Comic Review: RWBY “Epilogue: The Anthem”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

With each member of Team RWBY heading towards where they were at the start of Volume 5, they all reflect on the lessons they remembered and learned during their travels, hoping they’ll soon be together again.

OUR TAKE

The final chapter of this comic series is exactly what it says on the tin, that being an epilogue to this collection of self-contained tales. As such, not very much actually happens in this issue specifically other than putting everyone in place for what would go onto be notoriously known as the show’s worst season thus far. I mean if you’re going to make a bunch of comics that fill in the much needed blanks of any season in a futile attempt to fix it somehow, Volume 4 is not a BAD choice, but Volume 5 needed it way more. But yeah, because this chapter was just about capping everything off, I guess we can use this space to give this series a short “Season Review” in a sense, which will be easy for me since I only just read all of these in the past week.

There have certainly been a lot of times throughout the show where I’ve wanted little stories like these to help flesh out the main characters, especially regarding this particular time period that the comic covers. Problem is that this didn’t seem to be the priority of the series itself, which mostly chained itself to progressing the plot while the characters driving it still felt woefully underdeveloped (and personally far too many still do at the time of this writing). So I appreciate that this comic has the liberty of slowing down in a way that helps each of the four girls tackle problems and dilemmas that test their respective developmental hurdles in ways that I wish the show had bothered to. Not every single of them hit for me, but the interconnectivity of the stories helped them to feel individual as much as they were connected, much like the four girls of Team RWBY should be. It even utilizes ideas that, while not the best executions, could certainly be used within the show.

That all said, there way too many things about this that are likely to never put it within a hundred miles of being proper canon, not the least of which being that way too much of the dialogue just does not sound in-character. The art also seems rather off at times, though with at least a few different adaptations out there now, varying art styles are likely to be expected at this point. Also quite a bit of liberty taken with canon stuff in order to fit the narrative of the story being told in a given issue, which I doubt will ever be acknowledged in the show itself.

In the end, this and the gen:LOCK comic (which wraps up next month) have certainly been fun experiments with taking Rooster Teeth properties to a western printed form, which I do hope they pursue again in the future, whether it be more stories from their flagship shows (hopefully more focused on less appreciated characters like what the novels have done for CFVY) or even some love given to Camp Camp and Red vs Blue. While comics themselves have not been a super lucrative medium for much lately other than testing future billion dollar movies, this is a fun playground for RT to make sand castles in, which fans like me will be eager to see them play with. Despite their less than helpful developments last year, the spirit of creativity is still kicking in this company born from wondering why we’re here.