This book follows the first two Black Hammer books (one and two) and the very much sidebar (and baroquely-titled) books about Sherlock Frankenstein and Doctor Star Doctor Andromeda (my post will go live in three days as I type this; let's see if I remember to add the link!). And it leads pretty directly, I expect - with the caveat this this series has been all about the fakeouts leading to extensive unrelated flashbacks up to this point - into the next volume, which is titled Age of Doom, Part II.
(There's no third volume of Age of Doom, which could be ominous, but there are seven more volumes after that. They could all be flashbacks - Black Hammer '45 pretty obviously is, for one - but I choose to believe that even this series will move forward in time once it exhausts all other options.)
Anyway, this is called Black Hammer: Age of Doom, Part I but, as I just pointed out in tedious detail, it's not actually "Part 1" of anything. It's either part three (of the linear story) or part five (of all previous volumes). Like the rest of the main series to this point, it's written by Jeff Lemire and drawn by Dean Ormston, assisted by colorist Dave Stewart and letterer Todd Klein.
And it's still stuck on the moment at the end of the first volume, when the new spunky female Black Hammer arrived on "The Farm" from Spiral City, discovering the five or six superheroes living there (do we count Talky Walky? I do) after The Event and we the audience saw one of those supposed heroes, the witchy Madame Dragonfly, immediately steal Hammer's memories for what we have to assume are nefarious purposes.
(Note that we get a different flashback version of that scene in this volume, following the big "everything you know is wrong" moment, and the new version means that the old version could not have possibly happened that way...which is really annoyingly lazy storytelling.)
So we open this book with another return to the moment where Hammer announcing she's remembered everything and is going to have a reckoning, and she of course immediately disappears. (Gotta keep the tension up somehow!) From there, we get a couple issues of Hammer in various weird worlds (first a transparent ripoff of the bar between worlds from the end of Sandman, then not-DC Hell and a couple of other mystical places, just in case any of the slower readers aren't convinced Dragonfly is behind it), while the main cast decide to figure this out and get sidetracked by their various inamorata deciding that, yeah, OK, we can have sex now.
Again, Lemire is making it clear, even to the slower kids in the back, that the two reality-warping characters are...what's that again? oh, yeah, warping reality.
Eventually, in time for the last of the five issues collected here, we finally get to see Everything We Know Is Wrong. (Well, Everything We Know about the Farm. I bet we know some wrong things about the death of the previous Hammer, and maybe the Anti-God, too.) And we get a big cliffhanger moment on the very last page, as we must when a Part I is going to lead directly to a Part II.
As before, I can appreciate the storytelling and character work - both Lemire and Ormston do good panel-by-panel and page-by-page work here, making engaging people, moving them around convincingly, and making them all interesting - while still finding the overall structure silly and ungainly and massively derivative and entirely airless. I still think Black Hammer is a very well-done version of a thing I would be hard-pressed to say is worth doing.
[1] Trust me, this is me happy. At least as happy as I get about manipulative third-hand superhero tales.
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