Review: Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Five: The Complete Collection trade paperback (DC Comics)

Two tensions play on the end of Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Five: The Complete Collection. On one hand, this is a book whose finale should be very easy to land — no sudden cancellation here, since we’ve known since the beginning that Injustice has a five-year gap to tell the comics story, and even we know exactly what events the Injustice comic needs to dovetail into. On the other hand, all of this is prequel to the video game itself where the biggest events actually happen, so the Injustice comic has always been doomed to find a way to end without really coming to an ending.

Writer Brian Buccellato has never quite been able to capture the verve that the Injustice comic started with, though happily Year Five is at least some improvement over Year Four. But though there is some summation-type material as Year Five comes to a close, Buccellato’s does not really conclude so much as it just stops. Likely a variety of things were known at that point — other Injustice miniseries to come, plus the Injustice 2 sequel — but still, if you’ve been reading what’s really a whole lot of comics over five volumes, maybe you might’ve hoped for a little more.

[Review contains spoilers]

Following Injustice: Year One’s setup, Year Two had a more cosmic bent, Year Three featured the supernatural, and Year Four was a fight with the gods. Perhaps in the manner of bringing things to a close, Year Five is a somewhat more traditional superheroes-versus-supervillains-type tale. For my tastes, DC stories involving the Greek gods sometimes lean too much toward the lofty and esoteric, so something that involves Doomsday and Bane and the Rogues set against the world of Superman’s imperial regime is more to my liking.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Year Five shows a lot of potential in its early half, in a story that involves an escaped Bizarro — secretly made by Lex Luthor — killing a group of civilians in his misguided way, just as Superman, continuing to lose control, also kills some civilian insurgents. Dramatic confusion ensues, with Superman trying to use Bizarro’s murders as a cover for his own and charging Lex with determining Bizarro’s origins without knowing Lex is the culprit. Superman is in trouble, Lex is in trouble, and it rather seems like a lot of things are about to come crumbling down.

But they don’t, is the problem. In the end, the Bizarro plot comes to almost nothing at all, except the one-panel inspiration for Lex to seek out heroes from the Multiverse to help them. That’s not nothing, of course — it’s verily the linchpin on which the Injustice video game turns — but it feels small given how long the Bizarro plot stewed and how much else involved in it never pays off (Superman never finds out about Lex’s duplicity, for instance). There’s a highly entertaining teaming of Bizarro and Trickster that, in Injustice’s dark humor fashion, ends in Trickster’s accidental death, but again, in the grand scheme of almost 500 pages, it all comes to just about nothing. (Though Buccellato uses Danny Chase and mentions Phantasm, so sometimes the journey is worth it.)

See too the suggestion that the Flash might betray Superman’s regime for Batman’s rebellion, simmering since the first year — Buccellato sets this up, even has Barry have some convincing conversation with Iris, but in the end, he’s loyal to Superman. Hawkman gets teased a couple times, even faces off with Mongul for a piece of Kryptonite, and then he’s killed off by Superman in a single issue. Toward the end Hal and Diana are seemingly shocked to learn that Superman was responsible for having Alfred Pennyworth killed, but that doesn’t seem to affect Diana’s feelings for Superman a few pages later. It’s not so much that Buccellato has to put the toys back in the box as it is that he suggests real the possibility of something significant happening here and then it never does.

Year Five got some extra issues — 20 “chapters” vs. the other years' 12-ish — so I can’t really fault it for what it does with them. But “Part Nineteen” is almost entirely Deathstroke breaking into STAR Labs to steal a Mother Box (albeit and fighting Metamorpho), and “Part Twenty” is a mundane story of mostly normal superheroics set on the alt-world that Injustice steals its saviors from — that is, there’s some clear filler material here such to question whether the extra room was needed. (The alt-world is as weirdly over-armored and violent as the Injustice world, which I guess adheres to the game, though I’d have been more interested to see “our” DCU interact with Injustice, beyond, well, y’know.)

Rightly, at least, Buccellato pits Superman against Batman at the end and recounts the sum of Superman’s crimes (though Batman’s even missing a few!). Injustice has never succeeded in giving nuance to its Superman’s goals or even making him all that likable, but I thought Buccellato did well setting out the two sides of the debate in the final pages: Superman wants people to be safe, and Batman wants them to be free. That’s maybe the easy choice that’s sailed innumerable sci-fi parables, though we’ve rarely seen the average person actually suffering over five years of Superman’s rule. Possibly I’m just inclined to see that aforementioned nuance where it isn’t here at the end, but I was mildly more convinced by Superman here than I had been before.

But in total, again, Brian Buccellato’s Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Five: The Complete Collection could not do what equally no Injustice volume could do before it — really convince us Superman could go mad and bring about all of this. Perhaps the fault is Tom Taylor’s, starting Superman in too normal a place in the first book; the fall is just too great, and too absolute. As I’ve said before, Injustice’s contribution remains what came after it, DCeased and Dark Knights of Steel and DC vs. Vampires and Batman: White Knight and on and on, mostly modern “what if”-style DC universes without the constraints of being a media tie-in book.

[Includes original covers and a variant, page layouts]

Rating 2.25