And it was, to put it lightly… Not good.
TLDR: It started fine, but each chapter was worse than the last, pacing was bad, plot threads were repeatedly dropped and picked up for no coherent reason, characters were inconsistent. I want another Overwatch comic series, but I want it to be well written. This was not.
Also, I would like to hear other people’s opinions on this series/finale. For my wall-of-text thoughts…
I had high hopes with the first chapter. It was a decent introduction that introduced Iggy and her dynamic with Tracer, as well as presenting the tensions in King’s Row before Alive, with an ending that suggests we will see Alive, and that the final 3 issues will be about the aftermath and fallout from the assassination of Mondatta.
The second chapter was okay. It felt like it was mostly a recap of past events. Whether its recapping issue 1, Tracer’s Origin, Uprising, or Alive, it felt like half the comic was stuff we have already seen. There were still interesting segments here with Kace’s and Mondatta’s speeches and conversations that shed light on the differences between the fundamental nature and ideology of Omnics and Humans (Humans served Mondatta food as it is Human custom, Omnics value the whole more than the individual.) The ending also added a conflict between Iggy and Tracer that we expect to see in the coming issues.
Chapter 3 is where it went downhill.
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Iggy flip-flops between extremely anti-human and anti-human music, and having a reasonable conversation with Tracer or still loving her music over the course of the next 3 issues. If this is supposed to be an intentionally internal conflict with Iggy, it is not presented well. None of her dialogue from this point on is coherent. For instance, her conversation with Lizzy on the communicator in chapter 4 makes little sense in the context. She is saying words that are supposed to be cut-off for suspense, but after reading the whole issue… I have no idea what she was trying to tell Lizzy. “Kace is… It’s not Kace, its…” It reads like plain suspenseful dialogue that wasn’t supposed to have meaning. And even if she was trying to warn Lizzy that there was a shooter trying to shoot Kace, she does nothing about it just like she accused Tracer, and that was before the shooter missed and filled Izzy with doubts of Kace’s leadership, especially she was gung-ho and on his side in the immediate previous issue with no visible change in thought. If anything, Lady’s sacrifice looked like it only encouraged her following of Kace in context, especially since he finishes her sentence for her in the rejection of Tracer and humanity, and Lizzy at the start of the next chapter reinforces that. It is just incredibly inconsistent and hard to follow what is going on or why with respect to Iggy’s character.
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We have Tracer’s Chronal Accelerator, which is inconsistently “repaired” and “damaged” regardless as to what happens with it. It had to be damaged because of Widowmaker, yet it works well enough to get back home. It stops working on the way to the riot, outright disables her on the way home so that Lizzy has to step in and help. Then its working well with Winston’s “temporary” fix, where temporary seems to mean only about an hour and goes back to randomly failing again in the fifth chapter. It is extremely inconsistent, where Winston’s repair was just as meaningless as it randomly paralyzing her in the middle of the street. The paralysis itself seems really out of place considering every other time we have seen Tracer’s chronal disassociation (Tracer Origins, Doomfist Origins.) It doesn’t actually add tension, the third or fourth time around it happens its an eyeroll. And it doesn’t feel like its damaged when Tracer can still use her powers at every chance she needs it with no consequence. Even at the end when she takes the bullet for Iggy, we hear the shout “Tracer! The Accelerator!” and then nothing bad related to the Accelerator happens, it works perfectly and flawlessly, allowing her to take the bullet. It’s just hard to follow and feels like its cheaply written conflict at the writer’s convenience rather than something that is consistent in the context of the story.
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Lady’s sacrifice was a defining moment in Chapter 3. It didn’t make sense. Lady recognizes the danger and says that they need to move the crowd. Kace, the omnic whose ideology is established to differ from Lady’s, says to destroy the machine (presumably by rushing it). What we see is Lady not working to protect the crowd, but instead rushes the sonic pulse for seemingly no reason, and just Lady. There is no one among Kace’s command or supporters rushing it with her, she is the only casualty. This whole scene in general was hard to follow. There was a better way to write Lady’s sacrifice than this hard-to-follow sacrifice where she seemingly just kills herself to protect no one. The sacrifice being used as fuel in the next chapter is fair, but then its dropped completely by chapter 5.
