We made it, folks. Time and existence themselves were threatened, but we were saved by the heroes that continuously lift us up, channeling their energy into an angsty teenager in order to restart the Big Bang. Yes, it’s chaotic, yes, it doesn’t make a tonne of sense. But it’s “Zero Hour”, baby. It’s DC Comics at their most superhero-nonsense-y, and we love to see it. Now that we’ve made it to the end, let’s take a look at some of the aftershocks, and take one last final look at the event as a whole before the close. Take my hand one last time, dear readers, as we navigate our way back from the end of time.
Written by Louise Simonson, Geoff Johns, and Jeff Katz
Illustrated by Jon Bogdanove, Dennis Janke, Dan Jurgens, and Norm Rapmund
Colored by Glenn Whitmore and Hifi
Lettered by Ken Lopez and Randy GentileA ZERO HOUR tie-in, “Peer Pressure” part 1! Someone’s cutting Clark Kent’s face out of childhood photos…and trying to kill him, too! Who is this new menace? Continued in SUPERMAN #0.
Superman: The Man Of Steel #0
Written by Louise Simonson
Illustrated by Jon Bogdanove and Dennis Janke
Colored by Glenn Whitmore
Lettered by Ken Lopez
This was a neat little issue to close out the omnibus! Who better but the original and the best hero himself to herald the beginning of a new era, and under one of his most underrated creative teams, to boot. Simonson gives us a very tight retelling of the Kents’ adoption of Clark. Her tone for the voices of Jor-El and Lara are refreshing, feeling more inhuman and clinical, yet still caring in some way, as they discuss Clark’s potential to grow up and rule as a super being on Earth. As soon as we’re out of this recap segment, we get a clear and confident splash page from Bogdanove and Janke. The focal here isn’t just Superman, who’s recognizable even without his chest shield showing, but the sprawling, futurist utopia of Metropolis, which the artists render with a mix of art deco and modern architecture. Whitmore’s classy blue-centric colors on the city also make it shimmer without relying on too many digital effects: simply, the eye for a stunning palette. I’m also a huge fan of Simonson spending time on developing Clark’s relationship with Lois, which seems to set a precedent for years of storytelling to come. The art team does some great work on fleshing out the human side of this, having Superman take four panels to change back into human clothes from his costume when he could have easily done it in an instant. It’s such a fun point of detail!
The story builds off “Zero Hour” in a way that’s pretty typical for crossovers in this style, meaning that it fades away in the hero’s memory as time, space, and the universe ‘heals’ itself. It’s a shame for the material it’s building off, but it does give the book a fresh start and an almost clean slate to build new stories off. Speaking of, the story here is a bit of a creepy one, with a masked villain sending Clark pictures from his childhood with our protagonist’s face cut out of them. It’s not totally fleshed out here, but it’s a nice grounded approach and palette cleanser, coming off the cosmic explosion we’ve spent eleven weeks on.
Zero Hour Score: 6.5 – A good restart for the series, but essentially leaves “Zero Hour” in the dust – boo!
Booster Gold #0
Written by Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz
Illustrated by Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapmund
Colored by Hifi
Lettered by Randy Gentile
This one isn’t actually in the omnibus but was recommended by dear reader @ChadWalters on Twitter. Considering it not only features our favorite crossover event but also has Dan Jurgens involved in art duties, I thought I’d check it out. For context, this issue shows Booster Gold from 2008-ish as having been thrust into the timestream with a bunch of Blue Beetles, who run into Extant and Parallax scheming the events of “Zero Hour”. Since the timestream isn’t connected to the normal flow of time, this is possible within the trappings of the DC universe, though you’d think it would be much more crowded! One thing to bear in mind is that this is a very paint-by-numbers Geoff Johns comic from the mid-2000s. This is both to the comic’s benefit and detriment.
Continued belowIn terms of the good, there’s some retconning that shows Parallax and Extant communicating much more than they did in the original crossover. This gives context to Extant wanting to work for Parallax, who promises to return someone ‘important’ to him, and also shows the more fallible, human side of Hal, as he notes he wants to keep Alan Scott alive when he takes out the JSA, so he can ‘know how far his successor has surpassed him’. The bad is that there’s not enough time spent on these motivations. The Extant motivation is super vague and not explored here, I’m assuming the person he’s referring to is his old partner Dove but it’s never explored, even in other Johns comics as far as I can see (please correct me if I’m wrong!). There is also an unfortunate, poorly-aged joke about Booster ‘rear-ending’ Barry Allen, which even outside of its connotations feels out of place and dates the comic immediately. Outside of this, the Jurgens art is perfectly serviceable. It doesn’t have the bombast and grandeur of the original comic that Ordway’s inks brought, but Rapmund’s cleaner inks and Hifi’s modern coloring give his art a lot of class and sheen. His rendering of Parallax is fun and feels very reminiscent of the holier-than-thou feel from the original crossover, but there’s not much else to note outside of that. The second half of the issue deals with a plot-line specific to the series, so I won’t go into it in this coverage.
