Reviewer: Tim Stevens
Story Title: The Stealer Part 3
Written by: Peter Milligan
Art by: Cliff Chiang
Colored by: Lee Loughridge
Lettered by: Clem Robins
Editor: Karen Bergin
Publisher: Vertigo > DC Comics
I should have guessed it was going to end like this. Well, not like this exactly, but in this frustrating vein. Not that I am frustrated with the ending. Just that it had to end.
(Wow, Milligan’s work is even messing with my writing now.)
Without giving away the ending, let me just say that it does what every issue of Human Target seemed to do: it answered the question you were asking in a way that made things even more confusing and out of focus. I’m not talking the X-Files version of answering questions in the final few seasons. What I mean is that every answer we were given that revealed the puzzle more made it all the more clear that nothing could be taken for granted in this book, that nothing was the absolute truth. It had worked for twenty issues before, so why not take it for one more ride around the block, right?
Right.
In the end, everyone has what they want and yet… no one does. We have a Tom McFadden who seems cured of his identity crisis/psychotic behavior but really no clearer on who he truly is. We have a Christopher Chance who is free of the weight of being the Human Target, but much like Tom, no closer to finding a weight that is his own. We have Bruno losing and gaining a friend. We have Mary gaining a man who just might be ideal, but who isn’t really the man she fell in love with.
Milligan rightly decides not to wrap things up and for once I’m in favor of it. This book has always swum in ambiguity. To boil all that away in the final act would have been a mistake and a betrayal. In many ways, this truly is the most perfect ending imaginable for this series. It’s just too bad it had to end at all.
And because it is the end, let me shout out to all the people that made me love the book. Milligan, Cliff Chiang, Javier Pulido, John Watkiss, Cameron Stewart, Lee Loughridge, Clem Robins, and Karen Berger, all of you step forward and take a bow. You produced one of the single best series that was released in the past decade. I hope they all take much pride in that.
