Evil Dicks Are Evil: Forever Evil #3 Review

I think I’ve finally figured out why DC’s latest event crossover, Forever Evil, hasn’t really been working for me, despite the fact that I’ve got a soft spot for the Crime Syndicate going back to the original Crisis On Infinite Earths. The storytelling decisions that writer Geoff Johns has made have made this thing pretty one dimensional up until now.

Think about it: the Crime Syndicate in this series are pretty much just evil for the sake of being evil, and that’s not all that interesting. Sure, there are some little extra beats like Ultraman’s lust and hatred for Superwoman, and Owlman’s somewhat conflicted emotions about Nightwing, and Power Ring’s cowardice, but in general these characters are pricks for the sake of being pricks. They’ve got the raw power to knock the moon out of orbit, but they also need to recruit this universe’s super criminals for power, why exactly? Because shut up, that’s why!

Also, Johns’s decision to get the Justice League out of the way has made sense from the angle that it allows these characters to run riot across the Earth to show us how bad they are, but it has had the unfortunate side effect of accentuating what the bad guys are up to… and a lot of it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Like that whole moving the moon to block the sun. It’s a neat visual, but if you stop and think about it for more than ten seconds, you’d realize that changing the moon’s orbit would alter tides, cause massive crop failures and climate change, and generally cause devastation on a planetary scale. Not that anyone would know, since the eclipse would blind everyone in about 45 minutes or so. And combine that with the fact that every time I see Grid I’m reminded that he split away from Cyborg by the selfsame powers of “shut up,” and we’ve had a bunch of one dimensional characters doing awful and ridiculous things for about three months (or eight when you remember that Forever Evil is, for all intents and purposes, just a continuation of the Trinity War crossover).

Well, this week brings us Forever Evil #3, and the good news is that things are starting to improve and become a little more diverse than just “evil dicks are evil.” But to get there, we get one more big plot point that doesn’t really ring true, and another that relies on, well, evil dicks being evil.

Batman and Catwoman have gotten the debionicised (fuck you spellcheck; debionicised is a word now) Cyborg to S.T.A.R. Labs and Cyborg’s father to try and save him before his impression of a doorstop becomes a permanent condition. As Batman takes off to try and find Nightwing, Luthor has harvested his Bizarro Superman clone, and is using him as manual labor to reestablish contact with satellites he has far out of lower Earth orbit, which he uses to witness Ultraman break Black Adam’s jaw and chuck him into the ocean. Back in Central City, Deathstorm and Power Ring are in a disagreement over the Syndicate’s orders to level the city, which leads to Power Ring to start shooting, Deathstorm to use his powers to split Captain Cold’s powers away from him. The Rogues manage to escape, with Cold finding Luthor busy calling Black Manta for backup on his burgeoning plan to strike back against the Syndicate.

There are a couple of things that really work in this issue, and the first is the element that I’ve enjoyed best throughout this story, and that’s the Rogues. Johns, as a longtime Flash writer, has a special affinity for the Rogues, and writes them as he always has: as blue collar, “honest” thieves who are about the score and the brotherhood, and who sure as hell aren’t evil… or at least not so evil as to facilitate innocent people getting killed on the say-so of a bunch of power-mad goons from off-planet. We got the beginning of a nice scene of the Rogues trying to be reasonable with Deathstorm and Power Ring, like professionals, and it is always a refreshing change from evil dicks being… well, you know.

And that scene plays a bit into the other thing that worked for me: the members of the Syndicate beginning to come unglued of their own volition. Like I’ve said, I’m not finding a lot compelling about the Syndicate’s characterizations – crazy and evil is only interesting up to a point – but I can buy that these psychos are so nuts that they’re never too far away from coming unglued and unable to function of their own volition. And we are starting to see that here: we’ve got Ultraman freaking out that Black Adam was actually able to hurt him, and Power Ring going off even more half-cocked than usual (and letting it slip that he’s down to 15 percent power). I can’t really buy into characters that are simply pure evil, but megalomaniacs who are so far gone that they can’t keep their shit together for very long? That makes more sense to me. It’s not enough to grab me with both hands, but it’s enough to make me more interested in the plot.

Which is a good thing, because this issue gives us yet another plot point that is so big and overblown that it’s hard to really take seriously. The possible reveal of what happened to the rest of the Justice League, combined with the reveal of how Cyborg, who at this point resembles the men’s room aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, is somehow a viable living thing, fall under the category of big, broad, almost Silver Age comics logic that it’s hard to accept. Now, please keep in mind that this is a comic book story populated by people who fly and shrink and run faster than light, so “believable” is a relative word. Your mileage may vary with these couple of plot points… but thrown together with the eternal eclipse and Grid The Suddenly Sentient Cyborg (which should be the pre-intermission number in the Justice League musical… yes, I have been drinking. What’s your point?), they require more of a suspension of disbelief than I normally need even in a mainstream superhero comic.

David Finch’s art is his normal, fine-lined, hyper realistic 90s style art, only with more realism behind the fine lines and cross hatches than you’d expect from comparable artists. He is one of the best currently working at showing a heroic pose on all his character… including Power Ring, who is supposed to be in the thrall of a pants-shitting terror at the time, but what the hell. One place I did have a problem in this issue was his storytelling, particularly in the sequence where Captain Cold is escaping from Deathstorm; the visuals don’t make it clear what exactly the flow was. We have rogues jumping into a mirror, and then Deathstorm breaking the mirror, and Cold erupting from a mirror… somewhere. Then later we see Cold talking face-to-face with Luthor in Metropolis, with no indication how the hell he got there from Central City. This confusion isn’t completely Finch’s fault – there’s nothing in the writing to explain just where Cold ended up after the buster mirror or how he got to Metropolis – but it was a confusing moment in a book that generally has some sweet iconic superhero images.

There are some signs of life in Forever Evil #3 that make it more of a fulfilling read than the preceding issues; the Rogues are solid, and watching some members of the Syndicate start to act as their own worst enemies is definitely an improvement over the standard EVIL characterization we’ve been seeing. But still, there are elements of this story that are simply overblown and defy logic – seriously, how the hell did Captain Cold get to Metropolis? And how did Luthor know that “churning” the small part of the ocean off the coast of Metropolis would call Black Manta (who, purely by coincidence, managed to find Black Adam floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean)? Particularly since the tides should be a crossrip disaster due to the moon’s new orbit?

And Goddammit, there’s the problem with Forever Evil: leaps in logic, plot holes and big, bold action set pieces that don’t make a lot of logical sense, populated by barely-opposed, shallow characters. The characters are starting to evolve and show a little more depth, but we’re gonna need a hell of a lot more of that to mask the plot problems. This issue is an improvement, but it’s still not firing on all cylinders.