Zero Hour Score: 6.0 – Does some interesting retconning but doesn’t build on it enough, and feels very much like a product of its era.
Final Thoughts
I was pleasantly surprised with my readthrough of this comic! I had read the mainline series years ago and didn’t particularly enjoy it, which makes sense because it wasn’t really a complete story. For better and worse, “Zero Hour” leans a lot on its tie-in issues and trusts that readers will be caught up too. It’s an issue that modern comics have navigated a little better, like Hickman’s red-highlighted issues in the HoX/PoX/Dawn/Reign of X era, but is, unfortunately, a little typical of crossovers in the nineties. With some considered story mapping, this crossover has the potential to stand up against some of DC’s best!
As much as I think this kind of edited read would make for a cleaner overall story, I enjoyed reading this comic on a weekly basis with warts and all. As I stated at the start of my coverage, I intended for this recap to not only be an examination of the event but how it reflects its little slice of the DC universe in the nineties. As it turns out, DC Comics of mid-1994 were wild! There was plenty of acclaimed series that stood out immediately, like the Simonson/Bogdanove “Superman” stories, the Kesel/Grummett “Superboy story, the Marz/Banks “Green Lantern” with my boy Kyle Rayner, and the Grant/Blevins “Shadow of the Bat” story. In the middle, there was a bunch of super eclectic and almost alien line-ups like “L.E.G.I.O.N.” and “Outsiders” which were a bunch of fun to be thrown into and immersed in, and “Hawkman” and “Guy Gardner: Warrior” who were artistically and stylistically unique and well-crafted. There were a bunch of stinkers, too, like “Team Titans”, “Anima” and “Damage”, but even outside of their quality, they were glimpses of a DC universe that I haven’t really seen since then, which was fascinating!
In terms of the story itself, I find myself drawing comparisons to one of the series’ contemporaries, the Marvel crossover “Onslaught” (currently being covered on the Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men podcast, if you’re interested in that!). “Zero Hour” starts off incredibly strong, with a cosmic-level villain who menaces the whole DC universe into producing a massive super-group to take him on. At some point, however, there’s a lack of communication and a bunch of editorial influence clearly present in both stories that start to affect the quality of the story being told, which makes for some unnatural-feeling narrative decisions. “Zero Hour” feels like it doesn’t suffer as much from this, however, and feels like it has more staying power just because of the loose nature that tie-ins had to adhere to. The whole point was, the universe and space/time was rupturing, and mish-mashing together! It made for some great and wildly unique feeling stories, like Superman meeting about ten different Batman incarnations, or a silent “Green Arrow” comic where two realities play out simultaneously on the page vertically adjacent. Even though it started to wane towards the end, “Zero Hour” ultimately gave its tie-ins more of a playground to get messy in.
But did it stick the landing? Yes and no. I was pretty mad that Extant was being built up so much only to be pushed off the table in the blink of an eye by Parallax, but I was also impressed by the way Parallax was integrated into the story. On a similar note, I do feel like the final event of the issue itself finished way too quickly with the amount of story momentum it had gathered. Thankfully, a lot of these threads were explored in tie-ins like “Green Lantern” #0, but it goes to show that the structured end of the event was inherently flawed.
So, that was “Zero Hour”. If you love weird, off-beat DC continuity, high drama, incredibly purple dialogue, nonsense Superhero science on cosmic levels, and the nineties, I can wholeheartedly recommend this series! I can even recommend this series for those who’ve come off more recent events like “Death Metal” and want more of that kind of thing, as I feel Jurgens explores that kind of high-concept sci-fi with a whole bunch of earnestness. But, I can only recommend this as a full, tie-in-centric read. Even a three-quarters read. Reading the main event alone, you’re not getting the full story, and you’re also missing a lot of great character moments and charm. “Zero Hour” is by no means an accessible, easy, or perfect read. But if you’re willing to put in the work, there’s a lot of fun to be had in the pages of this mighty omnibus. As always, feel free to share your thoughts on here, or feel free to yell in my Twitter ear! *insert fade to white*
