4 out of 5

Coming off of the amazing first two issues (reviewed when Titan was releasing these in album size, with one album equating to two floppies), the closing out of Masked’s initial arc falls just shy of grandness as the plot diverts toward more typical superhero antics.  Stéphane Créty’s characterization is still in perfect balance with the big screen action, and Serge Lehman’s script continues its blend of comic book adventure with idea-packed, intelligent sci-fi, but when the transformative powers at the end of the first half also reach out and effect a subsequent transformation of a villain to juxtapose our hero – making Brafford‘s war buddy into a giant, pompous, and destructive humaonoid gas cloud – Masked’s dense world building takes a backseat to superhero satire (some slight knocks at the crowded American hero market) and fisticuffs.  When we resume with fleshing out Masked’s world, it’s with these actions in the rearview, so talks of secret organizations and conspirators hoping to take advantage of the anomaly power for various reasons suggests a different, and perhaps more generic, focus going forward.

The book is still madly entertaining and looks fantastic, and taken as a whole, the story’s shift between thinkpiece on emerging technologies and superhero ronp is pretty damn seamless, it’s just a potential shift in expectations established by the opening.