Retro Review: Fifty-Two

Ten years ago this week, DC launched 52, something longer than a miniseries but with a definite end built right into its short title. The title and concept of 52 play back on itself in a variety of ways. The series ran 52 issues in 52 weeks, from May 2006 until the same month in 2007. The number itself occurred many times within the story, often as an Easter egg for its own sake, but ultimately as a clue to a mystery. After DC had shown a propensity for delays on other, more modest, projects, the idea of a weekly series with several collaborating writers seemed like an unrealistic goal, but 52 came out on time each and every week, a creative success in each of its separate subplots.

52 was built on an unusual base of concepts: It was set in the year immediately after Infinite Crisis and was given sole power to tell the tale of that year, with all other DC comics skipping ahead "One Year Later." Consequently, it seemed that any monthly comic might contain spoilers for 52, but that seems to have been prevented either by good preparation or the simple fact that 52 and its four writers – Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka, and Mark Waid – focused on minor characters who didn't headline in the monthlies.

The stars of the main subplots of 52 were as follows:

• Animal Man, Starfire, and Adam Strange

• The Question, Renee Montoya, and Batwoman

• Black Adam and Isis

• Will Magnus and other prominent scientists

• Booster Gold, Skeets, and his rival, Supernova

• Ralph Dibny

• Steel and Lex Luthor

Effectively, DC got a tremendous proportion of readers to buy about seven full issues' worth of material concerning each of those subplots, something that could not possible have been achieved by scripting and publishing the stories separately: Imagine how few readers would buy a seven-issue Elongated Man series.

So, initially, it seemed to cynics like a sales job based on promises: A series so central to DC's plots that readers would feel compelled to read it, but based on unimportant characters and the seemingly imminent risk of failed deadlines. The result, however, was a delight: The quartet of writers and their army of artists managed to hit every deadline, and the stories were without exception worth reading. 52 made a collection of minor characters worth reading about with the most important element in fiction – engaging, original storytelling, full of surprises. Each subplot in 52 was something more than it seemed to be; someone – usually more than one someone – was involved in deception, and the stakes were always bigger than they seemed to be. What seemed at the outset to be sullied and selfish motives ultimately proved selfless. Time and time again, 52 took the high road, giving each of its constituent stories another level than first impressions seemed to indicate.

In retrospect, 52 employed somewhat of a formula across most of its plots. There were characters who seemed good but had a hidden evil identity in at least five of the plots: Black Adam's stepbrother was befriended by an anthropomorphic alligator, Sobek, who stuttered and claimed to be fearful, but was really a murderous double agent for Intergang. The team of superheroes made by and working for Lex Luthor had one very bad egg in the form of Everyman, real name Hannibal, and like Dr. Lecter, a sociopathic cannibal. Dr. Cale, the beautiful blonde scientist who warms up to Will Magnus, was another double agent, loyal to Apokolips. Two plots have a golden toaster-sized traitor: Doctor Fate's helmet is actually Felix Faust, intent on stealing Ralph Dibny's soul; and, Booster Gold's sidekick Skeets has been taken over by Mister Mind. Other deceptions abound: Lobo pretends to be living according to a vow of nonviolence, but he breaks this vow three times, twice by design. Supernova, a hero who fills the void left by Superman, is actually the very man he seems to antagonize, Booster Gold. And, the ongoing mystery of what the Question plans for Renee Montoya is resolved when she – and we – find out that the Question intends for her to become the new Question after her death.

