans about Spartan, the WildCATs, and their alien origins (off-panel of course) to Dolby, much to the horror of Spartan (who’s not only becoming annoying with his automaton ways, but with his newfound laziness). Spartan decides to pay back Grifter by making him send Dolby out to rescue Rendozzo’s son from his evil secret agent-father, rather than getting his own hands dirty and simply rescuing the kid himself, with the aid of his teleportation powers.
Good: Warblade returns! Unfortunately it’s in a symbolic splash page with the rest of the old-school Wildcats, which is supposed to represent Grifter telling Dolby about the history of the Wildcats.
Bad: Cutting out the retelling of the history of the Wildcats. I know Casey hates the old-school Cats, but for new readers of the book it would have been a golden opportunity for Casey to tell the history of the team, without forcing them to shell out around $60 for Trade Paperbacks.
Ugly: One word: Spartan. The guy is a total waste of space, period. Purposely written to be boring, emotionless and devoid of any and all personality, Spartan drags the book down so far that it becomes something of a chore to sit through the pages of the comic.
Furthermore, why the devil should he be angry at Grifter for outing him, and the corporation, to Dolby? In a world where the existence of alternate realities is publicly known, where the Authority are sitting around in their spaceship and acting as an independent police force, and where Finland’s entire population can be ethnically cleansed in a purge that is on the level of the Jewish Holocaust, why can’t Spartan assume that the planet could embrace the fact that an alien-created android can come to Earth, sell everyone alien technology that would benefit humanity at a reasonable price, and generally embrace capitalism? Plus, keeping the secret will just make people like Dolby and Sam Garfield more obsessed with the notion that something bad is going on, and eventually result in the revelation being painted in the most negative light if ever revealed…
Also, Wax’s vendetta against his boss, by way of regularly raping his wife, gets put on the backburner this month as he spends the issue gabbing with Rendozzo over how Rendozzo is still angry about how Wax used his powers on her over several issues, to extract information for Spartan. It’s a really pointless sequence that serves no real purpose towards advancing the plot, except to include Rendozzo into the issue.
