Inferior Five #5 – Jeff Lemire, Writer/Backup Artist; Keith Giffen, Writer/Penciller; Michelle Delecki, Inker; Hi-Fi, Jose Villlarubia, Colorists
Ray – 8.5/10
Ray: After an extended delay, with the last issue coming out in 2019, this inventive series from Jeff Lemire and Keith Giffen returns for its final two issues. It’s not the only miniseries to do that this month, but this one is definitely the better of the two—even if the time off hasn’t helped to keep track of its complex narrative. Set in the mysterious and creepy town of Dangerfield, Arizona, a group of offbeat kids try to unravel a mystery centered around obscure DC superheroes and one of the company’s most obscure events. But aside from a prologue that finds two of the kids seeking out a comic book store with the answers they’re looking for, most of this issue doesn’t even take place in Dangerfield. Rather, it takes place in the aftermath of the comic book event Invasion, as two very different alien groups—the brutish Khunds and the calculating Dominators—hatch a plan to turn Earth into a laboratory.
This issue suffers a little by comparison to the previous ones because it focuses heavily on characters we haven’t spent any time with before—the alien representatives—as they target D-list heroes for experimentation as part of the Dangerfield project. This is intriguing, especially once it’s revealed what the connection to the kids is. When the flashback ends, we head back to Dangerfield for a tense segment as the kids start to discover exactly what’s lurking under the surface of their town. It’s still one of the most inventive books in DC’s stable, but it was originally supposed to be twelve issues and it’s hard to see how the creative team wraps this all up in one more issue. The Peacemaker backup, fully by Lemire, is a great visual use of minimalism and shows off Lemire’s brilliant panel work as always, but with only three pages and one installment to go, I’m not sure how it’ll dovetail into the main story yet.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.
