This has been an incredibly frustrating comic book mini-series.

James Robinson won me over with Starman in the 90’s, and that book remains one of my favorite series of all time. The beginning of Cry for Justice — all the cries for justice aside — showed a lot of promise. I loved sequences with Mikaal and Congorilla, and I found some of the JLA interaction to be pretty fun and interesting.

But somewhere in the middle, this series seemed to shift dramatically. We’ve gotten hints that this series changed midstream to fit changing editorial plans. I suspect that’s largely what got us to this issue, which turns out to be a very disappointing finale to a very uneven series.

On Twitter today, I saw a lot of people pissed off at the writer, commenting that this is a writer run amok — the speculation being that this was Robinson left to his own devices and resorted to cheap thrills and cliches. I think that’s a little unfair, as we don’t know anything about the construction of the series. So let my suspicion of editorial edict cancel out those reviewers’ suspicions, and let’s just focus on what we ended up getting.

The overall backbone of plot does seem to be intact. I can’t quite make sense of it — if you asked me what Prometheus’ overall motive and plan actually was  — but I do remember bits, and the threat in the finale is real and clear. What’s less clear is… everything else.  In the first few issues, Robinson spent time setting up characters like Mikaal, Congorilla, Hal, and even Supergirl. This issue is filled with various characters that get no set-up and no pay off. The only character that gets an arc seen through properly is Green Arrow, and it’s handled so awkwardly that what should be the final powerful shots, are rather ruined by the choppy storytelling beats leading up to it.

This is the worst kind of mini-series storytelling. It lacks focus, it lacks clear character beats, and the whole is not the sum of its parts. It’s more like a weird, square-root-division of the parts. It’s a mess. And I say that as a guy who has truly enjoyed many of writer James Robinson’s works.

The artwork hurts the story greatly. The shift in artists didn’t bother me last issue, but here, where the art needs to be the most evocative to depict tragedy, it all falls down. Stiff poses, bland facial expressions, and muddy artwork completely destroys the impact of what some of the biggest scenes should be. Green Arrow kneeling in a brown blotch, his face hidden from view, the person in his arms unseen… this is the exact WRONG shot for any sort of emotional impact.

Writer run amok or editorial interference? I can’t say. But the end result is very disappointing, and I really hope that we get to see the better side of Robinson as his JLA-proper run gets rolling. I actually thought the last issue of that series was pretty good.

Edited to add: I didn’t talk about the chain of events in this issue because many people already have. I think it was a series of cheap tactics, yes. It was a “fridging,” yes. But everyone’s already said that, and I’m somewhat used to this kind of thing, and so I find it much easier to accept if it’s housed in a well-written story that gave it proper weight and importance. Sadly, this is cheap tactics wrapped in a terribly structured and illustrated package, making the cheapness of it all the more apparent.