A hard, fast run to the finish.

Creative Staff:
Story: Fred Van Lente
Art: Roberto Castro, Joseph Cooper

What They Say:
FINAL ISSUE! Magnus battles THE BASILISK, an unstoppable entity bent on blasting our hero into atoms! Can Leeja and Magnus hit reboot on their entire world’s corrupted infrastructure? And even if they do, what’s Magnus’ robot-dad’s final, horrifying endgame? Is this the end, or a frightful new beginning? Hints in the final pages as Magnus “fades to black”.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With a lot of fond memories of the Valiant series for Magnus: Robot Fighter, I jumped into this series with a lot of hope. The early issues of it certainly gave it to me with some crazy action, some fun twists and a solid push forward with what it wanted to do. Unfortunately, it felt like at times as it went on that it lost its direction and wasn’t sure which paths it wanted to pursue as we get a better look at what NorthAm is, both from the outside and with the various social classes and power structures that exist within it. As the book moved towards its finale, things shifted to bringing in a somewhat out of the blue feeling enemy in the form of the Basilisk, which gives it all purpose and places to go.

With the finale here, there’s a lot of little wrap-up moments going on as we move towards the final battle. Interestingly, we saw H8R coming back in the previous issue in human form and the reveal there is intriguing in that they’ve figured out how to basically print out humans with the minds/souls of the robots, but with the problem of it all being final at this point due to the changing nature of this world. That gives peoples lives a sense of finality instead of just moving on and becoming something new, which is both good and bad for a whole host of reasons. That plays into what we learn about Magnus as well with the way that 1A has reworked Magnus in so many forms over the years in order to accelerate what’s needed in order to face the Basilisk and the overall threat of what NorthAm is. Hence we see Old Man Magnus for a bit here, which the women have an interesting set of reactions to, to the black Magnus that ends up bringing the book to a close with that form.

A good chunk of the book works through both the printing of robots to people and what’s involved there and with what Magnus is doing in his fight against the Basilisk, which has some solid sequences throughout that are only marred by the terrible lettering choices for the Basilisk that makes his dialogue largely unreadable on my digital device. The back and forth between the two is fun and seeing the kind of life cycle that Magnus is living, in how we get the new incarnations of him, definitely is interesting to watch with what it means. His time with Leeja is small overall throughout the book, and it’s still hard to really feel engaged in their relationship, but watching her cope with the changes of his physicality but knowing he is who he is underneath makes it all worthwhile. A lot of the supporting cast gets sidelined in this installment, and have been for a bit, but it’s worth it in the end to rework Magnus as much as he is here and to play the story with Leeja as they do.

In Summary:
Magnus: Robot Fighter comes to a decent enough close here with what it wants to do in dealing with the Basilisk and setting up an epilogue that shows how North Am changes and what happens a bit with Leeja and Magnus. The book as a whole had some very fun ideas to work with and started off with some great execution, but it felt listless as it move past the halfway mark of its run and wasn’t sure what it wanted to do while feeling too convoluted in some ways while ignoring characters far too easily. I enjoyed the book as a whole though and was glad to see Magnus back in print and in good form, but I’m also hoping that this closes out this incarnation of the character and that another attempt is made at restarting it. I liked what the team here did overall, but I’m not looking for a continuation of it either. A fresh start so that this story can feel like it has a beginning, middle and end so that it feels properly complete. Hopefully we’ll see Magnus again.

Grade: B

Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: March 11th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99