The End League #3 (Dark Horse – Remender / Broome / Parsons)
Fan-favorite creators Rick Remender and Mat Broome continue their epic tale of the final days of Earth’s last heroes! With half the team ensnared by The Smiling Man within the city of Loge, the mysterious man known as Black must choose between claiming the Hammer of Thor and rescuing his former teammates. Meanwhile, in the remains of New York, Prairie Ghost and Soldier American come face to face with the soul-possessing Scarecrow Sinister and discover that nothing is as it seems.
So it’s the end of the world… and the bad guys win. I suppose with that as your premise, it makes for a tough a follow through.
Rick Remender (Fear Agent) is doing a great job of giving us a rich inter-connected character landscape, trying to fill the reader in on every piece of the puzzle. He is a master at this, making the reader connect with his off-center faulted characters. But with just three issues of The End League out, his attempt and ability to do this might be too much for the reader to deal with. In issue #1, we were introduced to quite a few characters along with a complex plot set up, just to watch most of them die and the situation get more dark and dire. It’s not that it is a bad story or story-telling, in fact quite the opposite, it’s cery good… but the casual reader will probably need a score card to keep track of everything.
The art of this book most of the time is quite remarkable, giving great detail to both forefront and back ground. The combined team of Mat Broome and Sean Parsons is able to give us beautiful and hideous, action and landscape all with the same high quality.
Issue Grade: A-
