Commander In Crisis #6 // Review
The good news is that the multiverse is real. The universe shares existence with a whole bunch of other universes. The bad news? All of those other universes are dead, and we're in the only universe that's left. Oh: and empathy? Yeah: it's still dead, but they're not going to mention that in the press conference. There's...kind of a lot going on as writer Steve Orlando's Commander In Crisis reaches its sixth issue. Artist Davide Tinto brings the drama and the action to page and panel. Despite Tinto's ability to bring dynamic order to a chaotic script, Orlando's feverishly-rendered plot continues to race along on far too many tracks to feel compellingly coherent.
A couple of US presidents from a couple of parallel worlds are sitting around lamenting the death of empathy. They're also trying to figure out precisely what the hell that even means, as elsewhere a villain awakens quite a few copies of herself, and the US Senate has passed a bill that could tear the whole country apart. There's a conflict in an undersea kingdom. Y'know... that's going on as well, but a couple of heroes are going to try to keep THAT from blowing-up with the use of complex sci-fi genetics.
Orlando has a lot going on this issue. Any one of the scenes in this issue could have been expanded to a full issue, but Orlando has a hell of a lot of story to cover and not a whole lot of time (evidently), so things drift from one scene to the next, really, really quickly. This would be fine if there seemed to be any natural progression for the narrative. It jumps around too much for any one scene to feel firmly seated. Every scene in the issue seems to get going a few panels before it's over. It's scarcely satisfying.
Tinto does what he can to ground each scene's dramatic intensity, but it would be difficult for any artist to find an engaging rhythm for Orlando's script. The weighty intellectual end of the drama (such as it is) has its moments on the page, but most of it involves characters meaningfully staring-off into the middle-distance. Tinto makes this seems as intense as he can, but it's not something that works terribly well on the comics page without the right build-up. The action comes across pretty well, though.
There are some appealing images. The villain surveys a few of her identicals in presumably amniotic aquarium tubes. That's fun. The combat in an Atlantis-like place is also kind of cool. It's not like the visual world that Tinto's bringing to the page isn't interesting. It's just not in the service of anything terribly interesting. Orlando's script has fun elements in it. Tinto's art works well in places. The story isn't being framed in a way that engages the reader, though. It all continues to feel like a hectic mess of action and drama.