The pattern of deceptions across every plot in 52 plays into the larger pattern of sneak attacks, common to many Morrison stories in the decade after 9/11. Enemies who could not overpower their foe directly set up plans that come crashing into them when they're least expected, perhaps most shockingly when Sobek tricks his "friend" Osiris into saying the magic words that remove his superpowers, then crunches into his flesh with powerful jaws, killing him in his moment of vulnerability. In this subplot, evil plans come to fruition, but in the two subplots, the savvy heroes have prepared counter-sneak attacks of their own, just as the Seven Soldiers and Batman do in Morrison's other works. Ralph Dibny deduces early on that "Doctor Fate" is not what he seems to be, and plans a very clever sacrifice that cheats not only the magician, but also the Devil himself (in this case, Neron). At the end, we learn that the gun that Ralph pointed at himself in issue #1 fired wishes, not bullets, and that the flask he kept sipping from held power-giving gingold, not liquor. Rip Hunter intervenes to give Booster Gold the tip-off he needs to outwit Mister Mind, so the two of them can save the Multiverse. In the other plots, the heroes have to work hard to make up for their unpreparedness, and they manage to salvage the situation after initial setbacks.

The big plot, covering most but not all of the subplots, is that Intergang is preparing an era of crime on Earth, serving their dark lord, Darkseid. They win a few skirmishes in 52, leading to millions of deaths, but, obviously, fail to achieve the victory they seek, but we know by story's end that they lurk in the shadows, and have something else planned. Separate from that main plot is the impending threat of Lady Styx, an interstellar bringer of death who is killed by Lobo, but only temporarily. Distinct from all of that is the return of the Multiverse, and the immediate threat to it posed by Mister Mind. Along the way, 52 makes some big changes to the DCU, killing Vic Sage and Ralph Dibny, depriving Black Adam from his powers, and giving us a new Batwoman.

Another Morrisonian device is the way that Mister Mind is ultimately defeated: Rip Hunter and Booster Gold send him back in time, where, in his larval stage, he meets up, seemingly haphazardly, with Sivana, who imprisons and torments him. This is stunningly parallel to what happens at the end of Return of Bruce Wayne, in which Batman and his allies – including Booster and Rip – put the Hyper-Adapter into a time machine and send it into the past, where it is vanquished by a familiar DC villain, Vandal Savage. Other time loops bring Ralph Dibny back to his wife's death and Booster Gold back to the day he meets his best friend, Ted Kord. There is also a considerable parallel between All-Star Superman and the Steel-Luthor subplot, with a superpowered Lex Luthor being defeated at the end by someone in Metropolis who out-thinks him, turns off his powers, and then punches him out. The abundance of Morrisonian patterns in 52 suggests that he had more influence on the plotting than his 25% share of the staff might seem to imply.

The stories make use of other literary reference: the three lost space travelers are on a journey home like the Odyssey, with lotus-eating, a Cyclops (the Emerald Head of Ekron), and a suitor (the unspectacular Roger) wooing Animal Man's wife, Ellen. The Four Horsemen constructed by Intergang obviously come from the Book of Revelation, as echoed in the Crime Bible. And DC lore is mined quite effectively in the small details everywhere, with Isis being adapted from the 1970s Saturday morning live action show, the new Batwoman being related ("Kate the younger") to the 1950s Batman love interest, Supernova being adapted from an alternate identity of Superman back in World's Finest #178, and a depowered Clark Kent jumping from a window in order to get a scoop a la Lois Lane.

Though 52 is devoted to the minor characters, DC's stars cross the stage in cameos, with Clark Kent, Diana Prince, and Bruce Wayne all making appearances, the last of those very key as a prequel to Morrison's Batman run. The JSA, the Green Lanterns, and a wide sweep of other major heroes all play a role here and there. Though it's an excellent thing to read now, unusual as a work of that length with a pre-planned beginning and end, it was scripted to suit the needs of its times, launching the post-Infinite Crisis DCU with panache and intrigue. And, just as 52 begins quite literally in the wreckage left by Infinite Crisis, it drops ominous clues to something coming down the road, something that would prove to be Final Crisis.

52 was an impressive accomplishment, one that was extended, but poorly, into another yearlong series, Countdown, which mirrored its structure (weekly issues for a year; leading into, rather than out from, a crisis), and counting down just as 52 counted up. But the success of 52 was not repeated then, nor has that format been repeated since. 52 was a singular thing, a start and a finish, with the final panels of both its first and last issues asking the reader, "Are you ready?"

