By Jonathan Edwards

Wow, another whole issue completely dedicated to a flashback for this fucking story arc. At least this time we get some resolution for the how and why of Aron Aut’s betrayal. However, I’d like to reiterate that that’s a cliffhanger we were left with two issues ago, and there’s no good reason both flashbacks couldn’t be contained in a single dedicated issue. The lion’s share of Palmer’s was made up of redundancies, and Aut’s goes to bizarrely extreme length to ensure his characterization is nothing more than a one-dimensional, unrepentant supervillain, even going as far as giving him a whole different costume and the moniker “The Null.” If all of that fat was stripped away, they probably could’ve had a pretty strong and streamlined backstory issue that, dare I say, could’ve even gotten us excited to see the conclusion of “Panic in the Microverse” (side note: while the covers to every issue in this arc have consistently called it “Panic in the Microverse,” I’m fairly certain the internal credits of the first two or three issue referred to it as the “Crisis in the Microverse” instead).