Black Science Comes To An End With #43: Review

Writer: Rick Remender / Artist: Matteo Scalera / Image Comics We’ve been in the endgame with Black Science for some time now, but still…I never took the time to consider that I’d soon be writing my last review on what has been one of the smartest sleeper hits on the shelves for five years and change. Yet here I am, musing about how we’ve come such a long way from that first issue where a mad scientist adventurer Indiana Jones’d out of harm’s way with a giant toad’s tongue. And now in the final issue, Grant McKay and Kadir Aslan’s ideology comes to a very unexpected head. Remender has a penchant for taking the road less traveled. In this case, he didn’t bring Black Science to a close with an epic third act slugfest for the fate of the universe. Instead, this issue, as does Remender’s concept of the eververse, comes down to a matter of choice. All the time Grant spends throughout this series taking account of self and trying to be better for the sake of his family (maybe some of the most development I’ve ever seen in a protagonist) all seems to hinge on a single decision. Though this one choice is a callback to a previous side plot, it also somehow manages to speak to Remender’s entire concept of alternate universes. The finale manages to say goodbye to a massive, memorable cast of characters in a fitting and arguably unsettling way that will stick with readers for quite some time. Not only that, the job Matteo Scalera did as far as delivering on all the gravitas promised in …