"And who is Virgil Hawkins today?"
Synopsis: Static's final confrontation? The school psychologist.
One of the greatest strengths that worked with the Static series as a whole in both in the Milestone comics and in the tv show, was he connected to readers. Any present topic like drugs, suicide, or teen sex could work to Static advantage or disadvantage depending on how the material is written. For example, this issue tackles a little bit on bullying and child abuse, but unfortunately they're easily forgotten due to this being too late in the series to care about.
And that's was one of the problem with this series overall. The writers took too much time with Static changing his surroundings, spent the majority of the time have Static take on new villains, that they barely made an attempt to give Static a life outside of being a superhero. After all, he's still a teenager. However, the attempt to have readers connect to who is Virgil is somewhat present in this final issue.
Another problem that present itself with this issue is that should you really care? After all, it's mostly likely that Static will join the Teen Titans in the future (I hope). And then there's also new characters who show up out of nowhere. It's made clear that Static's new friends were going to show up sometime in the series before it got canceled (possibly in the previous issue), but they are poorly written in.
On the positive, what I found a bit interesting in this issue was how much intact Static's history is from Milestone (apparently). The New 52 changed a lot of history and background with a number of characters (to the point where it's hard to determine what stories are still canon or not), but it appears that Static's time in Dakota is still the same. In a way, the spread pages of Static's life in Dakota paid homage to the original series (RIP Dwayne McDuffle) with the minor tweaks with the reason why Virgil and his family moved to New York. Speaking of which, the cover artwork is incredible and the artwork is decent for the finale.
Overall:
This is really a shame. Static Shock was one of the series I looked forward to reading from the start in the New 52 and had so much potential. So many problems could have been easily corrected. Maybe in the near future, Static may rise again in some kind of form, whether it's another animated series, movie, or maybe another comic series.
