Wholly Schmidt!

Every now and then, As often as they can get readers to spend their money, both Marvel and DC like to have Big Dumb Events (BDE). Usually called something more marketable like crossovers (or more pretentious, like “Civil War: A Marvel Event in Seven Parts”), they’re big stories that take place across the entire publisher’s universe, or at least on a larger scale than most normal monthly titles. Often this will mean a special limited series bearing the BDE’s title that (allegedly) gives you the main event in a half dozen issues or so, as well as bits of the story spilling over into regular monthly titles to maintain continuity across titles as well as scheduling can allow.

DC’s most recent BDE was “Infinite Crisis”, a big somethingorother that shook stuff up and killed people and changed this and blah and that and whatever. It’s not particularly important to our discussion (or in retrospect, particularly coherent), except that it kicked off their Lesser Smaller Event, 52. At the end of Infinite Crisis, almost all of DC’s regular titles jumped forward one year in their stories. The hook for the story of 52 is that we know basically how Infinite Crisis ended, but not the specific fallout from the events. Of note, Superman, Batman, and Wonderwoman were all MIA for the year.

I don’t know exactly how 52 was conceived; I’m not sure if they had this idea and structured Infinite Crisis to set it up, or if the idea came up as a result of the planning for Infinite Crisis (groundwork for BDEs is often laid far in advance of the event itself), but 52 is a fifty-two issue series that pledges to fill us in on the missing year with one issue every week for a full “real” year. The gimmick part of 52’s hook is that this comic is attempting to take place in “real time”. A week between issues represents a week for the characters in the story, while over in Batman’s regular comic he might be in one big fight scene for three issues over the course of as many months.

It’s an ambitious undertaking on several levels. Most of the best comics I read can’t even maintain a monthly schedule. For a comic to ship every week is a logistical miracle, even facilitated by having a big team of authors and artists working on the title. There are a lot of loose ends and stories to tell coming out of Infinite Crisis. If we buy that this really was all planned out from the begining, that 52 really will give us all the answers promised, that’s also an impressive feat of planning and foresight. Even if we don’t end up with satisfying answers to all of Infinite Crisis’s questions, competantly writing and pacing several stories at once in a single title is also ambitious.

52 #21 (or week 21) will be released this week, and as we approach the half-way point, there’s not a whole lot to say about it. I’ve been trying to throw together some quick impressions for all of the comics I buy each week, and 52 is never easy to analyze. Imagine telling someone about a new TV show you saw last night, but breaking down your impressions to each chunk of the show between commercials. Sometimes an issue of 52 follows a particular group of characters for the bulk of the issue with just a few updates on other stories going on, and sometimes it’s split evenly between four different stories. At 28 pages an issue, that’s a lot going on but with very little progress in any single story. Reviews, trying to analyze everything on a weekly basis, only drive home how silly that approach is. A character may be shown only briefly in a small scene one week and the reviewers will lambast it for not adding anything, not giving us any further characterization or plot details, when it’s actually just doing exactly what 52 should be doing: It’s giving us a week in the world of DC. It’s driving home the continuity and the connected nature of these characters in their shared world, even when their actions don’t specifically impact the other characters in that single issue. Every character doesn’t have to have a big defining moment or startling revelation to warrant inclusion, and not everyone deserves the same amount of “screen time” (though I suspect the editing team is probably aiming for that in the long run).

The bottom line is that there isn’t a lot to tell someone about 52 on a week to week basis, so I’m not going to try to. Week to week, there’s only one thing interesting about 52: Are they still on schedule? Have they still managed to publish a new issue every single week? So far, the answer is yes. I might pipe up from time to time if the art is significantly bad, or good, or if there’s some really big revelation or conclusion to a long running story. Those will be the exception though. It’s going to be very late in the series before we can look back and really start to make judgements about the stories we’re being given.