Your Happenstance panel for today...

...is a recent one, a (maybe) spoiler-free panel from Final Crisis: Escape #2:

From "Pawns" Written by Ivan Brandon, pencils by Marco Rudy, inks by Mick Gray with Jack Purcell.

Even though I've not followed a lot of DC in a couple years, the premise for this one grabbed me. How do recap the first two issues of this one, since neither the readers, nor the main character, and possibly not the writer, have any idea where this is going? Here goes: Tom Tresser, a.k.a. Nemesis, master of disguise, former Suicide Squad operative, and current Wonder Woman boyfriend; is drugged and kidnapped. He wakes up in a mysterious faculty (that may or may not be named, "the Electric City"? Wasn't that in the solicits?) with faceless captors, OMAC-like watchers, and several other espionage agents, including Amanda Waller, Rick Flag, and Cameron Chase.

Or maybe he doesn't: people, places and things seem to shift from panel to panel. Nemesis may or may not even be Nemesis, or there might be more than one. Or he might be drugged to the gills and imagining most of this.

The Factual Opinion had a review, which among other things, pointed out "It's still got potential, which is weird, because it's a six issue mini-series and this is the second issue, so you'd imagine that it might be time for the potential to turn into pay-off, but hey, maybe that's just the way it's going to roll. " I think readers so far are giving this series a lot of rope, in the hopes that it pays off and doesn't hang itself. But it's early on, and there's still any number of ways it could stumble:

• The whole series could be a drug trip halluncination, with Nemesis fighting his way out of it in the last issue; meaning you just dropped eightteen bucks you could've spent on actual drugs...
• The whole series isn't an elaborate mindgame, it's an elaborate counter-mindgame; created out of Nemesis' imagination to keep his cover while being probed or interrogated.
• "Nemesis" isn't really Nemesis, and neither is anyone else: they're all OMAC-created simulacrums designed for either testing or replacing those characters.
• Every time the caption boxes use "Word Deleted" they're saying, "Beatrix Kiddo."
• So far they've avoided the trap of "Nemesis keeps escaping, and when he thinks he's clear, bam! He's right back where he started!" But if Nemesis becomes the new warden or jailer or whatever, suck.
• Three pages from the end, when things look darkest, the faceless keeper unmasks--gasp! Nemesis! He was three steps ahead all along!

Hopefully, I haven't guessed it, since those endings would be terrible.