Folks, you’ve heard about it whispered in the corners of DC fandom. You’ve been confused at the odd reference to it in those “modern comics” you devour week after week. What in the darned heck is “Zero Hour”? Why is it called that? Why is it numbered backward? Who is Extant and should I really care? Well, wonder no more, gentle readers. Not only will I be recapping all five issues of the titled event comic, but I will also be reviewing the whole damned thing. Yes, every official lead-up and questionably connected tie-in that DC Comics has chosen to fill up their hefty omnibus tome that haunts the corner of my writing desk. Come with me on this journey through time and more time and some space as we dive into the mess that is “Zero Hour: A Crisis In Time”.
Written by William Messner-Loebs, Dan Jurgens, Alan Grant, and Tom “Tennessee” Peyer
Illustrated by Steve Lieber, Curt Shoultz, Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, Bret Blevins, Arnie Jorgensen, Derec Aucoin, and James Pascoe
Colored by Matt Webb, Gregory Wright, Adrienne Roy, and Gene D’Angelo
Lettered by Albert De Guzman, Gaspar Saladino, Todd KleinThe universe is unraveling, destruction working its way from the future to the present and from the past to the present, and the heroes of Earth gather to form a plan of action. Meanwhile, anomalies continue, such as the appearance of multiple incarnations of Hawkman ultimately morphing into a new winged wonder!
A reminder, first of all, that I’m scoring these comics based on their relationship to the core event, with my patented Zero Hour Score (Series relevance + individual merit)!
This week, it’s a “Zero Hour” entry week! We get some serious main plot progression, some gritty Hawkman content, a super fun Batman tale, and the finale to one of DC’s lesser-known yet long-running cosmic series! Only here do you get such diverse content, folks!
Hawkman #13
Written by William Messner-Loebs
Illustrated by Steve Lieber and Curt Shoultz
Colored by Matt Webb
Lettered by Albert De Guzman
Ah, Hawkman and “Zero Hour”, a convoluted continuity match made in heaven. All kidding aside, the creative team on this book is rock solid! William Messner-Loebs is one of those workhorse writers from the nineties (who’s had it tough in recent times, my thoughts go out to him!) who regularly turned in pretty enjoyable stories, if not full-length runs. Plus, early Steve Lieber art! The Hawkman in question here is Katar Hol, an intergalactic bird-themed policeman. Messner-Loebs gives him a classic brooding personality but manages to anchor him in reality by showing his genuine connections with his family around him. Lieber’s art style is less confident and more protean than his current work that people are likely more familiar with, but he’s working well within the tone of this book. With Curt Shoultz on inks, we get a style that gets a lot of emotive facial expressions down pat but feels appropriately urban and grungy, with loose linework and heavy crossed-hatched shadowing. Before long, Hawkman flies through some wonderful black and white textures and patterns, a great auteur rendering of dimensions-smashing that doesn’t feel derivative of the usual “Zero Hour” rainbows. And then comes face to face with the terrifying Hawk God on this fantastic splash page:
The two grapple (somehow), with a great mid-fight break in which we see a sequence of five panels depicting Hawkman’s helmet dropping. It adds significantly to the deep drama this book has built, on top of the god using haunting imagery of Hawkman’s father. At the last minute, however, Katar is saved by two other Hawk people, Carter and Shiera Hall, who both get caught in an energy blast and fuse to become an entirely new Hawk being! This last part felt like it perhaps cranked the volume a touch too high whilst adding in new ideas very last minute, but if you can unplug from the narrative and take in the searing psychedelic yellows and pinks that Matt Webb provides with the colors, it’s one heck of a ride. Also, the new Hawkbeing seems to be important to the core “Zero Hour” story! That’s a point!
Continued belowZero Hour Score: 7.3 – A comic that takes the grit and bombast of the nineties and bleeds it out into something only slightly incoherent. Also establishes a seemingly important player to the macro story.
Zero Hour #3
Written by Dan Jurgens
Illustrated by Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway
Colored by Gregory Wright
Lettered by Gaspar Saladino
ALERT, ALERT, we got the latest main story chapter ahead! What I love here is how consistent Jurgens is with his tone in this series (despite knowing the intense pressure he was under to produce this work). From the first page, we tick the box that “Zero Hour” is a certified Crisis ™ with a Flash death in Wally West, confirmed by the elder speedster Jay Garrick. It’s a poignant scene as Jay laments why he, the oldest in the Flash line, is still alive whilst the younger generation is picked away. Moving right along, Jurgens and Ordway flex their superhero chops, as they draw a half double-page spread of the Justice Society of America. Each member is exhibiting pitch-perfect physical characteristics, like Sentinel’s impossibly straight posture contrasted with Wildcat’s bent and grizzled stance. From there, we actually get a lot of continuity drawn upon from the tie-ins we’ve covered in this omnibus, which makes the reading that much richer. We touch on things like Superman’s parents re-appearing and Rokk Krinn dealing with his Time Trapper reveal, both of which are beats that you just don’t get in massive crossovers like this anymore. Building off this, we get a classic character-crammed splash page, and it’s as if Jurgens has turned over the DC Comics official action figure box onto the page.
