The Immortal Men #5 - DC Comics

THE IMMORTAL MEN No. 5, October 2018

Printed just as co-creator James Tynion IV rather unsympathetically announced the series’ cancellation at the San Diego Comic-Con due to his “bigger books” potentially delaying it and him not wanting “to bring in another writer”, this perceptibly lack-lustre twenty-page periodical must have struck many in its demoralised audience as simply being printed so as to ‘set them up’ for the final instalment to “The End Of Forever”. Indeed, except for Caden Park interfacing with the Bloodmask, and resultantly discovering that the supposedly benevolent Klarn Arg only wanted him so he could callously “overwrite your mind with his”, absolutely nothing of much interest occurs within Issue Five of “The Immortal Men”.

True, Roderick Clay’s potential gun-play at a DIY-A-Bear store in Midtown Manhattan does imbue the Diamond Gem Award-winner’s narrative with a modicum of action as the former Lieutenant Colonel tries to force his way into the A.R.G.U.S. black site and is overpowered by an agent wearing a ludicrously cuddly-looking teddy bear suit. But the vast majority of this publication is disconcertingly directed towards either portraying Timber Wolf slowly burying the corpses of her numerous team-mates who failed to escape The Campus, or depicting the mind-sweeping American lead conversing with Communion in an incredibly slow-paced, word-heavy sequence; “Look, I’m not all that good at beating around the bush. You were the contingency plan. If Infinite Woman incapacitated him, he planned to pass his consciousness into you.”

Unhappily, not even the sixth escape attempt by Reload from the House of Conquest generates much excitement either, as his determined flight through the first house of immortals in order to destroy its blood engines and “take the entire fortress down” is shown to be a futile endeavour within the space of a pair of panels, courtesy of his ineffective progress being monitored on a gigantic surveillance screen by Kyra Arg herself. However, what Patrick Kowalski’s efforts do produce though is enough material with which artist Tyler Kirkham can ‘pad out’ the New Yorker’s plot in order for Ghost Fist to finally teleport the Immortal Men to the Vietnam War veteran’s location as part of a “foolhardy rescue mission”, and dangerously position the heroes in direct conflict with the Hunt, the Kill and a plethora of bloodless.

Storytellers: Tyler Kirkham & James Tynion IV, and Colorist: Arif Prianto