The New 52: Futures End #31

By Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, Keith Giffen, Jesús Merino, Dan Green, Hi-Fi

“Oh, save me, Superman.” *WHACK*

The past couple of weeks we got some issues of Futures End focusing on single stories, but this week we’re back to the normal – being a bunch of different stories thrown into a single issue. You have your glowing bears, your press conferences, drinks by the beach, glowing bears, and Superman!

In The New 52: Futures End #31 we find writer Brian Azzarello along with Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens and Keith Giffen bringing us back into familiar territory involving Firestorm, well, familiar for Jason at least as he once again struggles from inside of the nuclear hero. This is a piece of the story that the last time around was a bit overdone, and therefore not necessarily happy to see it being repeated – poor Jason can’t catch a break. Bringing Superman back into the mix however is always a welcomed piece to this story since he’s been kind of a mysterious character – will he eventually go back? Where’s his shirt? How do his pants stay up so well without a belt?

On the artwork side of this issue is Jesús Merino on pencils, with Dan Green on inks, and colors by Hi-Fi. Mentioned above is Superman, also mentioned above is a glowing bear, so let’s focus on that for the artwork side of this issue. After finding himself in the woods for some reason – due to Constantine wanting to go to that spot for whatever reason – Superman finds himself facing off with a huge bear! But what’s that on the bear’s head? And did the bear swallow an x-ray machine? It’s this scene where this bear emerges that really stands out. Merino creates the top panels of the page with big explosions, the panels going from big to small until the last panel – which is the biggest – and we see the emergence of this huge maniacal bear. Hi-Fi takes this scene and pushes the colors of the bear to the forefront, as the backgrounds are all yellow, brown, and orange, and the bear a light blue infused inside of a deep purple/blue where you can see Green’s inks showing through as the bear’s skeleton emits through the figure.

This week returns to the mini-story style that has become the norm for these stories. Some of the stories are a bit stronger than others, but all together nice to see some characters we haven’t seen in a while make a return.