Look alive, sunshine. It’s all come to this. The ultimate finale. Detstroya has awoken, the Girl has come to Battery City and all hell is about to break loose.
Written by Gerard Way & Shaun Simon
Illustrated by Becky Cloonan
“Stupid children, they’ll never learn.”It all ends here, boys and girls, so Killjoys, make some noise! The Phoenix Witch rises, Destroya lives, and Korse is on the loose! If Battery City isn’t razed to the ground by the end of this issue, then we’re all dead. Check your BLI-issued heart monitors and make sure you have a pulse. If you do, you need this raucous finale!
Sometimes it feels like there is an expectation for the ending of a story to shock the audience. For it to pull some last minute twist, sweep the rug out from under the audience’s feet, and reveal something that completely changes the way the rest of the story is viewed. However, not all stories require that and, more often than not, pulling an unnecessary twist at the last second can kill a story. With the last issue of “The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys”, Gerard Way and Shaun Simon don’t pull any tricks to force the ending to be shocking or memorable and instead rely on the connections to the characters built up over the previous issues to make the ending enjoyable. Along with artist Becky Cloonan, they take one of the most enjoyable comic series in recent memory and tie everything up to give it an incredibly satisfying ending.
With “The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys”, Gerard Way and Shaun Simon have taken a look at youth culture in the 21st century through the lens of a dystopia and here they give a cathartic conclusion in a way that only comics can deliver. The dystopia they have shown in the series takes the arrested development of the millenial generation, trapped in a world left desolate by their predecessors, and gives them laser blasters, loud rock music and giant robot with which to destroy their oppressors. Catharsis is the name of the game here, providing a lens through the which the frustrations of a generation can be acted out, and Way and Simon pull it off beautifully. From the stories of ascension, revenge and freedom all intertwined with the assault on Battery City, they have created a tapestry upon which an entire generation can project their fears and woes and come away with a sense of relief. And they did it with tight jeans, hair gel and rock music. This should hardly be surprising coming from the man who fronted My Chemical Romance, but what Gerard Way has created here has combined Rebel Without A Cause and On The Road with The Road Warrior and he’s used it to voice the frustration of a generation.
Yet, for as cathartic as it is to see the comeuppance of Battery City, Way and Simon play the conclusion of this series fairly straight. Everything they have built up to over the previous issues plays out exactly the way they said it would. This almost leads to a feeling of disappointment in how the issue really pulls no surprises, but ultimately that’s in favour of how satisfying it is as a conclusion to the story they have told. To reveal at the last second that Battery City was in fact run by a self-insert of Way himself or anything of the like would have been a disservice to the story. Ultimately, the satisfaction of the conclusion supersedes the need to have a last shocking reveal hammered in.
For as well told as the story is, this series would not have been the same without Becky Cloonan’s art. Cloonan has defined the look of the series and created a neon pop apocalypse that infused both eastern and western styles with a sci-fi twist. The juxtaposition of the raw, earthiness of the wastelands and the stark, almost antiseptic cleanliness of Battery City that appeared before is shattered by Destroya’s assault, infiltrating the monochromatic harshness with colour and life. Cloonan also manages to tell a lot of story in the final pages, wrapping up the story and giving every character a conclusion (with some being more open-ended than others) in relatively very little space. This issue could have extended into another just to allow more time for Cloonan to expand each character’s conclusion in the story. Nothing about Cloonan’s art feels rushed and, in fact, it’s just as good as ever, it just happens to be so good that I want more of it. As it stands, it’s a testament to Becky Cloonan’s strength as an artist that she can create such emotion in very simple images.
This is a grand conclusion to an equally grand story that, while ultimately rather simple, stands as shoulder-to-shoulder with the great teenage disillusionment stories of the past. This is the rage of a generation focused through Gerard Way’s music and told as a story and it really works. The whole creative team, from Gerard Way and Shaun Simon to Becky Cloonan and even to Dan Jackson’s colours and Nate Piekos’ letters, have come together to tell a story that deserves to be recognised among the greats. If there is only one downside to “The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys” it’s there are enough ideas contained within pages to have kept this story going for much, much longer. Not many comics finish with me wanting even more, but this one did.
Final Verdict: 8.9
