Written by Steve Orlando, L.A. Thornhill
Art by Davide Tinto
Published by Image Comics
The Crisis Command has been broken up, beaten up, dragged around. But now they’ve regrouped, reunited, and they’ve got one more desperate, gigantic plan to put down the Extinction Society and save Reality-Z.
It’s go big or go home. Or, in this case, go big or watch the multiverse swallow up this reality and turn everything in it to cosmic slop.
Clarity can emerge in a crisis, can’t it? In crisis, we know what people truly hold dear, what they will fight for and die for. The truest of character can emerge, inner strength tested and revealed, fortitude and resolve gathered and shared.
Yes, shared. Because in crisis, no one suffers alone, and no one prevails alone.
Steve Orlando understands this as the driving theme of Commanders in Crisis #11.
As Crisis Command battles Executrix’s clones, the stubbornness of life continues. Orlando and artist Davide Tinto take us around the world, seeing other costumed heroes fighting for life amid the chaos of the impending cosmic sepsis in a world where empathy remains dead.
I’m always here for new, full superhero realities with new versions of familiar power sets and attributes. How can you not love the Justice Poets in Missoula, Montana, the Purple Corpse in Lisbon, Dusk and Dawn in Toronto, or the green-skinned Ajax, Last Son of Planet Olympus, in Paris?
The big superhero philosophies of a fist against evil and a good story rocketing hope into the darkness continue to power this book in ways I didn’t expect.
Yes, there’s mid-fight banter and punching and all of that here, too.
But then the story reaches higher and wraps its arms around the entire world.
Originator still has the bident from the Lightning World, the existential plane where ideas live until they are brought into our world when finally conceptualized and practiced. Originator, with the power to compel anyone to do anything for 24 hours by speaking a newly created word, is the perfect person to wield the bident and draw forth a new idea to save Reality-Z.
Or is she? Having learned their lesson from before of not engaging properly with the humanity they pledged to save, Originator instead uses her gift to unite every person’s mind.
For one day, all of the world’s people are linked, thought to thought. Now it’s time to think their way out of this mess, or perish and lose everything.
Boy howdy, what a cliffhanger! And even if they survive, what will be left behind?
“What reward comes without risk?” Originator says. “And what greater reward than life?”
