The third installment of The Twilight Zone: Shadow and Substance starts a new two-issue story arc entitled Jailbreak. Although I really enjoyed the first issue of this series, I couldn’t help but notice a lack of development and substance (no pun intended) in the second issue. That problem still remains a factor with this story unfortunately. This story follows a man named Lee. He’s in a POW camp run by aliens and is trying to plan his escape. The problem is, there really isn’t much else to the book than this. You can read the little blurb on Dynamite’s website and get the main part of the story right there.

There’s other parts that try to grab your attention like a woman falling out of thin air after presumably being abducted by the aliens or people fighting like animals to get food, but none of it really grabbed me. There was definitely a lack of emotion which was one of my qualms with the second issue.

Also, there’s virtually no character development. We know nothing about Lee, there’s the introduction of this woman named Anni who we get to see for a very brief amount of time, and other than the woman who apparently knows Lee in the beginning there really aren’t any other characters. I guess one could argue that all of the camp’s inhabitants make up a character, but overall I was disappointed. I feel pretty indifferent towards Lee which is obviously not a good way to feel about a main character. I don’t really want to spoil the ending in case anyone does want to read this, but it was pretty unexpected… but not in a good way. It was anticlimactic and made the whole book seem disjointed and rushed.

I enjoyed the artwork again which gave a bit of emotion to the otherwise pretty dull story. But to me honestly that can’t save this issue from being a disappointment. I really want to like this series and I think some interesting ideas have been presented but these last two issues have been making it hard to enjoy. Hopefully we get some explanation and backstory next issue or it’s all going to fall apart.

Score: 2/5

The Twilight Zone: Shadow and Substance #3 Writer: Mark Rahner Artist: Edu Menna Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment Price: $3.99 Release Date: 3/25/15 Format: Mini-Series, Print/Digital