How do you stop an unstoppable weapon?

New story arc! “A GUY NAMED RAY,” Part 1. Two of the leaders of the Bloodshot team find themselves on thin ice with their bosses at Project Rising Spirit. With little left to lose, they decide to take down PRS—and they have just the perfect weapon to use!

It’s always tough to start reading a comic in a series that has consistently failed to meet expectations, especially when that series was never one you were overly excited for or interested in. Such is the case with Bloodshot: Rising Spirit. After the last couple of issues, I was about ready to check out of the series and wait for September’s new Bloodshot series.

While I won’t say that Bloodshot: Rising Spirit #6 has made me a believer in the series (I fear it’s too late for that), what I will say is that with Eliot Rahal coming on board to help with scripting duties (even though he’s not credited in the cover image above), I at least had a little faith that we’d get a stronger issue than we’d seen before – and we did.

Where issue #5 was essentially a prolonged fight scene between Bloodshot and the H.A.R.D. Corps member Gunslinger that had some cool sequences, it ultimately fell flat with the story. This issue doesn’t fall flat, and finally has some interesting sequences with Bloodshot and his struggle to adopt an identity as it’s forced upon him. The entire comic is full of condensed short stories as Bloodshot faces one identity after another, interspersed with a scientist or two commenting on the effectiveness of the new methodology of what essentially amounts to throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks.

If this was the first issue, then I’d be telling you to pick the series up; Bloodshot: Rising Spirit #6 is probably a better jumping on point in terms of quality than we’ve had all series – and since this prequel series takes place before Valiant’s first Bloodshot story since relaunching, you could actually just start here in conjunction with the recap and ignore the first five issues.

Overall, this represents a strong increase in the quality over previous issues – whether that’s due to Eliot Rahal and Rags Morales joining the team or not I’ll leave up to you. After the struggles the series has had thus far, it’s refreshing to see that there’s still hope that Bloodshot: Rising Spirit can end on a high note.

Story: Kevin Grevious, Eliot Rahal
Art: Rags Morales and John K. Snyder III
Colourist: Andrew Dalhouse Letterer: Simon Bowland
Story: 8.2 Art: 8.0 Overall: 8.0 Recommendation: Read

Valiant provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review.