Velvet 15

Velvet 15
Jul 2016

The Man Who Stole the World - Part 5
By Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, Elizabeth Breitweiser

This isn’t a climax. This is an epilogue. Maybe I should be getting used to this by now but I still find it mildly annoying.

Velvet is dead. She was killed when Colt was chasing her through the streets of Washington DC. Colt is the one reporting this information to Simonson and Manning. He’s brought the body back with him. Her identity has been positively confirmed via dental records, which is about as sophisticated as it got in 1973.

Velvet isn’t dead. Three weeks later Manning meets with Damian Lake, who was working with Manning all along, in a safe house. They talk about Colt’s report. It doesn’t jive with what Lake remembers. Lake doesn’t get but so far into his version of what happened when Velvet shows up and kills him. She has a chat with Manning before killing him too.

Manning was planning to blackmail President Nixon. X-14 was killed because he knew. Manning didn’t trust Nixon. He saw the President of the United States and his ilk as being too cozy with big business to do the what’s best for the world at large. Manning was starting to build a secret organization within ARC-7 to manipulate leaders like Nixon.

Templeton didn’t want to have anything to do with Manning’s schemes. She still remembers how they led her to believe her husband was a traitor. She killed Mockingbird not realizing what was up. She knows now and she isn’t in a forgiving mood.

There was a lot of talking and not much in the way of action in this second half of this issue.

On the whole I enjoyed this series and the way the story is told visually but the ending didn't grab me the way some of Brubaker's other stories have. There is some mention at the end of the book that he wants to tell more stories about Velvet Templeton. I'm interested in reading more but as far as I know this is the most recent installment.