I was at my dad's over the weekend, so as usual, we were going to watch some older movies. Pity the DVDs didn't want to cooperate. His copy of Black Moon Rising had a crack in it. The copy of Brass Target I bought him for Christmas - a new copy mind you, still in the plastic wrapping - locked up about halfway through.
Oh well, at least his truck is running again - finally, meaning he has two vehicles old enough to drink to rely on instead of one - and we got the fencing up in the back yard like he wanted.
Sapphire's music career is dwindling because of new singer, Sugar Sweet. Who turns out to be a robot Mad Mod made for Simon Stagg by using AI to combine whatever is trending on social media. Yet Sugar doesn't seem to be spouting a lot of Nazi crap. Strange. It's a dual move by Stagg to both make money and tank his daughter's dreams so she has to run the company some day.
The plan falls apart when Sapphire, in a dual move to get her name of people's lips and make Urania look bad, leaks some security footage of she and Urania arguing earlier in the issue. Unfortunately, this means Mod's algorithm picks up the interest in superheroes and in destroying them, so Sugar becomes a warbot (with a dorky hat, but it's all nostalgia for something we never knew, baby) and tries to kill the Element Team. The attempt fails, thanks to the explosive power of glucose, but when Rex learns the warbot was the result of Stagg's greed and Sapphire's ambition, he decides he's leaving.
On the run, Mad Mod calls Vandal Savage for help hiding out. Which seems random, but I guess it's all to set up Savage and Java being old acquaintances and meeting up next issue. Which I guess makes sense. Why shouldn't the two cave-guys know each other? Though it seems irrelevant if Metamorpho's taken a powder.
My concerns that everyone was being cavalier about the ticking clock are apparently unnecessary. The clown in the van (as in, a guy dressed as a clown is in the van) is driving away slowly enough for Calavera, Maria and her cop husband Mike to argue in the middle of the street until Maria makes a random car stop and commandeers it for her and the skeleton.
They're smart enough to not just drive right into the trap, but their attempt to sneak in the back through the woods fails. Maria escapes, but apparently shooting a skeleton with a machine gun is more effective than stabbing him. I guess if you shatter enough bones he can't move. Maria returns to her office, but Mike failed to round-up any officers for back-up. Because they're all busy hounding and arresting Mexicans right now. Well, you know, priorities and all. Brutalize and intimidate, that's the motto.
OK, so here's the odd part of the issue. The person behind all this is the woman who killed Calavera. She wears a red dress that seems brighter when she gets less human, and a veil across her face that sometimes makes it look like her face has cracks and fractures running across it. She's not engineered this to bring Calavera back out of guilt. No, she wanted to die and be reunited with her son and he stopped her. But she met a scientist who thought he could give her what she wanted, and he'd accomplish his dream of. . .bridging the divide between the worlds of living and dead. It hasn't worked so far, but having a walking dead man is somehow the missing piece.
So, the whole plan hinged on the notion Calavera could, in fact, rise from the dead for one night? In that case, why have they just been watching and trying to lure him into this trap instead of jumping him the moment he stepped out of his grave? And how is the rich bastard Calavera busted for human trafficking in issue 1 - who turns out to be the clown - involved in this? He wanted revenge badly enough to buy into a cockamamie plan like this? It's all so odd, I'm not sure the final issue can pull this thing together.
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