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The Massive #5
The Massive, Vol. 5: Ragnarok
The Crash was only the beginning. What remains of civilization is being obliterated by a series of cataclysmic events. The truth about Mary’s identity, which began as a faint signal, grows louder—and she’s seemingly connected to it all. The secret of the Crash and the location of the missing ship The Massive get answered here, in the final arc, Ragnarok!
The Massive careens into its final climactic chapter as Brian Wood and Garry Brown pull back the curtain on the mysteries of one of the most thought-provoking comics series of the last decade!
Collects issues #25-#30.
The Massive careens into its final climactic chapter as Brian Wood and Garry Brown pull back the curtain on the mysteries of one of the most thought-provoking comics series of the last decade!
Collects issues #25-#30.
152 pages, Paperback
First published July 7, 2015
128 people want to read
About the author
Brian Wood
1,174 books961 followersBrian Wood's history of published work includes over fifty volumes of genre-spanning original material.
From the 1500-page future war epic DMZ, the ecological disaster series The Massive, the American crime drama Briggs Land, and the groundbreaking lo-fi dystopia Channel Zero he has a 20-year track record of marrying thoughtful world-building and political commentary with compelling and diverse characters.
His YA novels - Demo, Local, The New York Four, and Mara - have made YALSA and New York Public Library best-of lists. His historical fiction - the viking series Northlanders, the American Revolution-centered Rebels, and the norse-samurai mashup Sword Daughter - are benchmarks in the comic book industry.
He's written some of the biggest franchises in pop culture, including Star Wars, Terminator, RoboCop, Conan The Barbarian, Robotech, and Planet Of The Apes. He’s written number-one-selling series for Marvel Comics. And he’s created and written multiple canonical stories for the Aliens universe, including the Zula Hendricks character.
From the 1500-page future war epic DMZ, the ecological disaster series The Massive, the American crime drama Briggs Land, and the groundbreaking lo-fi dystopia Channel Zero he has a 20-year track record of marrying thoughtful world-building and political commentary with compelling and diverse characters.
His YA novels - Demo, Local, The New York Four, and Mara - have made YALSA and New York Public Library best-of lists. His historical fiction - the viking series Northlanders, the American Revolution-centered Rebels, and the norse-samurai mashup Sword Daughter - are benchmarks in the comic book industry.
He's written some of the biggest franchises in pop culture, including Star Wars, Terminator, RoboCop, Conan The Barbarian, Robotech, and Planet Of The Apes. He’s written number-one-selling series for Marvel Comics. And he’s created and written multiple canonical stories for the Aliens universe, including the Zula Hendricks character.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews
January 13, 2016
This series started out so well in the first book: A Greenpeace-style ship's crew searching for their sister ship in a world rocked by a major environmental disaster. The successive volumes followed up decently enough, until the fourth started to allow seemingly-mystical elements to incongruously slip in. This final book completely loses the script, falling into magical nonsense driven by the kind of stereotypical handwringing over humanity's effect on the environment that has rendered a lot of eco-tales unreadably bad. Predictably, the endgame is the planet offering a handful of deserving people a chance to start over with a clean slate, a "twist" ending that I suspect everyone who read a few pages into this volume saw coming a mile away.
This kind of story is so heavy-handed, so overwrought, so ridiculously saturated with environmentalistic guilt, so choked with childlike longing for some kind of earth spirit savior to rescue human beings from the mistakes we've made that I can't take it remotely seriously on any level.
This kind of story is so heavy-handed, so overwrought, so ridiculously saturated with environmentalistic guilt, so choked with childlike longing for some kind of earth spirit savior to rescue human beings from the mistakes we've made that I can't take it remotely seriously on any level.
August 30, 2016
"From chaos...comes life?"
Let's talk about Volume 5: Ragnarok.
Ragnarok literally means "the final destruction of the world in the conflict between the Aesir and the powers of Hel led by Loki, called also Twilight of the Gods." For those of you surprised at the religious undertones, not sure what to tell ya. It's in the title. I'm also not sure how to view the supernatural destruction of the world without examining the supernatural elements, why it happened, and why, how, or if humans even matter at that point.
Let's talk about Mary. Brian Wood, a phenomenal writer, gave us--I can't even call them clues because they were so blatant--details which screamed Mary's supernaturalism. She first jumped from the oil rig into the ocean during a hurricane, something no one should have survived. She repeatedly swam in subzero water to no effect. She disappeared from locked holds within ships. She was repeatedly shot. She has, at first glance, a personal history going back to the 1960s, yet she's only in her twenties. Should I keep going? Do we need more evidence of her supernaturalism?
