Underworld Unleashed

/ Alex Good

Underworld Unleashed: The 25th Anniversary Edition

I started out loving it. The first issue of the original three-issue miniseries was great, setting the table perfectly. We’re introduced to Neron, a demon lord who is going around collecting souls and taking them to hell. His plan is to power-up all the world’s greatest supervillains in exchange for their souls, which will lead to planet-wide chaos. Among his “inner council” are the Joker and Lex Luthor. It’s a great start and I was expecting great things from it.

I kept my hopes up even after the main storyline was derailed by the introduction of the four standalone issues. The first of which takes place on the planet Apokolips and required stuffing what felt like the entire history of Game of Thrones into a couple of pages of exposition. Unless you’re up to speed already on that whole bit of world building you may feel a bit discombobulated.

I didn’t mind these change-ups that much. I felt the crossovers might have helped to tell a coherent larger story. Only they don’t. There’s another inter-story that has Neron making more trouble in Arkham Asylum for Batman, but since he’d already broken Belle Reve Prison wide open in the first issue this seemed repetitive. This Arkham story was good as a standalone, but not as part of a through narrative. I was also really disappointed by the final issue, which had Barbara Gordon trying to figure out who was behind all the outbreaks of violence and being interrupted by Neron. Most of this issue was just profiles of all the baddies that Neron had recruited, and nothing was at stake since even Neron knew that Babs wasn’t going to go for his deal.

Then the climactic episode of the main story fizzled because it turns out that Captain Marvel/Shazam was the key to Neron’s plan but we hadn’t been prepared for this at all (Captain Marvel hadn’t even been seen anywhere in the series before this) and Neron ends up being defeated kind of easily, with no help from the army of souls he’d been acquiring. Indeed, after the first issue I think we only hear from the Joker and Luthor again briefly as they’re attempting to figure out the source of Neron’s power, which is another point that never pans out as being of any significance.

Still, if I had to give this an overall grade it would be pretty high. There’s so much good, original stuff in here, and I like the changes in art across the different stories, even if in the end things just don’t add up as well as I thought they should have and it felt like a lot got left on the table.

Graphicalex

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