Review by Ian Keogh

It’s been established that the citizens and superheroes of Earth 2 are under threat from an unknown force able to keep themselves concealed even from the likes of genius Terry Sloane. The final page of Indivisible revealed who that was, the Ultrahumanite, the brain of a genius in the body of a gorilla, and the opening pages of this reveal the threat at his disposal.

There’s a problem with A Whole New World. Fury, Wonder Woman by any other name, has a device that’s enabled her to recreate the Amazons. That was a neat twist. Not as clever is her taking it to a meeting with all the other heroes in the same building, the result of which is pretty well everything that happens afterwards. Why did she bring it along with her? There’s no good reason, and Dan Abnett, whose plots are generally tighter, doesn’t even offer a bad one.

If that’s unsatisfactory, so is the art. Federico Dallocchio starts well enough, his being solid, old style superhero storytelling. However Angel Hernandez (sample art) supplies more pages than anyone else, his basic figures floating on the barest of backgrounds, each page looking as if the minimal effort has been applied. The best art is from Bruno Redondo on pages looking in on Batman and his newly rediscovered son, but his pages only account for half a chapter.

It seemed as if Abnett intended to drag Society away from the commonplace, from events that could occur in pretty well any other DC superhero title, but until the final pages there’s little evidence of that. What’s provided instead is ordinary and not enticingly drawn, the best section being Batman and son’s conversation, but even that’s dragged out and padded with scenes whose only purpose is to provide some action counterpointing the talk. A Whole New World might have been the title applied to the next and concluding volume, actually called Life After Death.