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The Police are anti-omnic. We see this in chapter 1, and again in the riot. In chapter 4, the police sergeant mobilizes the police to sector 5 - Underworld. This is one of the set pieces for the last few pages leading up to one final confrontation. This plot thread is dropped entirely as the police are absent from chapter 5. They don’t appear, there is no mention of the conflict that may or may not ensue, this thread is just dropped.
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The overall pacing of events is hard to follow, chronologically and spacially. There’s a riot, Tracer is immediately there despite having a broken accelerator, and then the police pull out a sonic pulse that feels like it does nothing. “Bring in the second cannon” doesn’t give us any sense of space either, it a second cannon feels like it just shows up where its immediately convenient, fires, and then immediately disappears from existence. The trip from Iggy listening to Kace’s speech to seeing the shooter to calling him out are hard to follow with the rest of the events in Tracer’s apartment, which also feel incredibly rushed. And that’s not even getting into the final conflict where she saves Iggy, rallies all the omnics that disagree with Kace to save them from somewhere, then marches to some arbitrary somewhere else where Kace is and makes a speech to rally all of his allies to their side. Then Iggy gets shot at anyways?
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The ending itself was just incredibly rushed and anti-climactic. Tracer gets shot, she goes into surgery… And then she’s in better condition than she was before she got shot. There was no stakes or tension. Her getting shot even without her access to Recall had no impact. There is no conclusion to Kace, or to the Underworld omnics, or to anything else mentioned. She gets shot, Kace runs away, she gets better, and then everything is explained away in exposition by Winston. “Oh he might be working with Null Sector. Also I fixed the grid, and your accelerator. Ready to go fight someone else now?” The Null Sector point might have been useful to tease in any point prior to this, but this just came out of nowhere to explain away what felt like a meaningless conflict.
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Even just the dialogue and monologues between the characters feel like they prove that there was no cohesion or planning put out for this story. Just before she takes the bullet for Iggy, Tracer has a mental monologue about how she only ever thought of herself as a soldier, yet the first panel of the first page of the first issue is her calling her profession that of the “hero.” Top job if you can get it. It feels like each chapter was written in a vacuum without any regard for the rest of the chapters, even though they were all written by the same author.
Maybe these examples are just me being picky, but I had to reread multiple issues just because I couldn’t follow what was going on, why people were acting how they were, if Tracer was actually damaged, etc. Nothing felt like it had any cohesion or impact, it was just detached events happening roughly in sequence with no character growth. Tracer at the start and end are the same person, but she has a friend in Iggy. Iggy might have some leadership shown in exclusively chapter 5, but that is dropped by Tracer getting shot and then Iggy never being mentioned or shown again. Even in Tracer’s hospital scene where people are waiting for her to get better, its just rushed through with no sign of Iggy or Lizzy, and even in Winston’s exposition Iggy isn’t namedropped. Despite being the other main character, she just stops being relevant beyond “Tracer needs motivation to take a bullet for an omnic.”
I like the Overwatch comics. Some of my favourite pieces of the story such as Going Legit, Old Soldiers, or Masquerade are comics. And I want more Overwatch comics. I just want them to be good. Right now, I feel like I am trying decide whether or not London Calling is the new low for story content. I can’t decide if Zarya’s tragically bad Searching is better or worse.
If this series does tank, I want Blizzard to not take it as a sign that people don’t want comics. People do want comics. Its just this particular comic is bad.
. Isn’t the final message the problem, simply in THIS storyboard did not create any flow really useful for the evolution of the narrative, it is not the Overwatch team that decides how to expose the cycle of Solutions - problems that are proposed.