Retro Review: Kingdom Come

From the first pages – even from the cover – Kingdom Come made DC readers feel as though they had entered another world, the world where their comic book heroes are real. Alex Ross' art, which is painted rather than drawn, is as unlike the halftone color printing of the past as reality is unlike a dream. With respect to the visuals alone, Kingdom Come, like Ross' Marvels before it, is categorically transcendent, and automatically a classic.

The story itself, by Ross and Mark Waid, aspires towards greatness. Its scope is grand, the passions run hot, the new characters are wonderfully creative, and the world of Kingdom Come is more complex than most of what had come before it.

This starting point for the story closely resembles the premises of a trio of stories from the previous decade – The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and the unpublished Twilight of the Superheroes. With those stories in mind, many have observed that Kingdom Come is not entirely original, and that is hard to deny. Nor do the creators try to deny it – a copy of the book-within-a-book Under the Hood by Watchmen's Hollis Mason appears on Kingdom Come's eighth page, and we soon learn that KC's Batman has become the field general commanding an army of younger crime-fighters much as he was at the end of DKR. Kingdom Come acknowledged those creative debts, but it makes them its starting point, not its conclusion. It may more closely resemble TOTS, though those commonalities go only so far.

Though it opens with minor and almost pointedly mortal characters (Norman McCay, an old man, and Wesley Dodds, the now-dying Golden Age Sandman), it soon comes alive with colorful – and frequently wonderfully original – super beings. The realistic art drives home a dark theme, that the brief era of superheroes such as we have known, eventually gave way to a kind of super-chaos as a tiny oligarchy of super-powered beings turn the whole world into a mere arena for their non-stop brawling. There are no longer heroes or villains, justice or injustice – there are simply battles unleashing tremendous forces, and the non-super-powered majority cower and can only hope to avoid becoming collateral damage.

KC, like DKR, adopts the opening gambit of Homer's Iliad – a great hero is physically able, but unwilling to fight, until something goads him back into the battle. KC's Superman has, in the story's past, lost a non-physical showdown with a violent superhero named Magog. In a tragic turn of events, the Joker has killed Lois Lane. Magog executes the Joker on the street, violating the moral code the superheroes had previously respected. But here, justice and the law became tangled, with Superman expecting a court to convict Magog for this act of vengeance, but neither of them feeling completely vindicated when it did not. Superman retreated entirely from the world, and Magog became just one representative of a new era, one in which heroes were not quite heroes anymore. A few years later, as the story opens, things are pretty rotten, but they soon become much worse. A handful of heroes pursue the Parasite from St. Louis westward across Kansas, and when the villain is cornered, he panics and rips open Captain Atom. The resulting explosion kills one million people, including Superman's adopted hometown of Smallville. When Wonder Woman brings the news of this to Superman, he returns from his self-imposed exile to try to set the world straight.

At this point, the major players and their positions are as follows:

• A new breed of reckless hero – exemplified by Magog, Von Bach, and 666 – operates outside the law. They execute supervillains preemptively, and risk civilian lives needlessly in their battles. Their lifestyle is not as squeaky-clean as the heroes of the past.

• Superman and his Justice League want to corral the reckless heroes, and are willing to imprison those who don't fall in line.

• Batman and an urban league including Green Arrow, Black Canary, and Blue Beetle keep order in Gotham, Star City and elsewhere using their expertise and a squadron of younger enforcers.

• Luthor and several former supervillains, whose Mankind Liberation Front conspires to turn the conflict between the erstwhile superheroes into a battle that rids the world of superbeings for once and for all. Batman and his allies seem to throw in with Luthor, but that is a ruse.

• The world's civilian authorities, led by a UN Secretary General named Wyrmwood, another reference to Revelation.

Unlike the comics of the past, the sides do not merely engage in super-powered battle, although there is plenty of that. They take time out from the usual superhero-vs-supervillain kinetic activity to philosophize, negotiate, argue, and deceive.

