Futures End is not a very good comic book. DC's weekly dystopian look into the near future of the New 52 has been mostly forgotten by readers turned off by the messy premise (something to do with most of the heroes being killed off and replaced by weird robot bug versions of themselves that then hunt down the other non-weird robot bug heroes). That's despite the presence of some of the publisher's most talented writers in Brian Azzarello and Jeff Lemire. In fact the one consistently good thing about Futures End is the covers by Ryan Sook. His work on Futures End especially has been consistently brilliant, with a knack for rendering superheroes in a semi-realistic fashion, whilst also retaining that degree of stylised abstraction that's inherent in making characters like The Atom look non-ridiculous. To see second-stringer Ray Palmer not only looking pretty cool but also in some high-stakes superhero action on the cover of The New 52: Futures End #34 is novel in itself - that Sook renders it in a sort of nightmarish Escher collage of The Atom being menaced by a giant squid or kraken or something is even cooler.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
