Broken Frontier

Ralph Dibny’s tale of pathos and pretense comes to an irreversible close, but does so in a manner that betrays every tenet of the classic detective story.

To summarize what has come before: Ralph has been obsessively interred within a nine-month mission to resurrect his dead wife; in the course of this fixation he’s been suicidal, personally botched a near-successful revivification due to his own mistrust of a Kryptonian cult, been contacted by the Helmet of Fate, and led upon a magical mystery tour across the Tenth Age of Magic in order to claim the mantle of Fate and prepare the way for the ritual that will, at last, return his wife to him for once and for all. Right? Wrong! In one of the most ill-prepared, crudely preplanned plot twists in recent memory, everything you ever knew about this 52 subplot is proven incorrect, insincere, a lie, a complete and utter twisty turnabout red herring misdirection coup de théâtre gotcha!

There’s a two-page prelude featuring Montoya besides, though it holds the supreme merit of being less worthwhile than the latest History of the DCU back-up, which, ironically, is relatively informative this one issue (Green Arrow by Waid and Scott McDaniel, and it covers Ollie’s iconoclastic past and recent rise to mayor). For anyone who hasn’t caught on to Montoya’s ultimate fate, this issue’s opening continues to hint with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, though it adds nothing new, not even supplementary.

The art by Darick Roberson is a treat, especially as he handles the full pencil-and-ink art chores, producing a gorgeous issue with style and intensity to spare. Sadly, the story itself is a difficult pill to swallow, made all the more so for its ludicrous attempt to so thoroughly alter the every aspect of a subplot that readers have followed for forty-two near-consecutive issues. The result is a finale so absorbed with its own pretensions, cleverness, and sense of histrionics, that hardly a panel of it is buyable or enjoyable. It’s also mired in detective story allusions, while simultaneously ignoring or outright breaking the very conventions it so presumably, puerilely revels within.

SPOILERS FROM HEREON IN:

There are two schools of detective fiction, the first being "Realist," wherein the detective has unfettered access to modern pathology and forensics, science and psychology and technology and generally such procedural tales are inaccessible to the laymen, who may enjoy the story on a number of grounds, but cannot join in on the unraveling of the clues and the journey to an intellectually-reasoned final solution. The second school is "Intuitionist," a variety that, according to A.A. Milne during his mystery writing years, is a genre wherein the detective…

"…solves the mystery through pure intellect, reasoning upon facts which are known to the reader. Such an emphasis on pure human reason is the core of the intuitionist approach."

The Intuitionist approach is the core model of Victorian and pulp detective fiction, and absolutely the field into which Ralph Dibny fittingly falls. Sadly, the tale within 52 Week Forty-Two reveals this – Dibny’s final, ultimate detective story – to be little more than a stacked deck, long ago rigged by a method the reader couldn’t have guessed, and which, quite frankly, Ralph couldn’t and therefore shouldn’t have been able to ascertain in vague overview let alone detail.

Foremost is the revelation of the mystery gun, which was a completely unprecedented (and therefore un-guessable) machina with the power of a deus, and so when Ralph, the great detective, declares he unraveled Faust’s scheme "Because…I’m a detective," the truth is that he hadn’t, in fact, detected a damn thing, but rather allowed the gun, in a roundabout way, to do the dirty work for him. His sole supposed, actual detection is offered when he reveals that Tim Trench was the "victim of a locked-room murder where you (Faust, masquerading as the Helm of Fate) were the weapon" and "what’s the first thing you do with a murder weapon? You look for prints." This is meant literally, not figuratively, yet how Ralph managed such when Faust inhabited the false Helm (otherwise it would have reverted back into a wedding ring, as it did this issue) is unclear, or, rather, never considered or construed.

