As The Wake draws to a conclusion, let’s congratulate it for recently winning an Eisners in the Best Limited Series category at Comic-Con International: San Diego; well deserved in my opinion.
It’s been a long, but highly enjoyable ride all the way through. We’ve had excitement, horror, mystery, crazy sci-fi, and more. It’s going to feel weird saying goodbye to this comic after all this time (I’ve been recently saying good-bye to a lot of comics now that I think of it), but we’ll have to. But before we do, let’s see what the final issue has in store. Is it good?
The Wake #10 (DC Comics)
Leeward surfaces from the water after being dragged down into the abyss. However, just as she surfaces, she caught by the military and dragged aboard their gigantic plane. They have on question for her: What was your dream?
Okay, I’ll be very honest here. I read this once and honestly, I had to read it again just to understand what was happening. Then I went back to the first five issues of the mini-series and looked at the images that showed both the past and future (well, currently the present in the story). After all of that, I feel slightly more confident that I actually know what happened and how all of this connects. However, even then, I still don’t feel one hundred percent confident that I’m fully cognizant of everything that went down after I finished. Needless to say, this is going to end up being a comic you’ll need to reread again and reread previous issues if you are fully going to grasp what exactly happened or what it all means.
Because of that, I have to say that the ending feels a bit underwhelming; it’s not really big or epic like one might expect, it’s not horrifying or tragic like the ending for the first half of the story, but one that is hopeful and optimistic about the future. I can appreciate that kind of ending of course, but after all the buildup this series has had and the fact it’s really not all that happy since the mermaid problem isn’t really solved (I think, it’s hard to really say) and the moon has been destroyed causing who knows how many problems along with it, the ending just didn’t feel as satisfying as it could be. The fact that the book got extremely dialogue and monologue heavy during certain parts of this issue didn’t help either, considering it really slowed down the pacing and excitement.
Despite that, The Wake #10 is not a bad book. The writing and storytelling otherwise is still very good, intriguing to read, and finally sees most of the questions to the story answered. Going back and rereading things, including previous issues, does help explain and answer a lot of questions that were raised over the series and even offer clarification for moments in this issue that feel a tad confusing. While the dialogue and monologues are extremely heavy in this issue, most of the time it doesn’t sound unrealistic or take you out of the story. One moment that did take me out of the story was when a character . What the book really needed to fix a lot of these problems was a couple of extra pages or perhaps had spread out this new philosophy and genre change over the past few issues instead of all crammed in the end.
What’s not lacking here in the slightest is the artwork by Sean Murphy. It looks fantastic as always, from the layouts (some great looking double page and full page spreads here) to some of the amazing looking imagery. The characters look good and easily identifiable; the coloring is gorgeous, especially in certain areas; the creativity with the ships and technology still look very good; and like I said, that are some great shots and imagery in the book which I can’t say too much about without spoiling. The artwork was amazing from beginning to end, and I look forward to Sean Murphy’s next project.
Is It Good?
The Wake #10 was interesting to say the least. For a big finale, it feels underwhelming and disappointing on one hand, but on the other hand, it does satisfyingly bring most of the story to a decent resolution. It does answer most of the questions, even if it was not very clear about it a lot of the time. All I can say is to lower expectations and have previous issues on hand to look back on what has happened or what was alluded to.
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