Chaotic, but charming! From here on, we draw on a few more tie-in plots like our newly born Hawkman/person being a psychic fusion with Carter, Shiera, and every multiversal incarnation of the character. Apparently, all of these bird people were a result of residual energy from “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, which is a neat idea. Gregory Wright gets to do some mind-melding colors here, painting a tonne of different costumes that still all stand out on top of the “Zero Hour” rainbow background. The gathered heroes decide to work together despite time/space differences, thankfully. Meanwhile, we cut to a brutal scene of Extant giving the JSA an absolute thrashing. Jurgens seems to be using Extant as a commentary on the nineties here, giving him a short temper and bratty personality as he literally eliminates the older, ‘boring’ generation. The issue closes on chaos with the other heroes as cities are dropping on top of each other (don’t ask how) and a reveal from Extant as he pulls his mask off to reveal… Waverider’s face?
Zero Hour Score: 8.5 – Brings together a lot of disparate tie-in beats whilst marching the plot forward steadily, with great art and character beats.
Batman: Shadow Of The Bat #31
Written by Alan Grant
Illustrated by Bret Blevins
Colored by Adrienne Roy
Lettered by Todd Klein
When I saw Bret Blevins’ name in the credits here, I knew this was gonna be straight-up Rowan-nip. Blevins is one of the greater unappreciated artists of the late eighties, doing some killer work on books like “New Mutants”. The premise of the story works perfectly for Blevins’ more animated, pulpy style, with the time anomalies joining Batman and Robin up with an alternate, clumsier Alfred who dreams of becoming a detective. Alan Grant is a classic “Batman” writer, and nails the dynamic here, giving Robin (Tim Drake Robin, for those unsure) a worried and deeply analytical tone, and Batman a mix of the stoic animated series voice, with the camp and drama of the old ’66 stuff. Blevins highlights these in his visuals to a hilarious effect, with Robin constantly beset with a worried brow and Batman sporting a scowl deep and furrowed enough to impress Judge Dredd. Adrienne Roy also lends a lot to this pulpy tone, coloring the book with a more pastel palette and using subtle airbrushed shading to bring everything to life. The plot henceforth is simple enough, with our heroes stumbling into the trap of a gangster named Biff and having to be rescued by the alternate-Alfred. This is in no means a slight, rather, it feels more like Grant is just feeding Blevins and Roy some easy pitches to go out swinging hard. When I mention gangsters in this story, I don’t mean that in the blank-slate, nineties-Image Comics style. These boys have genuine personality! Just take a look!
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That level of exaggeration is applied to every character in the story, and it makes the issue so much more compelling than I ever expected. The ending is tonally perfect, with Batman and Robin bringing the hurt to the goons in single panel snapshots, feeling like an echo of the ’66 series’ “BIFF! BAM!” style. There’s also a great panel of a hypnotized Batman looking at a warped view of Gotham, which is so melty and distorted it feels like a natural evolution of Blevins’ work on the “X-Men: Inferno” storyline. It ain’t the most complicated story, folks, but by golly-gee-whiz, is it endearing.
Zero Hour Score: 7.0 – I have only scored this down somewhat since it’s not wholly relevant to the overarching plot. This is a good-as-heck comic!
L.E.G.I.O.N. ’94 #70
Written by Tom “Tennessee” Peyer
Illustrated by Arnie Jorgensen, Derec Aucoin, and James Pascoe
Colored by Gene D’Angelo
Lettered by Gaspar Saladino
Now this story is a fascinating one that blindsided me in my reading. Like last week’s coverage, this is another series finale tied to “Zero Hour”, but it also gets the lucky double-page-count boost, as well as being a segue into a future sequel series, “R.E.B.E.L.S. ’94”. Whew! Tom Peyer, going by Tennessee here, is a writer I’ve heard a lot of good things about, but have read surprisingly little of. He’s spun a whole lot of plot threads into this issue, most of which are resolved coherently whilst some are quite aggressively pushed to the side. The connection to “Zero Hour”, first of all, is spinning off from a sequence in issue #3 that we just covered above, with our hero Vril Dox noticing the time anomalies and launching a probe into the distortions. It’s very much the execution of the idea I discussed in week one, with Tom Peyer using the event as a springboard to clean up continuity and launch new stories, as this probe leads to the team landing a brand-new spaceship that they eventually use to escape at the end of the issue. Everything between these points is narrative definitely designed for fans that had likely been following for the last sixty-nine issues (nice), but I will do my best to analyze and make sense of it!
Jorgensen, Aucoin, and Pascoe set the tone nicely on the first page, with Vril Dox cast heavily in silhouette and beaming with neon, cosmic color provided by D’Angelo. Dox has been set up by his *checks notes* infant supervillain son Lyrl, believed to be a villain/tyrant by the planet Arga Prime. Dox then reels in all the L.E.G.I.O.N. members he can get, even depriving Strata of the chance to enjoy a honeymoon or marriage at all with his wife Garv (what I meant by plots being slammed to the side). There is a whole bunch of conflict, with the art time providing a delightfully kinetic and blocky art style, reminiscent of Joe Madureira in his prime. Peyer does well with the banter between Vril and Lyrl when they do confront one another, with Vril hamming up the role of disappointed father and Lyrl embodying the idea of a super-smart baby throwing a tantrum. Ultimately, the team escapes from Lyrl on this mysterious new ship, with a whole bunch of plot threads left dangling for the new series to pick up on.
Zero Hour Score: 6.8 – Deals with some narrative threads left by the core series, but is ultimately a finale to its own story. Solid workman art from a big team, and a story that feels a touch too cramped but likely appeals to long-time readers a lot more.
