Tries Its Hardest To Have No Logic
And there we go. All traces of what little excellence Voodoo once had are gone. No more fancy John Tyler Christopher covers, instead we have this boring and generic pice of blandness. To be fair, the quality of the art on the cover is quite nice. I want to see more of it somewhere. But the overall design is crowded and uninspired. And Voodoo's boobs have gotten bigger. And she's in a much more typical comic book 'sexy showing off T&A pose. Sigh.
Oh boy... and the new direction continues to make no god damned sense and contradict what same before. So the Voodoo we know is a clone, and the government has the original imprisoned. I assumed that meant the government captured Voodoo, cloned her, and the clone escaped. But then our Voodoo is all mad at the War Council for lying to her about everything. So I guess.... the government didn't make her. So who made the original Voodoo and why was she cloned?
It gets stupider. So you remember how in the 4th issue, Fallon, Black Jack, and their boss were debating what Voodoo was? And one of them suggested it was the Priscilla Kitaen who's DNA matches and disappeared after a fire when she was 4? And that maybe aliens kidnapped her and experimented on her? Yeah, that was true. And they knew that. So why did they have to debate if the Voodoo they were chasing was the real Priscilla WHEN THEY KNEW THEY HAD THE REAL PRISCILLA IMPRISONED. It's a massive gaping plot hole. Four issues went by where nobody but Voodoo had any inkling of an idea who or what Voodoo really was. Suddenly we find out they've known the whole time? IT MAKES NO SENSE. IT'S A HUGE CONTRADICTION. Furthermore, why would the Daemonites experiment on Priscilla, and then clone her, and then.... let her go? How did the government get ahold of the real Priscilla? Why didn't the Daemonites clone her THEN experiment on the clone and kill the original so the clone could take her place? They're clearly that ruthless. Why would they leave such a huge loose end hanging? And how did they let the government get their hands on it?
And even if you can ignore the groaning weight of that monstrocitous mess of horrible plot to untangle, it's also such a lazy and forced way to make Voodoo start questioning herself. It's a cliche. Let's take a villain who just follows orders, and turn her superiors against her to make her become a hero. Why not use the seed of appreciate for humanity that Kyle planted in her heart? Let it grow into a rebellion where she actually questions her orders and create some actual depth with morality. Instead you just made her masters into assholes that make me question why she would've had devotion to start with, AND her soul search involves the whole 'What am I because I am a clone!?' nonsense that's very easily a dull cliche
There was one really nice scene where I thought Kyle Rayner was badly written, but it turned out to be Voodoo disguised as him. That amused me.
And the crossover stuff was well handled.
And Voodoo's battles are getting really boring, really fast. Most of the time she just slashes the throat in the exact same way. It's just kind of dull to begin with, and gets worse as it keeps being repeated. If she doesn't do that, she uses her amazing mind reading powers she literally pulled out of her ass, because nobody else seems to have them, to read people's greatest fears. Apparently every time this makes them believe that she actually is the thing she turned into, because everyone she used it on these two daemonites and they cowered before her and begged Black Curate for mercy. They believed she was really the Back Curate, DESPITE HAVING WATCHED HER TRANSFORM INTO IT RIGHT BEFORE THEIR FRAKKING EYES.
Oh, and the Daemonite mothership. If it's going to be hidden away from Earth and all the superheroes, and aliens and such; it must be hidden somewhere very clever and mysterious. Perhaps in another dimension, the far reaches of space, cloaked with invisibility, or under the earth? Nope. It's behind the moon. BEHIND. THE F-ING. MOON. I'm not shitting you, that's where the ship sits, not invisible, and has apparently remained undetected. BEHIND THE MOON. IN THE DC UNIVERSE.
In Conclusion: 1.5/5
I dunno, its like, despite everything I said, reading this isn't really a brain pounding terrible experience. Most of the flow is still kind of nice, and I'm usually enjoying myself when I forget all the shit for a few glorious seconds; but on the whole I'm just so disappointed with the new writer. He brutally sodomized and murdered the subtlety that made me fall in love with this series, and replaced it with some plot that blatantly ignores what came before it, and even if you ignore all that, raises some other questions, and demonstrates that the Daemonites are miserably incompetent. Sigh.
