Reviewer: Kevin S. Mahoney
Story Title: And Empires in their Purpose
Written by: Gail Simone
Art by: Dale Eaglesham
Inked by: Wade von Grawbadger
Colored by: Sno-Cone
Lettered by: Jared K. Fletcher
Editor: Stephen Wacker
Publisher: DC Comics
Villains United is another spin-off limited series resulting from the events of DC’s latest event miniseries Identity Crisis. The only important plot point from that series not explicitly mentioned in this installment is that the heroes of the DCU, especially the JLA, have been wiping the memory of its villains (to varying degrees from pure knowledge to personality and skills) off and on for years. The villains have more or less just found that out and are reorganizing in the wake of this new threat. Longtime fans of this medium are most likely realizing that “organized group of villains” is an oxymoron. The sheer number of villain teams that have failed due to implosion is staggering: Injustice Society, Secret Society of Supervillains, Axis Amerika, Black Reign, and others all seemed to collapse under the weight of their collected egos and peccadilloes. Few villain teams ever make an intentional and concerted run against the heroes they loathe, let alone succeed. But this series doesn’t seem concerned about defeating heroes as much as coordinating a united front against them to prevent further tampering.
It would make a certain amount of sense if every evildoer agreed to this secret union once its protections and perils were thoroughly explained. Naturally, that would be one whopper of a boring story. So there are holdouts. And considering the mental state of some of the DCU’s villains, that’s to be expected. While not shown in this issue, one has to wonder: was Two-Face of two minds about this team-up? Did the Joker simply consider the whole affair a good laugh? Unfortunately, lots of second rate, lesser-known villains are shown accepting the proposal, while quite a few more well-known and potentially protesting personalities are passed over completely. That’s really tough to take if a reader only regularly visits one specific part of the DCU; Superboy fans might be happy to see Knockout give her okay, but Flash fans would probably have issue with the total lack of rogues featured in the story as well as Grodd and Cicada’s brief and yet somehow off-kilter appearances. It might just be a case of too many characters making too brief an appearance, not inferior characterization, but it is not a good sign for a series dealing primarily with pathological characters.
To complicate matters, there seems to be a group of villains outside of the large alliance intent on bringing it crashing down. Run by a mysterious and stern benefactor, six villains have chosen to buck the alliance and foment discord amongst the meta-villain community. The reward for success of the grand design appears to be the rule of a large land mass (a significant amount of or a whole continent) and the penalty for mission failure is immediate execution. Naturally, that means there was some turnover in The Six this time out, and since it’s been en vogue to knock off Flash villains lately, one of them dies. More importantly, I had never heard of one of the Six before and yet another one of them seemed badly misused. The version of Ragdoll fans remember from Starman bears resemblance to the one found here in powers alone; his dialogue, look, and personality vary so completely as to approach a poorly rendered imposter. An unknown and a badly reworked familiar antagonist are some crooked bricks to employ as cornerstones in this story.
This issue’s art is a far less flawed component of the overall experience. Eaglesham’s pencils do as good a job depicting large-scale scenes (an African preserve, a Gotham police station) as rendering intricate details (the expression of the condemned member of The Six, various weapons and costume elements). The figures in the opening chapter lack neither unique builds nor plausible anatomy. Given the rather extreme and mammoth nature of the cast of characters found here, that’s a feat in itself. The inks by WvG seem to enhance page and panel composition without drawing attention to themselves. The colors seem a bit too artsy in places (Luthor’s shirt is an absurd shade of teal that the Behr ColorFinder Website christened Jamaican Sea) but certainly succeed the vast majority of the time. None of the seasoned talent involved in this book can make the Ragdoll look as manic and bucolically creepy as he was in Starman; instead we get this sort of patrician sounding Harlequin knock off. The well-developed reboot of Catman’s look and character almost makes up for it, but not quite.
Overall, this issue was too diffuse and slow moving to have any real impact on the reader. Lots of little things happen, and significant groundwork is lain, and there are a very few moments of great characterization, but when a book riffs on anywhere from twenty to fifty great characters, that’s just a horrible batting average. The suspense that a book based on a conspiracy within a conspiracy ought to have simply rang hollow. The only thing that would keep a reader interested in the next issue is the guaranteed betrayal of a team member next issue; that’s the kind of hook a book like this needs to accent much more strongly.
