[I don’t sound too bad in this one, but once again I
returned to the well instead of looking for new possibilities. I was sad when
Chaos! ended their universe, but I was happy when they opened up the new one.
It wasn’t long after this that Chaos! went belly up and Brian Pulido lost all
of his creations except for Lady Death. I’m still curious about where he was
going with the new Chaos! Cosmos. When Dynamite scooped up the rights, they did
a piss-poor job of rebooting everything. I was OK with their Chastity book, but
everything else was miserably horrible. I think they gave up. I hope they gave
up. Anyway, this is from the Elmhurst College Leader, Feb. 15, 2000. Hey! It’s
my last semester of college!]
On December 22, 1999, the Chaos Cosmos came to an end when
the titanic thirteen issue Armageddon crossover reached its conclusion. Lady
Death destroyed Hell and brought Heaven tumbling down, finally defeating her
longtime enemy, Lucifer, in the process. Evil Ernie finally launched the nukes
which destroyed much of the world before he was consumed in nuclear flames.
Oblivia finally met her destiny as the Chosen One by
combining the forces of chaos to destroy Armageddon, the Father of Fear.
Unfortunately, being killed pissed Armageddon off to no end. He unleashed a
wave of pure entropy that destroyed the universe. Chaos physicist Mitchell
Wardlow, who had finally been able to break the chaos code and impose his will
on existence, tried to alter the end. Everything was destroyed.
Or was it? Aftermath reveals that not all is lost. Mitchell
Wardlow survived in the void, now calling himself Lord Chaos. He created the
universe anew, and his pride and joy is not just the recreation of the earth
but eight earths, what he calls the Eight Worlds of Chaos.
To his dismay, someone else survived from the old Chaos
Cosmos: the resident Trickster figure, Bedlam, one of the greatest characters
Chaos has come up with outside of the now defunct Evil Ernie series.
The artwork comes from the best Chaos! artist since Steven
Hughes worked on Evil Ernie: Luke Ross, better known for his work on
Armageddon. This time, he’s got an inker meddling with his art, and the result
isn’t that great. In fact, there are a few moments when the inking looks
suspiciously like David Brewer’s terrible work. Even when his artwork is
distilled like that, Ross does better than Brewer and the other bad artists
(and their numbers are many) who worked on Evil Ernie in its declining years.
Writers Brian Pulido and Len Kaminski use Bedlam to explain
the rules of the new Chaos Cosmos by letting him wander five of the eight
earths. It may seem a bit cheap, but without it, they would have a hell of a
time writing the new Lady Death and Lady Demon series.
There’s a world where Armageddon never came, so when Ernie
launched the nukes, the world survived to suffer. The dead also continued
roaming the land. The Dead King is back with his brother, Billy Young, both
zombies killing zombies for the greater good. Very moody, but without Ernie,
Price, and company it will never be good enough.
The future world could have been much better, and the
reference to Judge Dredd is not only uncalled for but ridiculous. For a guy
like Bedlam, who travels time and space, a
future world is a great place to buy weapons for use on more primitive
worlds (and he makes use of this quite well), but all in all, it’s a very
uninteresting world.
Another essentially worthless world is the normal world.
It’s a world without magic, without Ernie’s Dead Onez, without angels or
demons, without anything supernatural.
The “urban gothic” world is much better. Very moody (yes,
complete with bats silhouetted against the moon), kind of like the Gotham City
Tim Burton used in his Batman movies. Not only that, but it seems Morgan
Gallows of The Omen and Chastity, Ernie’s one-time vampire girlfriend hitwoman,
are both alive and well in this world. Could be interesting . . .
The “Dark Millennium” world is also promising, but not any
more than the typical Lady Death world, a world which will no doubt be filled
with superhero patter and titan bullshit. Of course, Lady Death had to be
recreated. She’s the backbone of Chaos!
Lord Chaos then cuts Bedlam off from the three remaining
worlds, leaving open a lot of infinite possibilities the Chaos! writers love so
much. It’s good to see they’ve still got jobs, and maybe some really
interesting work will come out of it, but the attraction to Aftermath is the relationship
between the sole survivors of the original Chaos Cosmos, Lord Chaos and Bedlam.
They can’t fight each other. Lord Chaos can’t uncreate Bedlam, and Bedlam isn’t
strong enough to face Lord Chaos. However, there’s a lot of hatred and
frustration there, and if there’s one thing Chaos! can do, it’s create great
characters with conflicting natures.
It’s a world of infinite possibilities, and this is only the
beginning. Time will tell.
