Phenomena Book 3 – The Secret
Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artist: André Lima Araújo
Publisher: Abrams Comics Arts
Publication Date: May 2025
I’ve written about this before, but one of the things I’ve found most interesting about the Brian Michael Bendis and André Lima Araújo Phenomena trilogy is the collaborative relationship and how it came to be. The two first worked together briefly at DC Comics. As they detail in the backmatter of this book, there was a creative spark there, and they decided to work together making some original stories. What this entailed — as I understand it from an interview I did with them — was Araújo showing artwork to Bendis that he had essentially been working on his entire life. Indeed, in acknowledgements of Phenomena Book 3, Bendis thanks his collaborator for opening “his life’s work to me.”
And, indeed, in the first two entries of the Phenomena trilogy, one could perhaps feel Araújo’s artwork and concepts playing an outsized role as the drive of the series. This, of course, made for stunning comics. What one first notices about Araújo’s art is the stunning, detailed, and imaginative landscapes. There are 20,000-foot views of futuristic, fantasy-tinged cities and creatures and vehicles all throughout these comics, and any one of them is liable to be one of the coolest things you’ll see in a comic all year.
These designs are very much present in Phenomena Book 3, as well, but this book is also much more plot-forward than either of the previous entries. It’s a book about past, present, future, and about reconciling oneself with big life questions like family, societal responsibility, and the legacy of being empowered. As such, this story grabbed me and didn’t let go, speeding me through these pages until I’d finished it all in one setting.
The first two books definitely had great character work and fun stories happening among the stunning visual ideas/landscapes, but Phenomena Book 3 just has more. It’s filled with kinetic fight scenes (or rattlebattles in the parlance of the Phenomena world), long-simmering confrontations, and stunning reveals. In this way, it’s a perfect endcap to this trilogy, one that both ups the stakes for our characters and also drives home the themes that have been under these comics all throughout.
I thought it was absolutely perfect way to wrap up what has been to me a must-read comic. In my review of Phenomena Book 2, I wrote about how these comics were a must-read for anyone interested in comics craft, and I think that’s doubly true of this finale. It’s a masterclass in giving weight to cool design work, in taking an immersive world and instilling it with the meaning it needs to capture attention. One of the key plot points in this final book is a character sharing his story with everyone — both friend and foe — and how fitting is that for a work of this size and ambition?
Phenomena Book 3 is now available
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