As the terrible remake of Red Dawn proved, North Korea is officially the country you use when you need a real-life country for a villain and you don’t want to be accused of showing them in a bad light. This is because the fictional North Koreas are never as evil or ridiculous as the real one.

Picking up right where we left off last issue, fictional North Korea’s fictional leader, General Cho, has given himself superpowers and is attacking the United Nations. Will the Guardians of the Globe be able do stop him? What do you think? Here’s the official description of Invincible Universe #6 from Image:

Buy this comic and support the war effort against North Korea! Bring our Guardians of the Globe home safe!

The basic flaw of this issue is that it’s too rushed. The real nature of the threat was only revealed at the very end of issue five, so it’s only in the first half of #6 that Phil Hester tries to convince us that Cho is a serious threat. Yes, we’re shown that he’s more than a match for the Guardians, but there’s no time for the gravity of the situation to sink in before —SPOILER— it’s resolved. And while that resolution goes through the motions of trying to mislead the reader before a twist ending, there wasn’t even the briefest moment when the deception feel genuine. The saving grace is that this isn’t a throwaway story; it’s all in service to moving the series forward to an interesting new place.

I almost always talk about Todd Nauck‘s ability to get a lot on the page without ruining the flow of the story or making things feel cluttered. Here, though, the story is rushed to the point that Nauck’s flow is thrown off in places. For the most part though, he keeps it under control.

Again, while I like the direction Hester seems to be taking the series, this particular issue was a disappointment. As trite as sounds to talk about the journey being just as important as the destination, it’s true here in the sense that hurrying the story just to get to certain points just drags the work as a whole down.

3/5