Future's End May Erase Even More Recent Past

A few posts ago, it was mentioned that the second volume of Deathstroke solo title erased, or adjusted, a significant amount of his pre-Flashpoint history and that of his daughter, Rose Wilson.

DC Comics relaunched their entire line in September 2011 so some of that revision was to be expected. Except that they may now be ignoring some of those revisions already.

While I very much enjoy DC's characters for the most part, I get tired of the multiple alternate versions that they have. The Future's End series, as a result, was of no interest to me. A story that takes place in a near future "that may not happen" (it won't, and we all know it) isn't much of a draw.

But they had a sale on Comixology recently during which individual issues could be bought digitally for about $1 each. I took advantage of that opportunity to sample the product, knowing that Deathstroke was included.

Note: While I only have about the first 10 or so issues, I know what happens later in the series between Barda and Slade. If this future never comes to pass, I think I need to be grateful as a Deathstroke fan.

In any event...In the few issues I've read, I've only seen Slade Wilson without the mask and not involved in any action whatsoever. He's working for an organization that is attempting to recruit one Cole Cash (ugh...), otherwise known as Grifter, due to the latter's ability to see through all manners of deception. The organization is hunting down super-powered characters and wish to use Grifter's abilities to facilitate locating targets.

Fair enough, and a good evolution of Grifter's abilities. The puzzling thing is that when Slade and Grifter meet, they don't seem to know one another.

And they really should. They worked together in Team 7. That team did not last long, granted, but long enough that the two characters should recognize one another about ten years later.

Perhaps it's just a matter of the writing style of the dialogue clouding the issue a bit. At left, 'Stroke seems to say the name "Grifter" as though he has never used it before. And maybe he hasn't. I don't recall if Cash used it while with Team 7 but I don't believe any of the characters in that book used their present codenames at the time.

Still, Slade calls their recruit "Mr. Cash" which is inconsistent with how he talked to him in Team 7 anyway. They were certainly on a first name basis.

There may a part of a story somewhere that I have yet to read which explains this lack of recognition between the two characters. Or something that happened in the five-year gap leading up to Future's End that had the same effect. Or both characters are faking for the benefit of that little girl character that I didn't really get (or enjoy).

Because while Team 7 was hardly a classic, it's story meshed with the final few issues of Deathstroke's second volume, its zero issue, and the end of Ravagers series. That would be an awful lot of continuity to scuttle after rebooting your entire line in order to clarify your continuity.

It should be pointed out that some of the solicitations and covers for Team 7 don't actually reveal what goes on inside the book, so perhaps there was editorial involvement that caused the story to change.

Let's close things out with a sharp variant cover to the third issue of Team 7, by Ivan Reis, Rod Reis and Joe Prado.