Commanders In Crisis #12 // Review
Empathy is dead. The multiverse is no more. Everyone is disconnected. All that's left to do is give people a little bit of time to communicate directly...but EVERYONE has to communicate directly...and that involves the mother of all psychic links in the 12th issue of Commanders in Crisis. Writer Steve Orlando closes out his mini-series with the aid of artist Davide Tinto. Color comes to the page courtesy of Francesca Carotenuto and Francesca Vivaldi. There's poetry in a climax that doesn't necessarily connect through action and aggression so much as communication and understanding. Still, there's no question that Orlando and Tinto are closing the door on a cluttered mess of a series.
“Omnisapienteleunification.” That's what they call it. It's written in cool, little purple letters in a running halo around everyone's head as they drift about in a sea of purples. It means everyone is linked psychically. Humanity has 24 hours to decide its fate. So y'know...no pressure or anything like that. Everyone just has to agree without the benefit of empathy over a single day. And if everything goes well in the last reality left after the cosmic sepsis, there really ARE going to be a lot of questions to answer, but for now...everybody has to shut up and listen to everyone else.
It's a really, really gutsy move to end any series on a big showdown between...everyone. There's no physical action...just the entire human race listening and connecting up with the thoughts of everyone else in the entire human race. The rest is falling action. Orlando is taking a hell of a risk with the series ending the first twelve issues as he is, but it's been such a complicated mess of a journey to get where everything is at this stage that the ending of the series feels like a strange footnote to a first draft.
The grand confluence of minds in the "omnisapienteleunification" comes across with a respectable amount of beauty due in large part to not one but TWO different Francescas working with an awe-inspiring array of purples. For his part, Tinto does an equally impressive job of allowing Orlando's script to speak for itself. It's kind of striking to simply show a whole bunch of dumbstruck people floating around with weird, little halos around their heads. The image of that in a page of the opening of the issue is really, really striking. Tinto does a pretty good job of delivering the weight of the drama from there on in.
There's probably more than a few really good ideas that have come to the surface in the course of the 12 issues of Commanders in Crisis. It's all been too much of a jumble to really make much of an impact, though. Had Orlando benefited from 3 or 4 writing teams, the series could have been much more of a cohesive multiversal experiment rather than the big jumble it ended up being.
