Time Masters: Vanishing Point #6

Review By: Blake M. Petit BlakeMPetit@gmail.com
Quick Rating: Very Good, unless you’re looking for Batman
Title: Passageway Part Six

The time-tossed heroes face Professor Zoom and the Black Beetle, and the timestream will never be the same!

Writer: Dan Jurgens
Art: Dan Jurgens
Finishes: Norm Rapmund
Colors: Hi-Fi Designs
Letters: Travis Lanham
Editor: Mike Carlin
Cover Art: Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund
Publisher: DC Comics

Five issues ago, Rip Hunter and Booster Gold hooked up with Superman and Green Lantern to seek out the missing Batman, lost in the timestream. Instead, they’ve been caught up in a war for eternity against the Black Beetle and a group of time-traveling villains, including the reality-warping Reverse Flash, and the body of the late Waverider has become a pawn in the game.

Whether or not you’ll like this issue really depends entirely on why you bought it. If you like Booster Gold and the sort of time-travel adventures that Dan Jurgens has been writing for over 20 years, this is great. Jurgens and the Booster Gold “family” are a perfect team, and this issue gives us a lot more of that sort of thing, including major developments for Liri Lee, the last of the Linear Men. We even get a very brief glimpse of Rip Hunter’s mother, although of course we don’t see her identity. (It is a little unnerving, though, to note that Booster Gold’s eventual wife appears to be wearing his sister’s uniform.)

On the other hand, if you got this book because you wanted to read a tie-in to the Return of Bruce Wayne miniseries, this is going to be a letdown. The Batman story is a macguffin, an excuse to get our heroes into the timestream, and nothing move. Even the effort to tie the climax of this story into that one feels very cursory, like it was slipped in merely because it was expected and not because it was necessary.

Jurgens and Rapmund have been a team for years, and their talent has never diminished. They’re magnificent artists with a fantastic style perfectly suited for a sci-fi adventure of this nature.

This book really works as a bridge, tying together dozens of time travel characters and adventures stretching back from Armageddon 2001 and laying ground for Flashpoint. And taken from that perspective, it’s just what you want.

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