By Judd Winick, Matthew Clark, Pop Mhan, Ron Randall, Tom Grindberg, Art Thibert & Steve Bird (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1195-X
After the never-ending calamity of the DC Infinite Crisis event, the company re-set the time line of all their publications to begin one year later. This enabled them to refit their characters as they saw fit, provide a jumping on point for new converts and also give themselves some narrative wiggle-room…
This fifth compelling compendium gathers issues #34-41 of Judd Winick’s grim and witty Outsiders comicbook, resuming the odyssey twelve months after the universe was reshaped by the Infinite Crisis with the team – Nightwing, Grace, Thunder, Metamorpho, Katana and Owen Reece (the super-fast son and heir of the recently perished Captain Boomerang) – all believed long dead but actually working deep, deep, deep undercover…
The eponymous and decidedly dark epic ‘The Good Fight’ (illustrated by Matthew Clark & Art Thibert) begins with ‘Cain and Abel’ as in the war-torn African nation of Mali dictator Ratu Bennin hoards Weapons of Mass destruction and makes plans to destroy the unchecked legions of out-of-control boy soldiers who fuelled his bloody rise to power.
The tyrant is particularly impressed with ambitious lieutenant Adanna Abioye, unaware that she is in fact American infiltrator Anissa Pierce: the Outsider known as Thunder…
Nighwing is the only member of the team still publicly active; running his team as covert operators eliminating truly evil men rather than wasting time fighting costumed lunatics. The Outsiders have spent months penetrating Bennin’s gore-soaked regime, but when the army plans a massacre, Thunder breaks cover to save lives and endangers not only the mission but also the squad’s hard-earned and precious anonymity…
Forced to improvise in ‘Meet the New Boss’ the team tortures one of Bennin’s most trusted aides for information before raiding the dictator’s citadel and discovering not only conventional chemical WMDs but also a super-speed sentinel who almost destroys them all in seconds…
Concluding with ‘Gone in a Flash’ the team’s triumph exposes a new kind of arms-dealer selling cloned super-humans as terror-weapons to the world’s worst countries and companies. Inexorably drawn into jurisdictional conflict with UN metahuman oversight agency Checkmate, they follow the trail of ‘Silver and Grey’, encountering ‘Familiar Faces’ (art by Tom Grindberg, Clark & Thibert) on a trail which leads to disembodied Brotherhood of Evil supremo The Brain and his devoted disciple Mallah – a gorilla genius with a penchant for genetic tampering and ballistic slaughter…
With the world’s bright and shiny legitimate superheroes increasingly anxious, Nightwing stubbornly continues with his unsanctioned, illegal enquiries in ‘Looking For a Fight’(Pop Mhan, Thibert & Steve Bird), but when his team invades the Brotherhood’s lair, unaware that the clone-dealers have a deadly silent partner, they are quickly overcome and seem destined to become the latest batch of raw materials…
The story-arc culminates in ‘Since You’re Here, Why don’t you Stay Awhile?’ (Clark, Ron Randall & Thibert) as the Outsiders break free to face bastardised versions of the World’s Greatest Heroes in a blockbusting showdown which leads seamlessly into the first chapter of ‘Mad Scientists’ as the trail to the Brotherhood’s partner leads to even greater struggles in ‘…You Make Lemonade’ before the hidden mastermind is revealed in ‘Raising the Dead’ only to turn the tables on the hidden heroes with a very public nuclear detonation which exposes the clandestine crusaders to the harsh light of global scrutiny…
To Be Continued…
Hard-hitting, breathtakingly barbed and astoundingly action-packed, the latter run of Outsiders was one of the most intriguing and cynically plausible superhero sagas of the last decade. Still gripping, evocative and extremely readable, these bleakly powerful stories will delight older fans of the genre and, as this volume has the added advantage of being designed as a “jump on†point for new readers, there’s nothing stopping the intrigued becoming the latest converts…
© 2006 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.