Whatever Happened to The Outsiders?
The Good: The pacing is quite as big a mess as the last issue, and things are all finally coming together.
I finally feel like, in the huge rivalry between Geo-Force and Black Lightning, neither of them are truly right. I feel like we were supposed to see that from much earlier on, and I did get a bit of that back in #28, but nowhere did I feel it stronger than in this issue, and it works well.
All the snippets of infighting between the Outsiders is pretty cool, especially Owlman vs. The Olympian. Batman would be proud.
Geode gets a much better fight than in her debut issue.
Geo-Force pushes his limits to the max, and as the series comes to en end, his epic transformation does convey the proper level of scale to this story.
Batman is finally showing up to sort out the mess that happened while he was gone. And the banter he had with The Wall was pretty great.
The Bad: Keith Giffen's art isn't BAD per se. I actually enjoyed it quite a lot on the one issue of Doom Patrol he drew, but it doesn't work well here. Plus it clashes IMMENSELY with the former series regular Philip Tan, and quite frankly, Tan is one of my absolute favorite artists, and his work on Outsiders (aside from #37) has been my favorite of his work, so I'm a bit biased to see him go, but still. I don't like the way Giffen draws a lot of the characters. Plus he has this extremely strict and formulaic panel layout. It's REALLY basic, and he sticks to it A LOT. It makes this whole issue feel less professional than it is.
The reveal of Veritas left me extremely underwhelmed. It seems to counter the sort of big mystic presence he had before, and comes completely out of left field. And he was trying to help Geo-Focre overcome his emotional chaos by making it more intesne and complicated? I feel like Dan Didio had some better grand vision of this story, but had to leave some of the details to the artists (as the past few issues have noted) and kind of let them derail the whole thing. What with the whole ghost Terra thing that was added almost at the last minute and seemed to try to imply it was there the whole time, and now this mess. Veritas got built up as this awesome plot thing, but the truth was a huge letdown.
In Conclusion: 3/5
It's better than the previous issue, but it's still not stellar. I was a little soft on this series when it started to go downhill because it started off REALLY strong. I'm not as sad to see this series go when I was when I first heard the news, but I really wish it would judt get a new creative team. I'm actually hoping that since it was a Flashpoint casualty, it might get restarted after Flashpoint as Batman and The Outsiders again. Or maybe following Batman Inc. #6, it'll be Red Robin and The Outsiders….. but that doesn't have as good a ring to it. Here's hoping this team gets a fresh start with a new series soon. If you've held on this long, you might as well stick around, because there are some genuinely cool things set up for the finale, but other than that, let this series end before you try jumping into any Outsiders.
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