I love Mary's character. This series eventually reveals itself to be her story, or that her story is the context for everything else. Having an idea of who she was from the very beginning, from Volume 1, I can't say I'm surprised by the "religious" undertones with which this series was concluded. It's inevitable. She is supernatural. She's involved with the Crash, the Massive, and literally everything that has happened. How else can the end be told but in a supernatural context?
Obviously, I enjoyed the series immensely. I loved the ending. It was extremely satisfying. I didn't see the twist of the Massive coming, and although the twist isn't the most original for post-apocalyptic, it worked for me and surprised me. Because there were no hints there, not that I saw.
The larger question is, what about the preaching and "religious" undertones and "heavy handedness"? (Notice the quotation marks.) I don't even think the ending is what you can call religious in the sense that it's attributed to any one religion, or that there's any spiritual guilt-tripping or judgment per se. Wood goes out of his way to say he's not being religious, more spiritual and humanistic if anything. Philosophical if anything. And not even judgmental but suggestive. We can do better, as Mary tells Callum.
Truth be told, though, humans are fucking assholes to the environment. Although Wood interestingly diverts from a human made environmental cataclysm to a supernatural one, the cause is the same. Because this world will die unless we change how we live. And I don't blame you, fellow readers. It's not your fault. And it's not mine either. I would bike to work if there were bike lanes for my twenty mile commute. Drive an electric car if they made them efficiently. But I do what I can. I bring my own bags to the grocery store, I compost, I grow blueberries and raise layer ducks. But we're still going to kill this planet unless the system changes.
It's the system's fault. Fracking, oil drilling, tar sands, nuclear waste, chemical spills, coal power plants, plane and auto emissions. You name it. It's a top down problem. We as consumers have only so much control and flexibility. But what we can do is talk about the problem. Admit the problem. Become informed and knowledgable and intelligent on the problem. Instead of just feeling bad and hoping the next generation will fix it. Or outright deny its existence. How many satires will it take before we accept en masse that there's a problem, a global crisis, that we refuse to deal with?
And what does this have to do with Brian Wood? Everything. Satire isn't subtle. I mean, have you ever read or watched a subtle story about the apocalypse? I wouldn't call it heavy handed, because it's true and true to the nature of the subject, and this comic is the satirical platform to make a true statement: that we are assholes killing the world and we don't even care. It is our fault. And we don't even have a Mary to protect us. We have to be our own Mary.
I guess I don't know what readers expected from a realistic series with an obvious premise of human made climate change. Sea monsters? Aliens? Super heroes saving us? That the world would heal itself or just start happily swallowing carbon monoxide? Are we being naive or merely unrealistic in our expectations of the narrative?
This was a great, suspenseful, dramatic series with a slow burn buildup of supernaturalism which, for me, made the series. I enjoyed the realism, but there has to be or should be an X factor, something unexplainable, because that's just how the universe works. Think about quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for a second. We can know a particle's location or its speed, but not both, because for some reason the power of observation and participation changes physics.
And Brian Wood seems to do just that. We have the easily explainable post-Crash world figured out, have the characters figured out, and he throws a slow curveball to make it more interesting. What's not to love?
April 22, 2021
It was Aliens!! Goddamn Aliens the WHOLE time, I want to kick something
This kicks off the major 6 issue finale to The Massive. It's titled Ragnarok and if you know your Scandinavian mythology you know it's about the end of the world. So, I walked in expecting earth shattering events and Wood pretty much delivered on that.
This sequence was so Deus ex Machina that it was hard to read. Suddenly a second crash is happening and it's worse than before. The world is basically going to be destroyed and most humanity will be wiped out. Then they find The Massive, finally, but it's super anti-climatic and it seems to be a vehicle for just throwing in some Noah's Arc parallel's for...uhm... reasons. At this point things have degenerated to bad writing. I feel like Wood wanted to end on this grandiose note for his environmental message, but couldn't think of a way to do that without lots of religious parallel's and super natural things happening.
All of a sudden these pieces of the ocean floor start floating to the surface and humans start fighting over the "new land". Typical humans... Anyway, this happens until the new land floats above the water and flies off into outer space. Guess what... they're Mary's people... You never get to see them, talk to them, or interact with them. They just up and leave. Then the world ends and maybe Mary had some sort of representations of Gaia, because she's been alive since the beginning of the Earth's formation? But it was, once again, kind of poorly explained and there were no answers really about Mary or her people... because we're "just not supposed to know". In other words, lazy writing masquerading as mystery. Oooohhh....