And it is on this deeper level that the script falters, badly. Every panel and every speech balloon in Kingdom Come seems to come from a passionate and wonderfully scripted epic, but Kingdom Come is not wonderfully scripted. Ross and Waid's writing aspires to greatness but fails to grasp it. A large fraction of Kingdom Come is devoted to talk and arguments, but the arguments do not make sense, or they are exceedingly shallow, or the characters talk past one another. On several occasions, they argue passionately for a viewpoint, are willing to go to battle over it, then suddenly appear to be arguing for or acting for the other side of the argument. When these changes take place, there is never a reason given as to why the hero changed their mind, nor do the other characters seem to notice the discrepancies. Perhaps this because Waid and Ross didn't notice them, either.

• Batman calls Superman's efforts "totalitarian" while running Gotham and other cities as a police state run by fear.

• After Batman's ruse to double cross Luthor is completed, he once again tells Superman that he is not on Superman's side. A few minutes later, he shows up thousands of miles away with his allies to fight on Superman's side.

• At the end, Batman looks on smiling when Superman finally agrees to operate with the cooperation of civilian authorities, but Batman and his allies have spent years running law enforcement in several cities "our way… ourselves."

• Superman and his allies call the prison they build a "gulag" – a perjorative term completely opposite in connotation from the noble intentions they have for it.

• Superman and his allies say that the new, reckless breed of heroes risk innocent lives, but Superman places his prisoners in the middle of the country, which – he admits – is a safety risk. He says that this was necessary so the reckless heroes could be monitored and taught, which does not justify why someone who could effortlessly bury Brainiac's parts on Saturn would collect the world's most dangerous superbeings in one location in the middle of the United States.

• Wonder Woman joins Superman's crusade against superheroes who are too aggressive, too reckless, and willing to kill, and in her efforts to control them, she is too aggressive, too reckless, and willing to kill. Yet, she is adamant that they must be stopped.

• In an argument before the final battle, Batman argues that perhaps it would be for the best if all the superbeings die. Superman vehemently disagrees. Minutes later, Superman says that perhaps he has no right to stop the bomb from killing all the heroes, but Batman does everything he can to stop one of the bombs. The two have exactly switched positions, and nobody seems to notice.

• When Batman incapacitates a temporarily-powerless Billy Batson, he does so with his foot alone and does not, for example, tranquilize him. This mistake risked the fate of the world.

• When Superman incapacitates a temporarily-powerless Billy Batson, he lets Billy decide whether or not to let him stop the final bomb, even though Billy had up to that very moment been guided only by the derangement that Luthor had induced in him. This mistake risked the fate of the world.

• While Batman and Wonder Woman are fighting on the same side, he insults her until she stops fighting their common enemy and turns to fight him. With the fate of the world at stake, they disengage from the battle to settle an argument of no apparent value.

• Superman spends the entire story trying to educate the reckless heroes because they needlessly kill villains. After the bomb kills many superbeings, Superman is on the verge of killing the civilians who dropped the bomb.

• After the bomb explodes, the Spectre describes the status as: "There were survivors. They are fewer in number, and their pain is great… but their war is over." Batman, minutes later, says that there are "enough [survivors] to leave us with the same problem as before. The same impasse. The same dangers."

• The problem that the story opened with was that there was a new breed of reckless superhero. At the end of the story, there are still enough of them to leave "the same problem as before." How are the problems solved? Superman tells the civilian authorities his solution, not counting the description of what it isn't, in only these words: "We're going to solve them with you… by living among you… We will earn your trust." An unmasked Batman offers a cockeyed grin of approval; the emptiness of those words is one of the strongest impressions I take away from Kingdom Come. Superman in no way articulates a solution to the problem of the reckless heroes. He merely says that the superheroes (who failed to solve the problem) will solve the problem with the civilian authorities (who were unable to solve the problem). During an epilogue, Wonder Woman says that what they went through gave the reckless heroes "plenty of incentive to learn." Batman, who had argued that Superman's methods were totalitarian, has the MLF working for him subdued by inhibitor collars.

