Broken Frontier

World War III begins, meanders, and ends in this absolute waste of a reader’s digest account of what could have been a spectacular all-at-once crossover.

Well, color me unimpressed: the big, big 52 event has finally arrived, and it’s about as poor a climax to the Black Adam storyarc as readers could have gotten. Not only is Adam’s rampage against…uh…the world…utterly unexplained (wasn’t it solely China that had backstabbed him and he had issues with?) but even as the threat of a true World War was meticulously set-up by the American heroes wanting to cross China’s borders with China threatening – and I quote – "war" if they did, such a conflict never arises, and the great "World War III" is nothing more than every American hero (plus a handful of cameo foreign-hero appearances) beating the snot out of Black Adam. That’s it. That’s "World War III." That’s about as far from a "World War" or anything that even deserves to be numbered as the third of such as I’ve ever seen/read/witnessed.

Maybe some vague sense as to what was seen in 52: Week Fifty will be established in the WWIII one-shots, but they’ve got a lot to own up to. First off, the situation is that Adam is hell-for-leather on his way to China, so in Day 2 he’s in Egypt fighting the Marvel Family, which is a relatively logical place to begin. But then in Day 4 he’s in Australia: uh…China by way of Egypt and then Australia? There’s no indication that anything specific detoured him, but then little else makes sense in this supposedly monumental issue, the cover of which claims "World War III begins here!" Only, outside of the first four pages (the Egypt and Australia moments) the only event that actually takes place in Week Fifty is the end of WWIII – the sixth and seventh, final days inside Chinese borders.

Such faulty advertisement of this like led me to believe that Week Fifty would be a prelude of sorts, with the gratuitous epic of honest war spread out amongst a whirlwind of four one-shot specials. Instead, DC has pumped out a splash-page riddled abortion of an event, told in such fleeting sequences of Rob-Liefeld-esque, representational displays of battle (look! Our arms are flailing about! That must mean we’re fighting!), that instead of wonder or awe or excitement, the only sensation the reader walks away with is the surreal understanding that a brawl has taken place right in front of them, with someone winning and someone losing, and that it was over quicker and seemed far less interesting than anything in the movies. In the DCU alone, there have been bigger and grander battles than this, and those certainly weren’t overbearingly called World bloody Wars.

All the great moral equivocations of the Black Adam character are defenestrated right out the window by this point, to be replaced by a silent berserker with pupil-less eyes and a want to (apparently) fly around the entire world before getting to the point and "doing what needs to be done" which at one point is what Adam says he’s doing. In fact (following this metaphor), it seems like the berserker-clone version is the very one who threw the old Adam out and away, to take his place and mar his image – that’s what the latest storytelling has read like, that’s how effective the writer’s responsible have been of late: this reads like the Clone Saga. ‘Nuff said?

Almost, but first let’s address the greatest sin – the conclusion. SPOILER: It’s a complete deus ex machina and it makes zero sense. One moment Captain Marvel admits that the Egyptian gods refuse to take Adam’s powers away as they fully support what he’s doing. Yet somehow the Big Red Cheese is able to yell "Shazam!" and call down the signature, transforming lightning, which he grabs hold of without changing into mortal form, battle-rams Adam with it, which does change Adam back into mortal form (and the Egyptian gods would allow this why?). Then Marvel reveals that he was able to get the Egyptian gods to allow him to change Adam’s magic word. No further explanation given. Just – poof – somehow, for some reason, the Egyptian gods, who completely supported Adam and what Adam was doing, decided that it was okay to change Adam’s magic word into something "he will never guess. Never." And that is a terrible, hackneyed, utterly unintelligible ending to what could have been a marvelous story and a far-reaching event, especially for the primary characters involved. Oh, and even though Adam himself doesn’t know that his magic word has been changed, he’s later seen experimenting, trying to guess what the new word might be. Ugh.

So what of the one-shots? Haven’t a clue, but obviously they won’t add much to the story of Adam or 52 in general. Don’t believe the hype: this one, single, 22-page issue was "World War III." Sure, there’ll be some minor deaths and One Year Later continuity gaps filled-in somewhere in the specials, but they’ll have little if anything imperative to add to the WWIII mega-event. The creators had the chance to really make this one week in the world of the DCU something special, and instead they made it something tired and bewilderingly disappointing. The story – especially after all the wonderful set-up – seemed like a surefire, foolproof hit. So what that then makes those involved I can’t say, but they sure do seem to have gone out of their way to make this story as stock, unimpressive, and by-the-books rote as humanly possible.