DC Comics reviews 5/30/23 – Icon vs. Hardware #3, Detective Comics #1072

Icon vs. Hardware #3

This Milestone mini-series keeps impressing. Writers Reginal Hudlin and Leon Chills are exploring time travel and a hero wanting to change the past in the kind of thought-provoking way it would have been fun to see The Flash explore.

After having a cathartic moment he needed with his father, Hardware decides to make wholesale changes to American history by stopping the creation of slavery. It’s a noble plan, but history has a way of course correcting itself. While Hardware can stop one form of slavery, another emerges. Stop the Holocaust? Another genocidal event takes its place.

Hardware shares these findings with a time-displaced Icon, who got caught in time thanks to the accident that brought him to Earth and led him on his super heroic path. Hudlin and Chills seamlessly blend Icon’s origin with this drastically altered continuity.

This issue has some decent action sequences featuring a major DC villain, but it’s not really about the fights so much as it’s his constant surfacing in the heroes’ lives.

The artwork from Denus Cowan, Darryl Banks and Yasmín Flores Montañez is solid. Giving Banks more work under the Milestone banner wouldn’t be a bad idea as Banks delivers some crisp and clean artwork.

This title has been a very pleasant surprise for how it’s skillfully tackled the repercussion of time travel and the inevitability of fighting against the tide.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10