Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Crime Syndicate #2 Review




Starro Is Just The Beginning!


Written By: Andy Schmidt
Art By: Kieran McKeown, Dexter Vines, Steve Oliff, Rob Leigh, Bryan Hitch, Alex Sinclair
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: April 6, 2021


Starro the Conqueror has made his way to Earth-3 and like the JLA of old, this will be the point in this new remade Universe where the Crime Syndicate come together to form a team of pure evil. It's a fun reimagining that I can't wait to see the whole story because in a post Death Metal Omniverse, everything is new and everything is up for grabs to define and I just hope that Andy Schmidt's take on our dark mirror versions of the world's greatest superheroes continues to be fun and exciting. Let's jump into this issue and see these characters take on Starro and each other. Let's check it out.


Starro has taken over a bunch of our villains of Earth-3 at this point and it seems that the Conqueror plans on taking over as many metas as he can so that he can build an army to take on something worse that's apparently on its way and it's because of this plan that we spend this issue having a Starro controlled Ultraman fighting Superwoman to add her to the collective. It's just like Roddy Piper and Keith David duking it out in they live so that Keith David would put the glasses on but instead of glasses...... you have alien starfish that take over your mind..... okay, maybe it's not like They Live, but we do get a pretty impressive battle between Ultraman and the new Superwoman.




Beyond the fight though, you start seeing some character development in Owlman and Emerald Knight in that the Starros are leaving them alone and we discover the meta-human army plot because of this and the idea that the Emerald Knights of this Universe are the sworn enemy of Starro, which is a cool development, even if it doesn't continue too long in this issue because we have to stop the story to go to an Owlman origin backup, which like the previous issue, is the weakest part of this book and leads to a new origin for Owlman which I'm not the biggest fan of, but it's all new and if you didn't know what his origin was previously, this will be fine for you.




All in all, the art remains strong in this issue and the stakes are being raised in the idea that there's something worse out there beyond Starro and while I liked this issue, there's something about the way that it's presented that makes the scope of all this come off smaller than it should. Maybe it's that we don't have enough time to see who these characters really are to define them for a new Universe and backstory but this feels like there should be more and taking up the page space with the background, which I just said I want more of for some reason isn't working and just leaves me wanting more the main story. For all my bitching though, I'm still all about this mini-series and hope that we have enough issues to really flesh out this new Syndicate because I love these characters and need to know more about them.


Bits and Pieces:


While I still enjoy this series and this issue, I'm hoping that as it progresses that it puts off the feeling of being something as big as it is because we're defining an entire Universe and Earth here and yet the scope doesn't feel like it's as large as it should be. That feeling aside, I do love the art in this book and love seeing these new versions of the characters defined. I just wish that the backups were as strong as the rest of the book.


7/10

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