The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1266: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #0, September 1994

This one's gonna have to wait too. My wife's leaving for Europe and things are in a bit of chaos at the Miller household!

On second thought. This was an utterly uninspired crossover. I don't want to say anything more about it.

More tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1265: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #1, September 1994

Ugh.

Early 90s DC really was a mess. This series was obviously designed, in part, to bolster interest in some of the newer characters that DC had introduced, but they're so bland that by the time they've been erased from reality, you're not really that bothered. I often wonder, when I see a crop of these "new gods" spring from the pages of a venerable mythic structure like the DCU, whether any of them will go the same kind of distance as their progenitors. A similar thing is happening again at DC in the wake of the Metal Knights event. I think. I didn't follow it at all.

The other thing I'm trying to figure is the utter hate on DC seemed to have for Hal Jordan in this era. I know he went evil, but they seem to go out of their way to make him super-fucking-evil. It's a strange treatment for one of their more iconic characters.

Not that I mind. I really liked Kyle Rayner.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1264: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #2, September 1994

Gah. Does the "crisis in time" involve my lost time from reading this series? They've lost me. Can you tell? Somehow Extant, who is also Monarch from "Armageddon 2001," and who is also Hawk, of Hawk and Dove, and has Waverider's powers to manipulate space and time, also has a couple of teams of superheroes under his control, and it's never actually explained how this happened, except to tell us on the last page that it's explained in the Team Titans ongoing series.

And that's where they lose me.

This was a major plot point of the entire issue, but there's no reason or logic to it unless you've read an ancillary title that you might not actually be reading regularly to begin with. Once line-wide crossovers started pulling stuff like this, they lost what the crossover was meant to accomplish - all your favourite heroes in one story together, and that story made, as much as superhero stories do, sense. The original Crisis did this par excellance, as did Hickman's Secret Wars. I read Crisis with no other context for the DCU except that I knew of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. And the series made sense. The first Secret Wars is the same. I didn't have to read any of the other ongoing series to get a good, complete story.

I've ranted about this before, but I think it bears repeating. Not only is it, in my opinion, rude for a company to expect us to spend even more of what little we earn on comics we wouldn't normally want to buy, but it's also demonstrating some class-based exclusion. In a lot of ways it's saying that if you can afford it, you can get the whole story, but if you can't, then you get an incomplete experience. And that's not fair, and it's certainly not how art or media should be. But, unfortunately, it is.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1263: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #3, September 1994

I hadn't realized that this was a weekly event - I was about to complain that all kinds of stuff is alluded to in this issue that we never see, and that that's a sign, to me at least, of poor writing. But with a weekly crossover, you have the ability to so stuff like that. I think the DC One Million crossover is just about the most perfect line-wide weekly crossover I've ever seen. Perhaps some of the failings I'm noticing - rough pacing, moments that should be dramatic but lack any gravitas - are a result of not reading the crossover as it's envisioned, as a line-wide story.

Given the dodgy era that the story comes from, I'm not certain I want to track the issues down. DC was just finishing up with its experiments with grittier, Image-esque superheros, but Starman and The Flash, under Robinson and Waid respectively, were leading the DCU back to a place in which I think it flourished. But then, I quite like that Morrison guy who came on not too long after this.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1262: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #4, September 1994

Let's just take a complete, 180 degree turn, and read some sort of crappy early 90s DC, shall we?

*sigh*

Another crisis. Granted, this is one of the earlier ones, but I think by this time, DC had figured out that they could make scads of cash doing multi-part crossovers. The one thing I will give Zero Hour is that it introduces Jack Knight, the best Starman, and one of the best superheroes, I've ever read.

That aside, meh.

I'll keep reading the rest of the series, and maybe some of the zero issues I have, but it's pretty run of the mill. I keep worrying that I'm judging these things by the standards I have now - crises like this weren't a dime a dozen back then, or not as much as they are now. But I think even by this point, they were getting a bit ridiculous. This is also around the time that the X-franchise seemed to have two or three major event crossovers every year.

Not that things are much better these days, though I do feel it might have slowed down a bit. Or, perhaps, I've stopped paying quite as much attention as I once did.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 327: Superboy, 1994 series, #8, September 1994

I have no idea why what happens in this comic happens, but that doesn't hurt my enjoyment of the story. Original Superboy versus clone Superboy was a match-up that was always going to happen, so I'm glad to have read it. It's weird, the old version versus new version trope of superheroics, whether it's something timey-wimey like this, or a younger generation versus an older. There's a passage of the torch, usually through punches, reconciliations, and understanding. The older versions of characters have to make sure that the younger versions are upholding the intrinsic qualities that makes them them, and then they can fade away to wherever old versions of heroes go.

Which is precisely what happens in this issue, and I didn't even need to know what the heck was going on in "Zero Hour" to understand.

This Superboy has never really been my favourite, and especially not this early version of him. The Connor Kent shaved head version seemed a bit more believable as a superhero. But then, it was the 90s.

So, onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 297: Action Comics #0, October 1994

A short one today. The problem with Superman having been in publication for so long is that, every now and again, you'll run across a really mediocre run of stories. The 90s, for the most part, are this. This is a part of the Zero Hour crossover, which was middling at best, but 90s Superman was trying way too hard to capitalize on the Image Comics successes, so his hair's long, and he's got that Image grimace going on there on the cover. Oooo...gritty.

My other bone of contention with this comic is that I'm not entirely certain how it's meant to link into the Zero Month crossovers. I've just read the Flash one, as I prepare for my long-delayed next part of "On the Run," and it actually functioned as an introductory piece for the hero. This one, rather, talks about someone Clark went to school with, and though it does show some of his past, it's more an origin story for Conduit than for Superman. But, again, 90s Superman stuff is really pretty bad.

I'd kicked around the idea of reading a bunch of Superman stuff for a while for this project, but for a long while it was impossible to follow a Superman story without reading every one of his monthly titles. You'll notice the triangle up in the top right corner, which indicates this issue's reading order for that year. Though it does allow for the telling of large-scale stories, it makes reading one issue every now and again a bit hard. The Bat-titles were doing this around the same time, and if must have worked for a while because this practice continued for most of the decade and part of the next. I'm glad, however, that the titles separated eventually. Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman is pretty fabulous, and, importantly, self-contained.

So, Superman fights this guy Conduit who's apparently secretly funded a covert intelligence agency, and how really has it in for Clark Kent.

Meh.

More tomorrow.