The end of 52 raises two questions: how was it; and now what?

SPOILERS behind the jump.

From the beginning, 52 struck me as more of an immediate concern than a narrative. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a narrative, but it did have a goal beyond telling the story of Booster, Ralph, Renee, et al.’s year in the spotlight. Specifically, 52 had to set up events in the regular DC titles which had already jumped ahead a year. Sometimes it did this with subtlety and finesse, sometimes not. However, the fact that 52 couldn’t control events affecting those other titles — including real-world concerns like shipping delays — meant that it was always going to be dealing with a moving target. I’m very impressed with DC for managing to keep 52 as cohesive as it was, dropped balls and dangling subplots notwithstanding.

The fact that 52 had to both tell its own story and extend tentacles into the rest of the superhero books also made it feel more like the DC equivalent of Time or Newsweek. Making 52 the main chronicle of the “lost year” (which the rest of us called May 2006-May 2007) meant that every issue had to tell us the most important events on DC-Earth (or “New Earth” now, I guess) that week. In that respect 52 was the first draft of history, as they say, but history doesn’t always lend itself to narratives, especially in the context of 52’s strictly-followed structure. Obviously 52 demands to be revisited, but clearly it was also intended to be experienced in the moment, with that first-draft spontanaiety. That’s why I think 52 couldn’t be perfect either as a narrative or a newsweekly: there was no way to pull meaning, either historically or dramatically, out of every single scene.  As closely plotted as it was, 52 still had to adapt, because ironically, its own timeline remained fluid.

Nevertheless, for a series in service to a status quo that didn’t seem too different One Year Later, 52 turned out to be cheerfully subversive. The Oolong Island scientists, the adventures of Ralph and Doctor Fake, fighting Intergang, and especially the secret of Supernova, personified the appeal of 52 itself. Each of those subplots offered a look into a secret history — a behind-the-scenes struggle with implications occasionally bigger than the primary-colored crossover fights involving the A-listers. I’m now particularly curious about what, if anything, Justice League of America will do with the 52-knowledge that was stored in Red Tornado.

And speaking of the biggest and worst-kept secret … now that it’s back, what gets done with it?

Beats me. I don’t get paid to shepherd these things.

I will say that the new, more finite Multiverse clearly can’t be the bottomless pit of continuity glitches and imaginary stories that the old one (or Hypertime) was. Most of the familiar parallel worlds seem to have returned, even if they have numbers instead of letters, and even if they look just a smidge different. It is rolling back the clock somewhat, but it’s also an admission that DC maybe shouldn’t have completely abandoned those old ideas back at the end of 1985.

The new Multiverse does give DC another opportunity to publish more “traditional” versions of its characters again, especially the characters which weren’t so homegrown. Obviously the main example of this is the Marvel Family, which to me works best when separated from a steadily advancing DC timeline. Indeed, they’re featured prominently in such a setting a couple of times in 52 #52.  If DC starts publishing a Marvel Family book set on Earth-5, and treats the mainline Earth’s Marvels as alternate-universe versions, I think that would be a nice spin on the Multiverse concept and a good way to preserve the classic Marvel Family tone.

Brian Hibbs points out, not incorrectly, that fans won’t take to the new Multiverse because they’ll want to read about the “real” versions of these characters. However, what determines which version is real? Until now, the real version has been the one appearing in the mainline titles. With the Multiverse, though, that’s no longer the case. The Multiverse not only allows an “authentic” version of a character to exist apart from its New Earth counterpart, it lets that version interact with the counterpart and with the rest of the main line. DC can both publish an Earth-5 Captain Marvel series and have that Cap meet Trials Cap — or it can isolate Earth-5 Cap and keep him unsullied. Either way, it lets DC claim that it’s being both true to Cap and moving him forward realistically, and it’s doing both in stories that “count.”

It doesn’t have to return to the exact pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths status quo either, as Nu-Earth-2 and Nu-Earth-10 show.  As much as I appreciate the attempts to update those worlds (including a new spelling for “innocence,” he said smugly), they look like the most obvious examples of fan entitlement.  I’m pretty positive we’ll see one or both, most likely in future JLA/JSA team-ups (we know where the “missing Kryptonians” went, right?), so I’ll find out soon enough.

But I digress.  The point of Hypertime is that every story “counts,” in one way or another, and it’s just our need to organize that draws the distinctions. Back in February I wrote that DC’s housecleaning never involves actually expanding the house — well, now it has. With its Charlton-Earth and Fawcett-Earth, 52’s Multiverse acknowledges that there’s now more than one way to tell its characters’ stories. In fact, 52’s Multiverse allows those visions to compete.  Alternate versions of characters have been influencing the “real” versions, and vice versa, probably since before the Superman radio series introduced Kryptonite.  It makes a certain kind of sense for these corporate-owned characters’ fates to be determined, in the long run, by the proverbial marketplace of ideas.  Personally, I’d hope that particular marketplace expands beyond guys my age, so that the overall market for superhero comics starts to grow again.  Basically, I agree with Hibbs that just using Earth-10 and Earth-3 for periodic fights with evil Supermen would be pretty shortsighted. 

Overall, 52 was a daring, ambitious experiment that had to be significant without giving its secrets away. The future it helped construct couldn’t contain any outward clues to its ultimate resolution. It was successful not because it connected Infinite Crisis with One Year Later, but because it made good on the promise of the former without doing any harm to the latter. We will not see another series like 52, and we can never experience it again like we have over the past year. Like its protagonists, it did the best it could with what it had, and it left DC’s superhero books a little richer without them even knowing it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under DC Comics, Grumpy Old Fan, Version 1.0 Blog@. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.