Picking up more or less where the last one left off, the second volume of The Twilight Zone follows a minor character from the first one with her own existential problems.
Barista Diana Westby has never gotten far in life and has largely given up. Then one day she serves the same Mr. Wylde who seemed to get the ball rolling in the first volume, and he tips her with a bizarre gold coin that seems to give Diana the ability to read minds and see what may be the future. Not long after that, she encounters three men planning to detonate a nuclear bomb in downtown Manhattan. Can she stop them? Should she? And how can she?
Writer J. Michael Straczynski has a good thing here, but two things jump out, in part due to my not being all that familiar with the old Twilight Zone. One is the mysterious Wylde seems to be at the center of things, and the second is the suffering protagonist here doesn’t seem to deserve what happens to her on the same level as the previous arc’s protagonist. As such, it just doesn’t feel like a real Twilight Zone in that the happenings there seem more mysterious and unanswerable, while here everything seems to go back to Wylde. Somehow, I just suspect JMS just added some Twilight Zone-style openings and closings to some other story he was already working on. It’s fine,the story a bit more intriguing than the previous one, but it just doesn’t seem to be The Twilight Zone. 8 out of 10 rescued dogs.
LAST BOOK: Yeah, the last Comic Bento book came from Marvel. It’s a Mark Millar-penned Ultimate Avengers.
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