By the end of the whole event our characters are basically living in that movie Water World. All around them is ocean and they are looking for precious land. The world is literally entirely different, but I have expected Kevin Costner to jump out of the ocean and throw some answers around. Whatever, I felt like Wood watched Water World and wondered how they got there and came up with this comic book series.
What started off with what appeared to be a hard science based comic set in a post climate apocalypse turned out to be a major bait and switch for me. I thought this was going to be a truly character driven series of humanity trying to survive and our characters coming to terms with a violent world where they were trying to be pacifists. Exploring that breaking point for Cal would have been truly amazing. Instead we get some weird super natural explanation about an Earth that wants to wipe out humanity. I don't mind fantastical things at all, but I always find it annoying when someone sets up a setting that seems as real as possible and just halfway through decides to up and deviate from that out of nowhere. Whatever, some people might love this turn of events, but I thought it was stupid. Oh well... this book could have been so much more.
This kicks off the major 6 issue finale to The Massive. It's titled Ragnarok and if you know your Scandinavian mythology you know it's about the end of the world. So, I walked in expecting earth shattering events and Wood pretty much delivered on that.
This sequence was so Deus ex Machina that it was hard to read. Suddenly a second crash is happening and it's worse than before. The world is basically going to be destroyed and most humanity will be wiped out. Then they find The Massive, finally, but it's super anti-climatic and it seems to be a vehicle for just throwing in some Noah's Arc parallel's for...uhm... reasons. At this point things have degenerated to bad writing. I feel like Wood wanted to end on this grandiose note for his environmental message, but couldn't think of a way to do that without lots of religious parallel's and super natural things happening.
All of a sudden these pieces of the ocean floor start floating to the surface and humans start fighting over the "new land". Typical humans... Anyway, this happens until the new land floats above the water and flies off into outer space. Guess what... they're Mary's people... You never get to see them, talk to them, or interact with them. They just up and leave. Then the world ends and maybe Mary had some sort of representations of Gaia, because she's been alive since the beginning of the Earth's formation? But it was, once again, kind of poorly explained and there were no answers really about Mary or her people... because we're "just not supposed to know". In other words, lazy writing masquerading as mystery. Oooohhh....
By the end of the whole event our characters are basically living in that movie Water World. All around them is ocean and they are looking for precious land. The world is literally entirely different, but I have expected Kevin Costner to jump out of the ocean and throw some answers around. Whatever, I felt like Wood watched Water World and wondered how they got there and came up with this comic book series.
What started off with what appeared to be a hard science based comic set in a post climate apocalypse turned out to be a major bait and switch for me. I thought this was going to be a truly character driven series of humanity trying to survive and our characters coming to terms with a violent world where they were trying to be pacifists. Exploring that breaking point for Cal would have been truly amazing. Instead we get some weird super natural explanation about an Earth that wants to wipe out humanity. I don't mind fantastical things at all, but I always find it annoying when someone sets up a setting that seems as real as possible and just halfway through decides to up and deviate from that out of nowhere. Whatever, some people might love this turn of events, but I thought it was stupid. Oh well... this book could have been so much more.
December 29, 2015
This is my review for the whole serie with spoilers but the rating is for this book only:
The serie started so well with the first 3 books. I really just got hooked. Book 4 was already a bit down, especially the story arc Sahara....
And now book 5: How the hell did this story become so magical/aliens/religious ???? the last comic book is so cheesy.... We still don't know what happened to Arkany.
even for all these defaults, I could not have put the book down for most of the serie, so I'll go with 4 stars for the serie but only 2 for the book.
The serie started so well with the first 3 books. I really just got hooked. Book 4 was already a bit down, especially the story arc Sahara....
And now book 5: How the hell did this story become so magical/aliens/religious ???? the last comic book is so cheesy.... We still don't know what happened to Arkany.
even for all these defaults, I could not have put the book down for most of the serie, so I'll go with 4 stars for the serie but only 2 for the book.
December 25, 2019
This final volume was fantastic. The ending was completely unexpected, and very strange, but I loved it! Still think this series would make a great TV show!
June 1, 2015
Excellent conclusion to a great series, Brian wood never fails to please.
August 14, 2016
A fitting end to a haunting and moving story.
January 24, 2018
Ehhhhh not really sure the ending was worth the build up. Still an interesting idea just needed better execution in my opinion. Art work was on point though.
December 9, 2023
Voto riassuntivo della seria: 3,5⭐
Eccoci qui, al quinto volume di sei .....ma con un finale.
La domanda che più mi preme al momento è ma nel 6o volume che ci sarà ?