Upon any but the shallowest scrutiny, Kingdom Come's script is shockingly disappointing. The entire middle half is devoted to telling us that imposing authority on superbeings by force is doomed to failure, then the epilogue breezily suggests that now it will work out fine.

And yet, there are fine moments along the way. Orion, having overthrown his father Darkseid as the ruler of Apokolips, describes the difficulties of ruling a former dictatorship in terms that consciously parallel the then-current situation in the former Eastern Bloc countries, commenting cogently on instability in Russia and war in the former Yugoslavia. The political rants of old Ollie Queen are both in-character and easy to imagine coming from the lips of a real former radical. Snippets of dialogue in several different languages capably give the story the feel of a real international drama. The shallow Planet Krypton aptly portrays modern fascination with pop culture in a world where that pop culture is about real people. And then there are gems such as the interaction between Ibn al Xu'ffasch and his father, the Batman:

"And they're prepared to fight tooth and nail with the generation that sired them?"

"Aren't all young people, son?"

Despite the very serious failures in the script, Kingdom Come is nevertheless a landmark and a must-read. It looks like an important story, usually feels like an important story, and as a result, is an important story. A small minority of readers (some 5%, based on Amazon reviews) focus on the script flaws and find the work to be outright bad. Most readers consider it an unqualified success. The truth lies between these: The art is a triumph, and Kingdom Come does enough right to keep readers paying attention from the start through the last scene – enough right to keep many readers from even noticing just how much goes wrong in all those speech balloons along the way.

Several works in the second half of the Eighties demonstrated that superhero comics can potentially be a vehicle for art on the highest level. The fact that a work so superficially pretty but deeply flawed as Kingdom Come can stand as one of the genre's landmarks doesn't reject that proposition, but it suggests that the potential has not been exercised that often.

Best of the Decade #10

Brief explanation: Top 10 lists are fun, and I've pondered a few possibilities: Scenes, comic books, stories, characters. Of all time, of the year. But since the odometer is about to roll on the decade of the 00's, I decided to run a countdown of my personal favorite scenes of the decade. (Of course, there are two Wednesdays left in the decade, so my apologies if one of the best scenes occurs in the next fortnight.)

Making this list taught me something: It hurt to leave some of the next-best entries off the list. And that tells me how much I enjoyed reading the stories I did. I wasn't reading comics basically at all from 1992 to 2004. I went back and read some of the ones I missed, but of course there are huge gaps in my reading overall; I can only include the comics I read. It also struck me how some really great issues didn't make this list, because they were good, but the quality was spread out over the whole issue; no shame there.

Seven writers made the list, and it pained me to leave a couple of other writers off. Once again, a sign that there was some top notch material out there and that my comic-reading time was well-spent.

#10 was in Brave and Bold v2 #6, the finale of a very fine story written by Mark Waid. An ensemble cast revolving around Batman fought against the Luck Lords, some bad guys who had the Book of Destiny (which debuted in Weird Mystery Tales, a comic I used to read in the Seventies). Because they had total knowledge of the future, they were a match for the heavyweight team pitted against them, including Supergirl and Hal Jordan. But they were scared of Batman, and the world's greatest detective used that knowledge to find the only way to beat them, to pit them against the Challengers of the Unknown. This worked because the Challengers have always been, by their tagline, living on borrowed time, and therefore live outside of Destiny.  Once the Challengers showed up, the Luck Lords lost their advantage, and the Challengers made their omniscience evaporate simply by running around and doing things.

Regardless of who was throwing the punches, it was Batman's victory, and the moment when he realized who could beat the Book of Destiny was one of those "stinger" moments that make heroes worth rooting for. Kudos to Mark Waid for tying together several non-superhero characters and concepts into a tight story that is great in many places, but culminates with the kind of moment that makes writing Batman so hard -- the writer has to touch upon a stroke of genius.

Next post: #9, the most recent scene to make the list, featuring two very powerful superheroes just standing around talking.