Zeb Larson reviews C.O.W.L. #11…
Arc two comes to a close with a monster issue. All of Geoffrey’s lies, secrets, and rationalizations have led to this. Plus, Radia’s public stand against C.O.W.L.—will she win the independence she wants? And does Arclight have a future with C.O.W.L.? Or at all?
With this issue C.O.W.L. is finished, at least for the time being. Yet this doesn’t feel like a finale issue: loose ends are still left dangling, bad guys are left unpunished, and many of the characters are quite literally left adrift. Yet don’t mistake the open-endedness of this last issue for bad writing. Higgins and Siegel have left us with an organic conclusion to the series, one that sacrifices easy narrative payoff for some real-world ambiguity. Justice won’t always be served, and sometimes bad men get what they want. I will be discussing spoilers in this review, so consider yourself forewarned.
The deaths of the police officers finally force Mayor Daley to crack, and he gives Warner the contract that he wants. Yet the now-employed members of C.O.W.L. are finding little to take cheer in as Grant gets a pink slip, largely to punish Karl. In response, Karl quits, and Radia isn’t far behind him. While Evelyn is shut down by her superiors over John’s death, Warner knows it’s only a matter of time before somebody puts all the pieces together, and he forces Arclight to go on the run.
While Warner gives a speech, there’s a montage of all the characters’ various fates. Alderman Lowe is arrested for selling schematics, Radia and Karl have become private investigators, Evelyn meets with another contact who turns out to be Sparrow, Grant gets a gas mask in the mail with a message, and Tom is left living anonymously elsewhere. Yet even at the moment of triumph, Warner has one last piece of business to settle: a bullet in Camden Stone’s brain. When Reginald asks Warner why he isn’t celebrating, Warner expresses doubts about whether it was all worth it, and can only weakly affirm that it was to protect people.
Readers hoping for closure are likely going to be disappointed. For an ultimate issue, we’re left with a few different dangling threads. How long has Evelyn been talking to Sparrow, and just what is Sparrow’s end game in all of this? What will Grant do with the box? And of course, we’re left wondering whether or not Warner will get some sort of comeuppance for his various misdeeds. Likewise, Arclight gets to walk away more or less free, though he is poetically starved of the fame and adoration he used to crave.
There are practical and pragmatic reasons for not wanting to resolve everything. Higgins and Siegel are leaving open the door for future stories, especially with the presence of Sparrow and the investigation into John’s death. After all, even Warner knows that what he’s built here is fragile at best and could rapidly fall apart again.
Yet there are some moments of closure. If Warner was hoping he would come out of this vindicated for his actions, he doesn’t get any of that. Some of C.O.W.L.’s best people have left, leaving his organization fractured. He’s forced into murdering Stone, knowing that with his death the threat he’s tried to manufacture may blow away in the wind. As Warner stays at the Gray Raven costume on the page, it appears to stare back down at him, scrutinizing him from on high. Does he feel judged or guilty for failing to live up to the heroic ideal he manufactured? Or is the suit a symbol of his ego, the real motivation for the behind-the-scenes manipulation? People might have been hoping that this would end with Warner getting a bullet for his actions, but he seems to have been punished despite winning.
Given that the promotional materials for this issue mention Radia so prominently, you might be surprised by how little dialogue she has in this issue. It is frustrating that we don’t get to spend some more time with her, given that she was one of the most interesting characters to come out of the book. Yet she does in some sense get what she wants when she walks away. If being a PI with Karl lacks some of the glamor of her old job, she can finally stand on her own two feet. She doesn’t have to play the part of “Radia” for anybody’s benefit: she can just be Kathryn Mitchell, and be appreciated as an equal part of the team, sans all of the sexism she was forced endure at C.O.W.L.
It’s a shame that some of the plot threads have been put on ice for the time being. We never got to explore race very closely in Chicago and the dynamic of an African-American second-in-command in a city that saw plenty of racism. Nor did we get to explore Reginald’s relationship with his deceased brother, or his son. There was a lot that we never got to delve into Higgins and Siegel note that there were a lot of plot threads that they wanted to explore but just couldn’t do in eleven issues.
Still, taking the series as a whole, this story worked. Warner’s desire to save C.O.W.L., partly out of altruism and at least partly out of ego ended up dramatically weakening the organization, while compromising the people who wanted to go out and actually be superheroes. Can we institutionalize do-gooding? Can you still be a hero if you make ugly decisions to keep being a hero? Warner may have won, but the last panel doesn’t suggest a lot of hope or happiness on his part. C.O.W.L. was a fun ride, and I’m hoping we get to revisit it at some point.
Rating: 8.9/10
Series rating: 9.0/10
Zeb Larson