Commanders In Crisis #8 // Review
There’s growing unrest in the streets. Things are unraveling. One of the greatest heroes on earth has taken a quick, little jaunt to the Pleistocene to witness history while another is investigating an apparently abandoned hospital in New York. Frontier discovers a little bit about the nature of reality in the ancient past while Prizefighter makes a friend and touches a different history in the eighth issue of Commanders in Crisis. Writers Steve Orlando and L.A. Thornhill begin to build a bit of narrative momentum captured for the page artist Davide Tinto. It’s still a bit muddled, but the pacing of the eighth issue seems to be much more steady than any of the seven issues that have led to it.
The powerful being known as Thunder Woman has taken Frontier to a key moment in the history of Homo Erectus. There are lessons to be learned in the past by mortal, god-like being an early primate. Lessons are learned elsewhere in the present as Prizefighter falls into a rooftop conversation with a hero calling himself American Dreamer. When the two have proven themselves to each other, they both head off to investigate a strange workspace in an otherwise decaying Roosevelt Island Hospital in Queens. Strange tech does stranger things to space, and before long, the two newfound friends are facing the surprisingly menacing threat of an old guy in a robe.
With the action primarily passing between Frontier and Prizefighter, the pacing of this issue is a welcome slowdown from the scattered disarray of the first seven issues. The narrative rests with a couple of the team members and a couple of their allies in a pair of encounters that echo and mirror each other in interesting ways. The ideas that Orlando is working with are familiar enough to speed through, but the unique aspects given to a world in which empathy itself has vanished? THAT’S going to take a little bit more time to explore in detail...and it’s something that Orlando seems to be giving quite a bit of space to here.
It’s a pair of conversations between a pair of different heroes. There’s drama that meets up with the wonder of magic in the ancient past and strangely engaging violence in Queens. Tinto keeps the two different scenes distinct without making the atmospheric differences between the Pleistocene and an old hospital from being too jarring. Granted...the realms of magic that Homo Erectus reach out to in direct reference to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel would seem more moving if the world of the Pleistocene seemed a bit more visually savage. Also: the action sequence at the end of the issue with American Dreamer, Prizefighter, and the old guy didn’t quite hit the page at the right angle to capture the weirdly cool aspect of a tiny, little bearded guy beating the crap out of a couple of huge heroes. (Sort of.) That being said, the visual fingerprint of this series is vividly locked into place by really iconic art by Tinto.
There’s still a hell of a lot in the basic premise of the world of Commanders in Crisis that feels like it’s been solidly missed by Orlando. The specifics of a tenuous multiverse on the verge of possible extinction could hit with a powerful sense of impact if the foundations of the world were just a bit more intelligible. Orlando’s interest between Frontier and Thunder Woman goes a long way towards establishing that background. However, there’s still so much ground to cover that really should have been explored in earlier issues of the series.
