Forever Evil #3 is a weird, bad comic on multiple levels. The cover basically sets the tone of the comic - baffling and stupid. The cover shows Luthor, Bizarro, Black Adam, Captain Cold and Black Manta fighting each other when, as you discover reading the comic, they actually choose to work together - they never fight! We get a summary page to start the issue where we go back to the end of Trinity War and Geoff Johns finally reveals what happened to the Justice League - Darkstorm (the Crime Syndicate's Firestorm) opened up Firestorm whose matrix pulled in all of the Justice League (minus Batman and Catwoman) trapping them. Why that had to be kept secret until now is a mystery - why not have told that at the end of Trinity War, giving that mini-series some kind of arc? It's an imaginative way of trapping the Justice League, so kudos to Johns for that, but seeing as the Crime Syndicate are evil and are telling everyone they killed the Justice League, why bother trapping them in the first place - why not just kill them outright? That would be the villainous thing to do, right? Batman and Catwoman have taken what's left of Cyborg after the mechanical parts of him separated and became Grid - the evil Cyborg - to his dad at STAR Labs to see if Cyborg can be saved. This is the scene where Batman finds out Nightwing has been unmasked to the world and revealed to be Dick Grayson and he resolves to go save him. This is a fairly straightforward scene rendered incredibly poorly by David Finch. Nearly the entire right side of Batman's mask has been disintegrated so his face is clearly identifiable, however when the scene starts the right side of his mask is untouched! Then as the panels continue you see the seams look a little torn up, then a large chunk is missing until we basically see half his mask has come off! Finch is an experienced artist and this kind of amateurish faux-pas where he can't even maintain consistency across 2 pages of art is shocking. Not only that but why doesn't Catwoman identify Batman as Bruce Wayne? Wayne is the most famous billionaire in the DCU but Catwoman doesn't think "Oh, you're Bruce Wayne!", or, knowing that Dick Grayson was Bruce's ward, couldn't put two and two together and think "Oh, that's why you care about Dick Grayson - because he's your adopted son because you're Bruce Wayne!". She's not an idiot but the way Finch has drawn it makes it look like she is, even if she's not in the script. It started off as a simple scene and was then ruined by Finch's clumsy art.
Up until this issue, the Forever Evil comics have been self-contained but with #3, if you didn't read Justice League #24 then you missed the beginning of the fight between Ultraman and Black Adam, which concludes in this comic. That's one of the most annoying things about Event comics: when the tie-ins begin affecting the main story - at least with Marvel's Infinity Event there's a catch-up page going over the broad strokes of the tie-ins that prefaces the comic; readers who're just reading Forever Evil are only going to be confused with this scene. It's an ok fight scene with the main takeaway being Luthor's observation of Ultraman's aversion to direct sunlight - though the clue might've been Ultraman moving the moon in front of the sun in the first place. Deathstorm and Power Ring beat up Flash's Rogues when they refuse to level their city with Deathstorm taking away Captain Cold's ice powers and trapping the rest in one of Mirror Master's constructs. Black Manta conveniently shows up right where Lex and Bizarro are carrying the unconscious Black Adam and powerless Captain Cold appears - and somehow they decide to team up!? Black Adam is unconscious so he might well decide he doesn't want to throw his lot in with this bunch anyway, while Captain Cold is essentially useless at this point. And Black Manta's reason is absurd - they "killed" Aquaman, taking away "the only thing I wanted" so now he's "going to take everything from them". What?! And, as previously mentioned, they don't fight at all so that cover is nonsensical. Did Bizarro write this script? More than anything, Forever Evil #3 is an underwhelming comic because so little happens in it. Lex is still playing around with his gadgets, we see the tail end of a fight that could've finished in the comic it started in, and we find out what happened to the Justice League several issues ago. The formation of the bad guy resistance is very sketchy at best and is put together in a very ham-fisted way. The issue feels very static with Johns seemingly content to continue revelling in the condition of a world taken over by supervillains rather than give us much story. Forever Evil #3 is a lazy, slow issue featuring a number of strange and pointless scenes with terrible dialogue and dismal art.
Published by DC, Forever Evil #3 by Geoff Johns, David Finch and Richard Friend is out now