Broken Frontier

The most intriguing issue of round one, Week 4 contains three electrifying, tantalizing scenes of honest surprise, plus an ending that ties directly into OYL.

Morrison, Waid, Johns, and Rucka continue to weave all their many, many plot threads (though their tapestry’s shape and size is yet to be seen), and in this, the final week of the event’s first month,they bring a good number of these yarns to their respective, astonishing heads. Booster Gold’s story is the most weakly handled, or at least the shallowest in content for the issue, granting only a summation of what has gone before followed by a vague foreshadowing of his actions for the upcoming round two/month two. Beyond this one seemingly throwaway scene, though, Week 4 truly excels at gripping the reader with a handful of unexpected fates (which is a blessing after the somewhat lackluster, spinning-its-own-wheels Week 3, regardless of its single, brilliant Black Adam sequence).

The current doings: John Henry Irons, alone and – at least temporarily – unloved after ostracizing his niece from the Steelworks factory, suffers from hallucinations, a possible sign of encroaching lunacy. This brings the man to the brink of paranoia, emotional instability, and inevitably the scene culminates with a truly unexpected final panel. Meanwhile, Ralph Dibny confronts Wonder Girl and her burgeoning new-found cult, whose followers follow an old Kryptonian belief that submersion in the waters of the river Memon will grant the drownee a vision of the afterlife. Hoping for a chance to talk with his departed wife, Ralph readily succumbs, though the results are both bewildering and strange to the point of uncanny. On another side of town, Renee Montoya proceeds with her final days as a hired surveillance hand for the mysterious Question; it seems a pointless, dud job, but the money’s good and the detective’s time is almost served in full for the fee already paid. Before the sand in the hourglass empties entirely, though, a large, trenchcoat-laden fellow shambles into the building she watches, and what follows is a gleefully exciting succession of action and revelations.

The John Henry and Ralph Dibny arcs both hit a certain stride with this issue, and while I was vaguely intrigued before, now I’m itching to continue with their separate stories (which, I suppose, hopefully, will dovetail into one big story? Maybe? Please?) The Montoya/Question plot equally reaches a sincere stage of validation, as the duo’s sleuthing unravels a startling connection to a certain major, cosmic DCU villain. It’s exciting, but then so, I thought, was Week 2, while Weeks 1 and 3 both proved to be a more difficult beast to burden, whose ebb was difficult in comparison to the even-numbered weeks’ flow. I suppose one of the primary hurdles all readers will undertake when attempting to settle themselves into the concept of a weekly, year-long event, will be the ambiguous pacing which these first month’s issues certainly sustained; the story moves slow, and yet it’s weekly, so for once a comic book can afford to be such. For once, the writers can allow for a steady, rambling pace than gives equally as many thrills (if not more) in a single month than an individual issue of a monthly. Yet, psychologically, it’s a horse pill trying to be choked down with cod-liver oil – it feels like reading four issues, yet the pacing brings only a single issue’s speed of resolution (well, okay, maybe an extra-sized issue, but still…). Personally, I’m a champion of the slower pace, the truly epic model of telling a story from beginning to end without missing a single, solitary beat, but in a weekly, comic book format, it’ll require a hefty adjustment not to feel cheated, even for a patient dude such as moi.

I suspect that one major contributing factor to this oddly detached experience of reader-writer connection is the not-so-pleasant breaking down of scenes by day, as well as by week. The story would indelibly flow with a far greater grace if the writers utilized a more fluid, natural procession, allowing the events within each issue to become, to a degree, timeless. All the proceedings within 52 are understood to take place within that particular week, but it isn’t necessary to additionally divide each and every scene into terribly brief, quickly discarded days. Such a tactic allows for every single moment to take place in its own day, and none of them to occur within the same day – a conceit difficult to digest. Obviously, with only 16 pages of story, only the most integral events within a seven-day period can be spotlighted. This is an obstacle that is implicit with the novelty of the series’ story concept, and it simply hinders the believability and flow of its telling to continually mark the days in rapid-fire succession, page after page. It’s a blunt object over the reader’s head to get their attention, reminding them of how novel the story’s narrative is, rather than exercising a more casual, seductive approach, allowing its audience to be persuaded of its natural entertainment value in spite of its grandiose design.

On the visual side of things, Joe Bennett’s artwork remains strong and consistent for this, his final submission to the series, proving that one artist can tackle four weekly issues without the final product suffering from the hectic schedule. Also, lest I forget, the "History of the DCU" back-up feature continues to crawl apace with its design to bring all of continuity from the very first Crisis to this latest one together into a coherent documentation. We’ve gotten the cosmic background of the universe being born and the history of the Guardians, the Manhunters, and the birth of the Multiverse, and in this issue the Crisis on Infinite Earths is covered in its entirety. It’ll be interesting to see what Dan Jurgens is able to pack into this 10-part chronicling by its end (and what he isn’t able to, too).

On a final (let’s-go-out-on-a) high note: this latest issue ends with a significant surprise, a cliffhanger that answers a good number (precisely five, I think, if I counted correctly) of burning questions about the One Year Later/52 continuity gap. The revelation only raises more speculation (as all good honest answers must do), but this should keep the message boards rumbling merrily along until the next installment next week. All in all, the 52 concept is burning strong, though with certain, definite flickering, wavering faults that may just plague the series to its bitter end. Still, it’s proving to be a grand ride, and definitely an epic well told, despite its overarching, dramatic inconsistencies.