This review is for the series as a whole. See my review of the beginning here.

The series ultimately doesn't do enough with its interesting premise. There's a lot of big action sequences, and certainly Dan Mora does a great job illustrating them, but it felt to me like Kieron Gillen spent more time asking "how could this mythological idea be used to make a comic book action set piece?" than he spent asking "what does the Arthurian mythos tell us about modern Britain?" I loved those moments, like I said above... but honestly, there just weren't enough of them across the series's thirty issues. At time the overlapping mythologies get confusing, and not in a good way; I don't think the series adequately delineates the difference between the multiple Arthurs, for example, and some of it gets wacky. Why would Tennyson's Arthur be steampunk!? The last volume feels like Gillen thought the series was going to run another thirty issues but was suddenly given only six to wrap it all up... I was surprised to learn from the afterword that he actually had twenty-four more issues than he originally thought he was getting!

I also felt that Duncan and Rose, the ostensible leads, deserved more of a character throughline than they ended up getting. They often end up feeling along for the ride, and I wanted a stronger sense of their development and choices in the face of all the weird things they go through.

Other than some of the jumpy issues near the end, it is (as Gillen-penned comics usually are) a pretty smooth read. There's a number of clever ideas in here. Mora's art gets a bit too grotesque at times but is usually excellent; Tamra Bonvillain is a revelation on colors. But I can't help feeling there's another version of this story that consistently treats its mythology as something to be interrogated rather than as a basis for clever set pieces.

Plus to name your final volume "The Wasteland" but then claim the poem was written by "T. S. Elliot" is a pretty unforgivable mistake!

I loved this series so it's bittersweet to reach the end after two years. I look forward to revisiting it. My review of Once & Future, Vol. 1 still stands:

An exciting, violent, and funny adventure. I'm not a frequent comics or fantasy reader but I was attracted by the story and then really impressed by the art.

Also, any book with black-billed magpies on the cover gets extra points from me. ( )

Outstanding ( )