Week Forty
If you came looking for a fight, you came to the right place. Natasha, as we saw last week, is in trouble at Luthor Tower, and her uncle, John Henry Irons, knows about it. And he’s none too pleased. This week, he suits up (for the first time since, what, week five?) and takes the fight straight to Luthor, with the aid of the Teen Titans. He makes short (and highly bad-ass) work of a few Infinity Inc. members, beats down Mercy with a backhand punch, and snaps that Everyman prick’s hand open. From there, the shape-shifter falls many, many stories down to his death. Good riddance.
The main fight takes place between Steel and Luthor, obviously, as Steel shows the billionaire that it’s not about having superpowers that makes you heroic; it’s about having a cause worth fighting for. This may be one of the most bad-ass fights we’ve seen in “52” so far, as Luthor just metes out the punishment and Steel keeps standing to fight back, even after breaking several ribs and rupturing his appendix. The fight ends when Natasha figures a way to jam the artificial exo-gene with a close-range electronic pulse from Steel’s hammer. Luthor loses his powers, and Steel beats him within an inch of his life, just before knocking that big “L” from the cover off the side of the building. The issue closes with shots from Kahndaq, where it’s been raining a week, everything and everybody’s dying, and Osiris asks Sobek to accompany him to the Rock of Eternity, for a new family.
I don’t have to tell you how awesome it was to finally see Steel beat the holy hell out of Lex Luthor. It’s been a long time coming, and they aced it. Very exciting issue. That may be the last we see of Luthor and company, and, if that’s the case, they did a fine job tying that storyline up. I’m not sure how it fits in with everything else that’s going on in “52,” but, then again, I’m not sure that it has to. It was some good old fashioned good guy vs. bad guy entertainment, and it paid off in spades.
See ya in seven.
Right on all points. It may be lame to admit, but I’m a Steel fan and always have been. It was really great to see him get his moment as a hero.
And, apparently they’ve just completely given up on that “real time” thing, as that fight obviously didn’t happen over a week. But, if I have to choose between a gimmick and a good comic, that’s an easy choice to make.
And for those last few pages, isn’t it pretty obvious now that Mr. Mind is Sobek, or at least controlling him?
Mr. Mind probably is Sobek, yes. Don’t forget his offering an apple to Osiris in Week Thirty-Six, or his first appearance, back in Week Twenty-Six, where he cried CROCODILE TEARS.
Credit Jim Doom for those observations.
52 is ste in real time in the sense that everything happens the week the issue comes out. That’s not to say that the 22 pages of comic cover all seven days of the week, just that all the events take place in those seven days. It was just a slow eek for eveyone else, apparently.
Poor Animal Man, who has apparently been lying on a rock gawking at aliens for several weeks now. I bet he’s thinking “I wish they’d make their move.”
Maybe the rock he’s on is moving at the speed of light, so that a second their roughly correlates to 1,209,600 seconds on earth.
[…] I’m not here to bitch about all the needless crossovers, though. Somebody else should do that, though. Seriously. Me, I’m here to bitch about the flagship issue. We’ve got twelve issues left before Final Crisis. Crunch time! Note: By comparison, at this point in “52,” this would have been the issue where John Henry Irons and Natasha raided LexCorps tower, destroyed the Everyman Project, and beat Luthor decisively. Week Forty. […]