Reprinting Unity (2013) #s 15-18, Unity Volume 5: Homefront gives us a look at the personal lives and feelings of some of the team's members, and at times it's quite gloomy. Each of the first three issues focuses on one specific member of the team, flashing back and forth between that character's solo story and a crucial battle right before those stories took place, against an enemy that isn't revealed until # 18. # 18 also brings in two other Unity members, one brand new and one who joined a little bit ago.
The solo stories start with Ninjak in Unity # 15. I should note that at about the same time that these issues were coming out, the first issues of Ninjak's 2015 ongoing series were coming out. I haven't read these yet (actually, I have Ninjak Volume 1: Weaponeer on order now), so this review only reflects the character in his pre-Weaponeer issues of various Valiant series, mainly Unity. The character (known as Colin King in his civilian identity) has changed quite a bit since his introduction, although he hasn't gotten any less dangerous. In X-O Manowar Volume 2: Enter Ninjak, I actually mistook him for a general mercenary. Later issues in various series clarified that he works only for MI:6 and now as a part of Unity. It's too limiting to think of him as simply a spy. The guy is like the Valiant equivalent of Batman; he can do everything. Originally he seemed very heartless and mercyless. Since Unity came on the scene though, and especially in the Armor Hunters crossover, we've seen glimpses of, as cliche as this will sound--a kinder side of Ninjak. And the Ninjak we see in this volume is a very dark but very torn character. He seems to be in the process of evolving from a cold killing machine type character into something else. What has caused this growth isn't really clear yet, but it's possible that seeing the Earth come close to destruction in various stories has spurred him to re-evaluate his philosophy, and it's possible that there's something else at play I haven't seen yet. The man does not seem to like himself much, which surprised me a bit.
Issue # 16 is largely dedicated to the Eternal Warrior, aka Gilad Anni-Padda. It tells the story of a trip Gilad makes to Japan, to retell an old story that's very important to him. He's had more battles and more wars than he can count, but this tale of wartime in feudal Japan has special meaning to him, and he wants the story of a female freedom fighter named Tomoe to be remembered among her descendants. Like most of the rest of the book, the tale is melancholy, much more so than most volumes of Unity. As with the rest of the book, and this time as with the other volumes of Unity, both writing and art are extremely high caliber. More gets told, sometimes in the space of a few panels, than would be recounted in some full collections. Gilad has travelled many paths over the centuries, sometimes depicted as being more in sync with and comfortable with war than he would like to admit to himself. Here, he is very, very weary of warring over ten thousand years, many times in direct service of the sentient Earth, other times for other causes he believed in or could live with. And continuing now in the Unity team.
Issue 17, the last of the 'personal lives' issues, focuses on Livewire, Amanda McKee. It's a partial recap of her life up to this point and the downhill turn her life and personal relationships--which she's really only forged in the days since leaving the Harbinger Foundation--have taken since she went public as a member of Unity. She's not comfortable in the role she finds herself, a soldier in the world's premiere super-team; as she says herself, she prefers the lab to the battlefield. And she doesn't like the fame and notoriety that comes with being part of Unity. As with the Ninjak and Eternal Warrior stories, it gives only partial excerpts out of some of her stories over the years of her life, but like the other stories it gets you interested in finding out more.
Issue 18 gives us the 'event' which the other issues largely happen in before or after. It's one of the team's most difficult missions, and, as it happens late in the book, I don't want to give away to much about it. It features the latest player assigned to Unity by MI-6 and the UK and US governments, and does a fine job picking up on a loose end from one of the previous stories, and it doesn't so much tie it off neatly as it reconnects the plot thread to the rest of the ongoing Valiant Universe.
Don't skip this one just because it's more of an interlude than the fast-paced epics Unity Volumes 1-4 have told. You wouldn't want a comic universe to be nothing but one big ultra-action megaevent flowing immediately into the next megaevent. The megaevents are great, but you need the 'smaller' stories too, to give the books context and a decipherable framework. And for their own sakes as well. These stories were 'small-ish' but they deserved to be told. Great book once again in the Unity line. Maybe a shade below the excellence of the first four books, but still a 5-star.
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