Tralasciando quest'ultima domanda, alla fine il tutto si è chiuso nel modo più (mistico ? Religioso ? Magico ?) possibile.
Sia chiaro questo sprint di misticismo e il capire dove si poteva andare a parare ha fatto sì che leggessi i volumi con davvero più voglia, però penso che sia una bella scorciatoia per chiudere un avventura che non si sapeva dove chiudere, o cmq sia personalmente la trovo una paraculata.
Sia chiaro la storia non mi è dispiaciuta, ribadisco la mia convinzione che wood sia molto bravo a scrivere e i disegni non mi sono affatto dispiaciuti.
Eccoci qui, al quinto volume di sei .....ma con un finale.
La domanda che più mi preme al momento è ma nel 6o volume che ci sarà ?
Tralasciando quest'ultima domanda, alla fine il tutto si è chiuso nel modo più (mistico ? Religioso ? Magico ?) possibile.
Sia chiaro questo sprint di misticismo e il capire dove si poteva andare a parare ha fatto sì che leggessi i volumi con davvero più voglia, però penso che sia una bella scorciatoia per chiudere un avventura che non si sapeva dove chiudere, o cmq sia personalmente la trovo una paraculata.
Sia chiaro la storia non mi è dispiaciuta, ribadisco la mia convinzione che wood sia molto bravo a scrivere e i disegni non mi sono affatto dispiaciuti.
December 29, 2020
How to ruin a great premise, by Brian Wood.
A cast of potentially interesting characters thrust into a world that could very well be our own (sort of)… struggle to do good...
The series had a few high points. Off and on some decent art. And until around the halfway point, I held on to hope that it could pull into a narrative worth the time invested.
I was wrong.
This was a terrible series. And this last story was the icing on the turd cake.
A cast of potentially interesting characters thrust into a world that could very well be our own (sort of)… struggle to do good...
The series had a few high points. Off and on some decent art. And until around the halfway point, I held on to hope that it could pull into a narrative worth the time invested.
I was wrong.
This was a terrible series. And this last story was the icing on the turd cake.
January 1, 2018
What started out as a believable extrapolation of the effects of climate change on the world's geopolitical environment ends with an unbelievable supernatural/alien deus ex machina. The series still presents a lot of thought-provoking ideas and is well worth reading. The characters are a diverse set of individuals with realistic motivations and problems. The artwork is consistently excellent.
October 12, 2020
I did not expect such a neat close to this series - that leaves with a sense of hope - after a book exploring human greed, violence and the consequences it felt a bit relieving yet odd to end this way.
December 1, 2020
Feels like Wood finally understood what he was doing here, but I'm also not really sure what he hoped to do with this series. If felt rushed towards the end and seems to tie things up almost too well, but beyond that, this was a somewhat satisfying ending to an otherwise underwhelming series.
June 16, 2017
The Man From Earth
November 2, 2017
A very satisfying conclusion to an interesting series.
December 23, 2017
Overall, a really disappointing series. Starts out strong and totally loses it around book three. It’s all downhill from there.
April 2, 2018
Reading the reviews, people had different expectations. I liked the story telling and it was a solid ending.
July 19, 2018
Lame direction change for this series. Kinda bored with it now
October 3, 2018
A really cool conclusion to the story with some pretty inventive twists. Overall very satisfied with where they left things.
May 27, 2019
What a great ending to the series.
November 17, 2020
this volume explains The Crash, it has a mystical element to it. would have preferred no explanation or a scientific one, still a good ending to the series.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 13, 2021
a perfect end to such a series.
August 9, 2022
Yeah just skip this one. The ending is nothing to even worth trying to figure out.
March 3, 2024
After starting strong, this series wandered a bit in the middle books, but man does it finish up well. It didn't at all go where I expected, but I really liked where it went.
August 11, 2015
While certainly far from a solid conclusion, this is about the best ending a series as inconsistent as this could've expected. Maybe even a bit better--aside from some really patchy art in places. Way too many plot elements introduced here: Cal and Mary had a love child, the Massive is found, Mary is an alien who has been here for ages to tend to the planet (or observe the humans? or something...?), the aliens are actually "slabs" who are being forced to leave because Earth's equilibrium has been thrown off by humans. (Wood brushes this "slabs" thing aside with what amounts to, "Don't think about it too hard." Seriously, this is in the narration.) Not to mention a few huge deus ex machina moments.
Overall the series was a fantastic concept that might've soared in the hands of a more skilled writer. It's too bad, because our destruction of the planet is very much something that should be written about and read by many. This could've been a great work of 21st century speculative fiction. As it is, though, it was just a mildly thought provoking diversion that was more interesting to assess for what it missed than what it achieved.
