The comics were supposed to arrive Monday, which would give me the chance to get this review written up for Wednesday before I had to leave town a couple of days for week. The comics did not arrive Monday, so here we are on Friday, kicking off a series of reviews of books from the last two months with the conclusion of a mini-series.
Maria and Mike figure out that while the adult Mexicans may very well be getting shoved across the border, the cops are rounding up the kids to send them to the creepy scientist and loony bereaved mother. Which means hustling back to Calavera, who is growing some flesh back? Like one of those diagrams of a human meant to show the musculature without skin in the way. Not sure if that's because his time is almost up or because of something Fantasma did to him.
Fantasma and the creepy scientist's plan is to make Calavera keep taking the kids the cops rounded up through the portal until her son possesses one of the bodies. Which seems like an incredibly stupid plan, but Fantasma is too fixated on her grief, and the scientist doesn't care what happens to other people, so there you go.
Either way, they're gonna start with Maria's son. Calavera gets Fantasma to give him a little boost of energy (which makes him look like a skeleton again), which is a distraction for Maria and Mike to make their move. Which promptly fails, but Calavera tackles Fantasma through the doorway. Which is just a cave entrance, it's not glowing or otherworldly, but Finnegan has kept the whole thing looking pretty mundane throughout.
Miguel falls through with them, but Calavera's able to bring him back out before his time runs out. Maria and Mike reunited with their son, the creepy scientist on the loose, all those other kids presumably now without parents. Not exactly the feel-good win of the year.
There's also a flashback to Mike and Calavera serving together in WWI, and Mike later failing to honor his promise to get Calavera a job with the LAPD, because the commissioner won't hire a Mexican. Juan tells Mike to stop calling him Johnny, that his name is Juan. So Calavera stopped trying to play by the white folks rules and just lived as himself. Which explains his work as a private investigator, but I'm not sure how it fits into this specific case. The cops clearly weren't protecting those kids, but Calavera wasn't involved because of them. He was there because Maria asked for his help. Which he provided, so maybe that's the point. He couldn't save Fantasma's son, or her from her grief, but that didn't mean he'd turn his back on someone else who asked.
No comments:
Post a Comment