Prelude to Cadmus Island War
This cover's a mixed bag for me. Overall Ryan Sook is an amazing cover artist and he's been churning out some phenomenal work on Future's End. The simplicity works decently, especially with the energy flowing in Lois' hair. And I LOVE the barely noticeable tiny airplane way up in the sky. But to liven up the cover, they added the sky fading into text at the bottom, which I think would work... if a single word was legible. I mean, I could pick out 2 or 3, but overall the text is so muddled it's basically just gibberish and comes across as pointless and weird.
Storylines are beginning to converge in this issue, with a lot set to climax on Cadmus Island. This issue was mainly building towards that, but it works out just fine. I'm not sure what's going to focus where next issue since we had another major conflict set up; the battle between Batman and Batman Beyond.
Aaron Lopresti's been a mainstay for this series, and his art always has a nice roundabout general superhero quality to it; but there were certain scenes in this issue where it didn't quite work right. It's just a little too bright and cheery, and not in a clever dissonant way, so there's a few scenes of emptiness and death on the island that should build up Brother Eye's creepiness but really don't enough.
It's great to see Lemire able to continue playing with Ollie, Emiko, and the Outsiders after the surprising regime change on the Green Arrow series. I'm really hoping for some more dynamic action artwork when we see them get into battle, but the fact that they're still around is just great.
IN CONCLUSION: 3.5/5
There's a few misses in tone in this issue, and few of the setup storylines go in really so-so directions in this issue; but there's plenty that was good. Things are really coming to a head in this series, and this issue was a major step towards a big climactic collision.