The Establishment 8 - 13

This is the second half of the Wildstorm series from 2001. After reading the first 7 issues, I was hoping that they'd actually touch on the origin of some of the characters, and of the organization as a whole, in these issues. Fortunately, they do, and it helps to flesh out the team a little bit, but as I feared it is simply a case of "too little, too late".

Even though the first couple of issues of this arc went over the origins of some of the team members, none of their stories really were that engaging. The only one that I found moderately amusing was for the Pharmacist. He was a super genius, got a brain tumor, died, and then was brought back to life as some super being controlled by some god-type thing (yeah, it gets pretty muddled, but I'm guessing regular Wildstorm readers would know what was going on).

I just felt like I was missing something as I was reading each issue, like I was that guy who walks up to a group of people having a conversation and thinking I can pick it up right in the middle. Sure, I might understand what they're talking about for the most part, but whenever they reference something I'd missed, I feel left out. That's exactly how this series felt all the way through.

I'm torn about how to rate this series because I'm sure it would be a lot better if I had more contextual information, but as it stands, I was pretty uninterested in whatever super-demon or whatnot that the Establishment was fighting from issue to issue. Oh, yeah, one last thing. In one of the later issues there's some nun with guns introduced and you're not really told why she's there or what her deal is, but all of the sudden a gun toting nun takes center stage. I think it was at that point I just threw my hands up and said "Whatever, I'm obviously out of the loop."

Ratings:
Art: 3.5
Story: 2.5
Overall: 2.5