The fact that Fate was never a part of the story, and that Dibny was never on a journey to resurrect his wife, and that (apparently) the entirety of Ralph’s journey was solely about pulling the rug out from under Felix Faust’s feet, outright invalidates everything readers have invested themselves in prior to. It makes for one very drawn-out, Hellblazer-esque hat trick wherein the protagonist pulls a fast one over the forces of darkness and the underworld (in this particular case, Faust and Neron). The few Intuitionist, witness-the-detective-detecting flourishes to the tale are nonsense, literally nonsensical, and the rest is mired in the supernatural, which is itself a foul of Intuitionist detective fiction – absolutely nothing supernatural is allowed. Though even should the reader permit such for a story completely enmeshed with demons and magic and more, the rules of the eidolon elements are never clear and what little is revealed already contradicts (a Ninth Age Magic device working in the Tenth Age without differentiation? Faust inside a helmet that reverts to a ring when he exits it, and yet somehow Ralph dusted it for prints while still a helmet without Faust knowing?). Even the final, fatal con with trapping Neron within a magic circle – the rules of the unbinding, in which Ralph is needed to personally release whomsoever is caught inside, is not so much as hinted at until Ralph is already dead and the story is done, which breaks the most foundational of all detective fiction tenets: according to classic mystery writer S.S. Van Dine…

"…the reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described."

There was never a time for the reader to join in on the "mystery" and especially not its hokey, sensational, illogical solution. The mystery behind Ralph’s missing wedding ring was that it was the fake Helmet of Fate? Uhm…okay. The gun he’s carried around all this time was a wishing gun that has no precedence within the DCU canon to even exist? Wow…uh…sure. The straw golem of Sue was really Felix Faust pretending to be her? Okay, it all can work (in broad strokes), but for God’s sake, why? And how was any reader to manage enough insight for the twists to be anything other than arbitrary sensation and indiscriminate manipulation of their expectations?

Sure, we’ll all be surprised – we couldn’t be anything but surprised because nothing was presented in a fashion to allow for so much as a suspicion to be raised. Morrison is the likeliest culprit for writing the supernatural side of things, and as he’s infamous for his metafictional moments of speaking through characters to the readers themselves, there’s a panel near the end in which Dibny lays the meat of matter clearly on the table. He reveals that his own use of the wishing gun (of which putting his finger upon the trigger was enough to operate it – he didn’t even have to fire it!) set into motion the entirety of Dibny-events as chronicled in 52; Ralph claims that Faust…

"…did nothing that wasn’t preordained the moment I made my wish, you charlatan! ‘The end is already written!’ You just don’t get it! You had no chance, because I was never caught in your spell! YOU WERE CAUGHT IN MINE!"

This ending (the twist) was already written, and no, readers didn’t catch on to it, and never did have a chance, it’s true, because we were caught in the scripter’s poorly executed, unconsidered writing. Oh, I’m sorry, I meant "spell." Apparently, Ralph wished this entire length of 52-event back at the very beginning, when the wishing gun was tucked firmly inside his mouth, and this entails that he wished for all that occurred to come about in the manner that it did, or at least that he was as much a pawn in the wishing gun’s scheme to fulfill his wish as Faust was.

Though the most important facet of any story – why? Ralph is allowed to die and therefore become "reunited" with Sue, but why did he have to die in such a convoluted fashion (and how does a piece of metal propelled as though a bullet pierce the breast of a rubber man and not bounce off)? Surely Sue wasn’t in Neron’s world, as Morrison’s own creation Zauriel attests to there being an alternative. So why? Perhaps the wishing gun killed Ralph so that he could get his wish, but then how and why did Ralph know how it was all to play out and conclude? The ending is an ending, but to what purpose? Perhaps one will be revealed, but on an intellectual level this finale fails fantastically in every way imaginable, breaking all the tenants of fair-play detective story craftsmanship. And on an emotional purchase, it’s simply unclear as to what it all portends, which might intrigue some, but regardless it makes for a major character’s final moments a hollow progression, unforgivably contrived and ultimately just plain silly.

The story within 52 Week Forty-Two is comic book self-referentiality at its most abusive, ridiculous, and self-destructive, offering the complete ruination of what would otherwise have been a provocative yarn. For a story that overbearingly swears itself as planted firmly within and playing upon detective-story conventions, it’s highly illogical, and utterly unintuitive, and most egregiously it fails to acknowledge the most fundamental tenets of the very fiction it so purports to revere.