Advance Review: Heroes Fall By The Dozens In ‘Black Hammer – The End’ #4
by Tom Smithyman
Overview
Jeff Lemire’s homage to Crisis on Infinite Earths ups the stakes by striking down characters left and right. Yet even with some strong artwork, the long-running franchise feels tired.
Overall
8/10At the rate heroes fall in Black Hammer: The End #4, there won’t be enough of them around to get to the final issue.
The series’ creative team of writer Jeff Lemire and artist Malachi Ward stack up a significant body count in just the first few pages of this chapter. And, spoilers aside, things don’t get much better for the heroes as the story unfolds. The evil Anti-God and his Hellamentals are laying waste to Spiral City. Last time this happened, it took the sacrifice of the original Black Hammer to kill him.
Now, with a rogue version of Black Hammer killing off his counterparts across the multiverse, the future looks grim. Even an algorithmically chosen “best-of” team isn’t up to the task. Meanwhile, the current version of our world’s Black Hammer is stuck on a farm in another dimension. And her daughter has run off to Manhattan with mom in pursuit.
It’s an action-packed issue, with stakes through the roof – making it the best installment in this latest limited series. Still, even with a who’s who of character from the Black Hammer multiverse, the story is overly familiar. It’s Lemire tribute to Crisis on Infinite Earths, though he’s finally breaking away from that story with the myriad deaths. Yet until a last-page surprise, the story just isn’t resonating the way most of Lemire’s writing does. Perhaps the many series and spin-offs have reached their saturation point. Or maybe Black Hammer was always, at its core, a smaller story and trying to inflate the stakes isn’t ringing true.
All of the action and bloodshed gives Ward lots to work with, and he turns in his best effort for this series to date. While his style is somewhat broad, he instills a nice level of detail in some of the characters, including the mysterious and deadly villain. His depictions of the Illuminati-like Parliament of Weird are particularly striking (as is character Doctor Andromeda’s resemblance to Ian McKellen).
This limited run ends in two issues. For the sake of the franchise’s quality, let’s hope that Lemire focuses on his many other projects and lets Black Hammer lay fallow for a while.
Black Hammer: The End #4 will be available for purchase on Wednesday.
