One For The Faithful: Deathstroke #20 Review

Editor’s Note: And one last look at last week’s comics before the comic stores open late today… and it contains spoilers. But they are spoilers on a book that has been cancelled and lives no more. So do you really give a fuck? Thought not.

“So the final issue of Deathstroke was in this week’s take. You gonna review it?” I said.

“Fuck that,” my co-Editor Amanda said, “As far as I’m concerned, that book’s been over since Rob Leifeld took over from Kyle Higgins last year. DC editorial took a perfectly good book about a professional dealing with the perils of entering middle age and turned it into a book about some badly-proportioned, footless steroid head beating on space douchebags.”

“But Justin Jordan’s been writing the book for the past few months. Do you think it’s improved at all since then?”

“I haven’t been reading it.”

“Why not? Jordan writes Luther Strode, and you like that.”

“Yeah, but so what? It’s damaged goods. Taking over Deathstroke after Liefeld had his grubby mitts all over it is like watching a buddy get married to a whore. He might be totally in love and committed to making it work, but here ain’t a force on Earth that can make people look at her and not picture when she had three dicks in her mouth. Let Deathstroke go under and lie fallow for a while. I’ll try it again when it feels a little less… dirty. You review the last issue.”

Okay I will. Despite not having kept up on Deathstroke since Higgins left the book any more than Amanda did. Which means that I have no idea what the hell led into the events of this issue, which includes all the Usual Suspects you’d expect from a big Deathstroke story. We’ve got Terra, Rose (Slade’s daughter who became Ravager before the New 52), Grant (Slade’s son who became Ravager back in the 80s – c’mon, at least try to keep up), Jericho (Slade’s other son, who was a good guy in the 80s before becoming a bad guy in… ah, fuck it) and, well, Majestic (for some reason), locked in a epic battle to the death that requires some ugly choices, brutal methods, and one deus ex machina on Slade’s part.

Which is fine, but what matters is: is it any good? And more importantly: does it work as a final story? You know, with “final” in subtextual quotes, since ain’t no one really gonna kill a character that appears on The CW’s Arrow?

So, some stuff has happened! And that stuff has led to Jericho taking over Majestic’s body, and using it to try to stomp the piss out of Slade, Ravager, Terra, and Ravager’s and Jericho’s mother. And piss is stomped out of at least one of them (and on the week of Mother’s Day too, Justin! For shame!), before we learn that Rose has the power to sap the strength of metahumans. This weakens Jericho / Majestic just enough to find that, like Superman, he has a weakness: a wad of concrete attached to a steel bar. Ravager then jumps into Terra and Grant, forcing Slade to immobilize Terra while Jericho makes Grant ready to cut his own throat in front of Slade, forcing Slade to make a difficult decision… a decision my own father probably considered six times a day until I was 18 years old (and four times a day since then).

The final issue of a cancelled book featuring a well-known and long-beloved character really needs to do just one thing: satisfy the fans who’ve stuck in until the bitter end. And that’s what Jordan does here. He throws in damn near everyone who matters from the Deathstroke mythos, sets up key moments from Deathstroke’s pre-New 52 history, while keeping the later, fan favorite stuff from later years that makes people happe (seriously: Jericho was always a useless twat, and no one ever wanted him to live), and even uses Majestic to answer one of the age-old schoolyard arguments: “Do you think Deathstroke could beat Superman?”

And the short answer is yes… provided you have the magic intervention of a character who can sap the powers of superheroes for some reason. I am not as familiar with Rose Wilson as some people, and God knows I haven’t been keeping up on Rose’s appearances in Superboy (because Scott Lobdell, that’s why… although since Jordan has taken over that book as well, I should probably give it another day in court), but this whole Metagene Dampening power appears, based on the character’s history, to have first originated from Jordan’s ass. It really feels like he needed a miracle to get Deathstroke et al out from under Majestic, and since he’s driving both books in which Rose appears: why the fuck not give her the right power at the right time? It’s certainly a better story point than, say, “And then Majestic’s powers poured out of his ass like last night’s bad kung pow chicken, as if by magic!”

But weak-ass plot point or not, that isn’t the point – after all, what’s an obvious deus ex machina gonna do? Make readers disgusted and swear they’ll never buy another copy of this cancelled book? The point is that that deus ex machina allows Jordan to give readers a splash page of Deathstroke bashing Majestic’s brains in (and I’ll bet one American dollar that Jordan’s original pitch for the concluding arc had Deathstroke bashing Superman’s brains in), which is a cool visual for fans of the character who stuck through three radically different interpretations of the character in about a year and a half. This book is for those people, people who love the character more than the people who wrote – or miswrote – him. So we get badass Slade beating on Majestic, and we see moments from the character’s history, like the death of Grant by Slade’s hand to cement a victory, and the savage repeated beating of Jericho (seriously: fuck that simpering, man-fro’ed wuss), and a final loner’s walk into the sunset while the captions announce, for all eternity, that Deathstroke The Terminator is one bad motherfucker (shut yo’ mo – oh, you already said the “fucker” part? Nevermind. Carry on).

Edgar Salazar’s art is plenty good for this final issue, of nothing to write home about. His art is fine lined, with enough detail lines inked into everyone’s faces to remind people of Liefeld’s work, as if the cancellation of the book weren’t enough to remind people of what happens when Liefeld puts his hands on a comic book (although to be fair, those irritating facial lines probably fall to inkers Scott Hanna and John Livesay). Salazar does pretty impressive faces – you can tell what people are feeling in the slower sequences, and he draws one hell of a dead person – and his pacing and storytelling are appropriate (it passes the old, “Can I tell what’s going on without reading the words?” test with flying colors). But still, there’s nothing spectacular going on here; a lot of panels are missing backgrounds, and the machinery he draws is kinda blocky and uninspired… but it does the job. Hey, the world doesn’t need another Rob Liefeld, drawing pages with an eye toward what he can get on the secondary market. I’d trade Liefeld for any dozen competent comic storytellers, and Salazar fits the bill.

Look: if you love Deathstroke enough to have hung in through Higgins’s examination of middle age, through Liefeld’s yen to use the character as a way to explore his own urges to draw Lobo’s huge pectoral muscles, and into Jordan’s more straight-ahead action stories, there are things you want to see him do. And those things include beating on a Superman analog and that moment where he kills his own son to win. And Jordan gives the fans those things. If it’s not the best, most cohesive comic book story ever written, so what? If you wanted those, you should have bought the book back when Higgins was writing it. If you’re still here, at the bitter end, it’s because you want Deathstroke and all that means. Jordan gives it to you.

Amanda’s cousin’s kid Billy would be happy with this issue. And that’s enough.