by Drew Baumgartner

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Hey, how long do you think Bill Murray repeated that day in Groundhog Day? There have been a few attempts to estimate some approximate number, but the only answer that really matters is “a lot.” We don’t need to see every day, or even be told about every day, so long as we get the idea that he’s repeating the day a ton. I mean, can you imagine if even the second day was chronicled in as much detail as the first one? That sounds interminable, but is largely what we get in Faith and the Future Force 2, with the added monotony that the arc of the issue is also more or less identical to the first issue.

Sure, the team Faith assembles by the end of this issue is significantly larger than the one she starts with, but everything from her unceremonious defeat to her recruiting of more Valiant Universe heroes to the way Neela sends a message back in time to re-start the whole process feels the same. Writer Jody Houser has fun with the details that are tweaked — Neela and Ank are reeling from Do-Bot’s most recent attack (apparently having about the previous one), surrounded, inexplicably, by robo-cats — but the story hits all of the same beats.

That’s probably excusable in the grand scope of this miniseries, but as an individual issue, the repetition saps all the energy out of the story. Maybe longtime Valiant fans can glean more pleasure out of seeing some of these characters bounce off of one another, but for someone looking for an introduction to the universe, this issue didn’t offer so much as a name for most of these characters. Moreover, this series’ rapid ascent up it’s own butt doesn’t fill me with confidence. Issue 3 may finally break the cycle, but I’m not sure I have enough interest left to find out.

The conversation doesn’t stop there. What do you wanna talk about from this issue?