Before Watchmen: Minutemen #5 - The Minutemen's Last Mission

[zapbiffpow]

In a departure from the classic saying, this is the one series I can believe no one's posted yet.

Not because the writing is terrible (it's not), or the art is sub-par (like hell it is), but because at all times the story's either so distrurbing or heartbreaking or controversial that it's hard to find which pages to post (i.e., the villain known only as The Friend of the Children.)

Before Watchmen: Minutemen #5 gives us the team's last moment as a unit. Four pages after the cut:



Here's what's happened during the series:

Silhouette - Murdered, mourned. I love how Cooke really expanded her back-story - she's now one of my favorite characters.
Dollar Bill - Shot dead, revolving door incident.
Silk Spectre - Quit after having avenged Silhouette, by way of 'taking care' of the Liquidator.
Comedian - Currently wetworks operative for the U.S. government.

The remaining Minutemen are just about ready to end the whole thing when they get an S.O.S from Bluecoat and Scout, a pair of heroes straight from the funny books who warn them of a Japanese plan to cause a meltdown in New York.

The target turns out to be the Statue of Liberty and the resulting radiation poisoning casualties, Bluecoat reports, would number in the thousands.

The Minutemen, although skeptical of the two, head for the Statue after the threat gets confirmed.



As the Minutemen hold off enemy gunfire at the base of the statue, Bluecoat is shot and killed, leaving Scout and Nite Owl to disable the nuclear device.

Then, in a freak twist of fate, Nite Owl is pinned down the stairs by the enemy he had shot to save Scout, forcing the kid to defuse a heavily radiated machine on his own.



This tearjerking sequence of words and images then happens:




This series has been executed so well it doesn't feel like a prequel or a fanfic anymore. Here's to Darwyn Cooke!

 

Comments

[thezmage]

But Moore doesn't know the quality of the story, he hasn't read it. So he's clearly not commenting on the quality of it, merely the concept, much like you take Morrison to task for commenting on just above.

[halloweenjack]

OK, then, I think that Moore is commenting on what he thinks the likely quality of a huge crossover event from an eight-page backup story would be, and I think that he was right, given the results.

[thezmage]

Exactly my point, as long as you ignore everything in the Blackest Night event other than the name his comment makes sense. Allow all of the other stuff in the event in there and it's clear how little sense his comment makes and how inappropriate and just plain wrong-headed his comment is

[halloweenjack]

[thedude]Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.[/thedude] Blackest Night was successful, as that's measured in comics today, and obviously has its fans, but I found it to be yet another in a series of increasingly contrived mega-crossover events that had no real reason or purpose other than temporarily driving up sales.