Giant-Size Black Cat Infinity Score
It’s the nature of corporate-owned episodic fiction: There’s really no good way to end a delightful series. With a concrete story that has a clean and clear beginning, middle, and end? THAT’s something that can have a satisfying ending. A series, though? One featuring a very appealing version of a gorgeous character? Not a chance. Writer Jed MacKay does his best job closing the series on Felicia Hardy in Giant-Size Black Cat - Infinity Score. Artist C.F. Villa closes the series with the aid of colorist Brian Reber. It’s sad to see the series come to an end, but MacKay and company DO manage an endearing conclusion to one of the more satisfying Marvel books of the past couple of years.
Felicia is breaking into a hospital. Not exactly a secure facility. Most people in a hospital are too busy or tired to notice. So all she and her accomplices have to do is wear scrubs and find the right room, just like that. Once they’re in, one of her higher-powered accomplices needs to go to work, but it’s going to be a bit more complicated once things get going. Nick Fury’s going to get involved, which makes sense. There are a few infinity stones involved. It could get ugly on a quantum level.
One gets the feeling that MacKay was planning for something much more longer-term than what he ended up with for his Infinity Score storyline. There was a hell of a set-up for this finale in previous issues, and there’s no question that things could have gone much, much deeper the MacKay had room for here, but he manages to tie it up with a reasonable level of satisfaction. Black Cat is performing a con her in and within the context of the issue. So it’s hard not to feel like the victim of a bigger con at the end of the last issue. There’s no reason Hardy couldn’t have kept going. In a flash, she’s gone.
Villa and Reber have a cleverly stylish sense of drama. The action playing out in a hospital with everyone in scrubs? It’s scarcely the type of thing that has any business looking stylish or dynamic. Still, The sharp colors brought to the page by Rever and some rather sharp bits of multi-story layout be Villa make everything look respectably cool from cover to cover. (The two big spreads featuring action throughout the hospital are particularly impressive.) Through it all, Felicia looks incredibly graceful. There’s real beauty in the way Villa and Reber bring it all to the page.
Another series ends. This one is a bit more difficult to take than many of the series endings in the past couple of years. The team assembled for this book was one of the best. Everything was sharply balanced. Felicia slinks off into the darkness, and the Marvel Universe feels just a bit bigger, having been the central focus of the panels for a couple of years.