Overall the series was a fantastic concept that might've soared in the hands of a more skilled writer. It's too bad, because our destruction of the planet is very much something that should be written about and read by many. This could've been a great work of 21st century speculative fiction. As it is, though, it was just a mildly thought provoking diversion that was more interesting to assess for what it missed than what it achieved.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 29, 2016
After the two separated story arcs in
Sahara
, Brian Wood presents with a long six-issue arc, Ragnarok, drawn by Garry Brown, in this final volume of his series about the environmentally challenged and societally broken down world of the post-Crash.
It has been a ride and a lot of things come to a head in this volume, mysteries are resolved, as Kapital and its crew encounter a reemergence of the Crash itself, with the frightening implications this has. However, certain things in this volume (and I will not succumb to spoilers) feel like they are something of a let-down. Not because the narrative is bad, or because these things do not stem from seeds planted along the journey, but rather because this ending, for me, seems to lose sight of much of what was primarily interesting in Wood's Crash concept (and the post-Crash storyworld it generated).
This may very well be where Wood was heading all along, but it still does not feel entirely right. So, while I enjoy the volume, I ultimately cannot shake off the feeling that there was a better ending to this series. Somewhere. Out there.
It has been a ride and a lot of things come to a head in this volume, mysteries are resolved, as Kapital and its crew encounter a reemergence of the Crash itself, with the frightening implications this has. However, certain things in this volume (and I will not succumb to spoilers) feel like they are something of a let-down. Not because the narrative is bad, or because these things do not stem from seeds planted along the journey, but rather because this ending, for me, seems to lose sight of much of what was primarily interesting in Wood's Crash concept (and the post-Crash storyworld it generated).
This may very well be where Wood was heading all along, but it still does not feel entirely right. So, while I enjoy the volume, I ultimately cannot shake off the feeling that there was a better ending to this series. Somewhere. Out there.
April 27, 2016
Oh, so that's what this story ultimately was. It should have been obvious in retrospect, but it still surprised me in a good way. This volume ends the series, and it goes out with a massive bang, as Mary and Callum are rejoined, and the Crash finishes what it had started years before. The story is truly apocalyptic, but seeing it through these characters' eyes puts a strong human face on it. The story goes in directions that it hadn't previously, but it feels like it earns everything it pulls off here. There were multiple moments where I misted up, and every major character gets a chance to shine here. The art is as starkly beautiful as always, and the color work is again a highlight.
I wasn't completely sold on this series for the first couple of volumes; it was interesting but it felt like too many pieces were missing. I think going back and rereading the entire series now would be worthwhile, but even if I don't, I greatly appreciated the things it had to say, and the way this volume wraps everything up. Very highly recommended.
I wasn't completely sold on this series for the first couple of volumes; it was interesting but it felt like too many pieces were missing. I think going back and rereading the entire series now would be worthwhile, but even if I don't, I greatly appreciated the things it had to say, and the way this volume wraps everything up. Very highly recommended.
December 18, 2015
Holy cow, what an ending to the series!
To review the series as a whole:
At first the story, like the Kapital's crew, drifts without true direction. It is while seeking and closing in on the Massive that the crew comes to find themselves, and in so doing the story takes form. It is only when the full truth--of character histories, of experiences, of the world--is out that the Kapital's goal is achieved. A satisfying story and, as it pertains to this particular collection, ending (or is it a beginning?).
To review the series as a whole:
At first the story, like the Kapital's crew, drifts without true direction. It is while seeking and closing in on the Massive that the crew comes to find themselves, and in so doing the story takes form. It is only when the full truth--of character histories, of experiences, of the world--is out that the Kapital's goal is achieved. A satisfying story and, as it pertains to this particular collection, ending (or is it a beginning?).
December 15, 2016
This series absolutely fantastic. This being the final installment wrapped up the story quite nicely, yet still left a tiny opening for further adventures of the Massive and its crew. Its kind of difficult for me to say good bye to Cal, Mag, and company. Then again it's been a pleasure just to get to know these characters and the stories of their trials to survive the end of the world. This has honestly been the best comic series I've read all year. If I had ten thumbs, they'd all be way up for Brian Wood, Garry Brown, Jordie Bellaire, and the crew of the Massive!
July 30, 2015
A worthy ending to a very enjoyable series. It was hard to see quite where this was going to end up without feeling either flat or overblown, but Wood has finessed it quite nicely here I think. I consistently enjoyed The Massive, and am glad to see it concluded nicely here rather than being dragged on or cut short as has happened with some other comics I've recently read.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews