Empire is written by Mark Waid, who wrote X-Men for a bit.  And it's drawn by Barry Kitson, who drew a Wolverine arc ages ago.  See how easy this is?

Empire was one of a range of titles originally created for the creator-owned publisher Gorilla some time ago.  Gorilla's funding fell through and the project crashed in fairly early course.  By that point, Waid and Kitson had produced two issues of Empire, an unusual series about a world where the supervillain Golgoth has succeeded in conquering the world and wiping out almost all opposition.  Thus, it's a superhero genre comic which starts out by inverting one of the most fundamental rules: the hero should always win and the status quo should be restored.

DC eventually picked up the book, and this is the final issue of the resulting miniseries.  Since they also reprinted the two Gorilla issues as issue #0, in practice it's an eight-issue miniseries.

However, Empire was conceived as an ongoing title, and so Waid doesn't resolve the story.  Instead, this would have been the first arc of an ongoing series, and there may or may not be a follow-up series down the line.  It does make for a bit of an anti-climax, particularly if you'd been expecting a closed miniseries.

There are no heroes in Empire.  The one remaining superhero is locked in the basement, and the closest we get to the good guys is the last outpost of resistance, up in Greenland.  Most of the storyline has hinged around scheming and treachery among Golgoth's own henchmen, and this issue does pay off several of those arc - though irritatingly, the renegade Lohkyn's storyline isn't resolved, presumably because he's needed as the hero for arc 2.

Most of the first arc has teased readers with the possibility of successful resistance up in Greenland, but this issue yanks that away - in a rather obvious fashion, it has to be said.  Again, it's the sort of thing that would have worked reasonably well in the context of an ongoing series but feels like a bit of a cop-out in the final issue of a miniseries.  Particularly given that there's no indication of when, or even whether, volume 2 will appear.

Nonetheless, this has been a surprisingly strong series, from a creative team best known for fairly conventional and old-school superhero stories.  Golgoth's relationship with his daughter Delfi has been a particularly strong storyline, with several genuinely unexpected twists along the way.

Despite the disappointments of the final issue, judged as the first arc of an ongoing series, this has been very good.  The question lingers of whether the remaining arcs will ever see print, or whether Empire will just disappear off into limbo again.

Rating: A-

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