Earth 2 #15.2: Solomon Grundy Review

The benefit of the Earth 2-themed Villains Month tie-ins is that these issues are inherently divorced from the Forever Evil conflict and thus allowed a bit more storytelling freedom. Unfortunately, this week's Solomon Grundy one-shot fails to take advantage of that fact. This issue lacks the compelling narrative of last week's Desaad story. It's not a bad read, necessarily, just a fairly formulaic one that fails to offer a complete story.

This issue, like so many over these past two weeks, works to humanize an inhuman character. Writer Matt Kindt divides his focus between the present, where Grundy plummets back to Earth and renews his feud with Green Lantern, and flashbacks to Grundy's origins as a humble slaughterhouse worker and family man. The present-day scenes are little more than a means of showing off Aaron Lopresti's pencils. But that's hardly a bad thing. Lopresti brings a great sense of spectacle to this issue as he depicts the one-sided battle between Grundy and a hapless group of police officers.

The meat of the story is meant to be in the flashbacks, but this material is annoyingly incomplete and truncated. We don't see enough of Solomon's (the Cyrus Gold name has apparently been retired) wife and child to care much about their inevitable demise. And these flashbacks end when Solomon is still alive and well. How he actually transforms from ordinary man to immortal zombie and avatar of the Grey is completely ignored. This issue would have been better off focused more fully on the flashbacks and providing a cohesive look at this villain's fall from grace.

Jesse is a writer for various IGN channels. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.

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