As if the conclusion of DC’s 52 hasn’t given me enough to be sad about, the end of the series also means the end of Douglas Wolk’s companion blog, 52 Pickup. He spends his final weekly post rounding up the character development for the series’ stars, listing still-unanswered questions, and as usual, providing annotations for the issue itself:

Pp. 28-30: I’ve read this sequence over and over, and I totally fail to understand what’s happening. As far as I understand, Butterfly-Mind is attracted to the suspendium, and then physically trapped inside of Skeets’ dying robot husk, which is reinforced with more suspendium. (Maybe we could just start calling it Plotdeviceum?) Then Booster hands off Skeets to Supernova, who throws the robot-with-butterfly-inside; it lands in an explosion I don’t think we’ve seen before in Week 1, Day 1, where Sivana just happens to stumble upon Mr. Mind, who is now in caterpillar form again, and puts him in his lab in a jar, where he’s exposed to more Plotdeviceum, and somehow ends up in Dr. Magnus’s lab at the beginning of week 2 (because all mad scientists actually share the same lab), where he crawls into Skeets, and proceeds to repeat the entire sequence in an infinite loop, getting older each time. That cannot be right. Can someone explain what I’m missing?

Doug thanks the creators of 52 for a year he won’t forget, at the end of the post, but I felt that those of us who followed his blog all year long should thank him for the same thing, as well…

(In best superhero-comic-fashion, this isn’t the last we’ll hear of Wolk; in addition to his ongoing work for Salon and Publishers Weekly, he has a book out of interest soon:

It’s called Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, it’s being published by Da Capo Press at the beginning of July, I’m really happy with how it turned out, and I encourage you to pre-order a copy here. 52 is mentioned only in passing, but there’s a 30-page chapter on Grant Morrison (and Seven Soldiers and The Invisibles in particular), as well as essays about Question creator Steve Ditko, Mogo co-creator Alan Moore, and Mystery In Space writer/artist Jim Starlin. It’s also got chapters on David B., Chester Brown, Carla Speed McNeil, Dave Sim, Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel, Tomb of Dracula, superheroes, superreaders, bad comics, good comics, art comics, and much more.

Don’t ask - Just buy it, as they say.)

Related: Someone at Something Awful makes a guess at which writer wrote what, JG Jones talks about the final cover for the series, and various people ask for a Ghost Detectives series (Wizard, the mothership, me).

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