What I Bought 7/21/2018

I've actually had two quiet weekends in a row. It was fantastic, almost relaxing.

Stellar #2, by Joseph Keatinge (writer), Bret Blevins (artist), Rus Wooton (letterer) - I'm sure her doctor told her that was a perfectly normal test to run, but I think she should have questioned it a bit more.

The sudden appearance of Stellar's former comrades-in-arms was not a hallucination or weird time flux, they really are there to capture her. Which they do. Then they travel to another world, to try and capture another former member of their group, which goes less smoothly. It does result in Stellar being free of confinement, but now she's the one stuck dealing with Zenith.

The main part of the issue is really flashbacks to how the five of them were originally selected and turned into these weapons as children. Stellar is the one who hated what they'd became, and most readily took a chance to get away. The three who captured her, assuming Umbra is representative, seem to have simply accepted it. If nothing else, their lives as prized weapons were better than what they had as refugees before. Zenith is the one who embraced the power, took the whole, "I am superior, I can do whatever I want," approach. Stellar and the others' homeworld appears to have been devastated by the war (or by Zenith?), so what are they doing this for? Umbra suggests the team reunited to stop Zenith, but why? He makes it clear he doesn't want to be there, so are they under orders, or did they choose to deal with an out-of-control former teammate?

Stellar never reaches the point of being a glowing yellow thing in the shape of a person at any point in this issue. Even when she's fighting her old friends. Which is a change from last issue, when she went to that level against them right off the bat. I don't know if that's because they dropped her before she had the chance, or she made a conscious decision not to. She asked them to take the fight elsewhere, away from civilians, and they were unconcerned. Maybe she felt the best option was just to lose quickly, so they'd leave.

She doesn't power up fully against the giant creature she tangles with at the end of the issue, either, but she doesn't really need to. I'm more interested in how Blevins colors it, a sickly yellow-gray over its entire body, even its claws, with all sorts of lines running over and through it. Like it's skin is translucent, and we can see some of the inner workings, circulatory system and what passes for the creature's guts.

This issue had less to it than the first one, which had to spend more time setting thing up, but I'm still intrigued.