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March 5, 2006
One Year Later Arrives Like A Wet Blanket
There have been a few special occasions in DC's history when I've looked forward to seeing a revision of the entire line of monthly comics. One is the initial aftermath to the first Crisis in 1986, which took about a year to play out. The second was Zero Hour, a mini-series that wasn't so great, but all the Zero-numbered issues of DC comics were pretty well done and gave the heroes a pretty good boost. The third was DC One Million, where the Million-numbered issues were very good, mostly because Grant Morrison had a hand in plotting all of them. Now we have One Year Later, which promised to relaunch the DC universe with sweeping changes. But so far I'm unimpressed. Week one of One Year Later has arrived like a wet blanket.
Detective Comics 817: Jim Gordon is back as Commissioner, Bullock is back as a Detective, and Harvey Dent is a good guy patrolling the streets in Batman's absence. Gordon lights up the Bat-Signal; Batman and Robin respond. There's no evidence to deny that it's still Bruce Wayne behind the mask. Basically, we just get the picture that Gotham City's been returned to the status quo.
JSA 83: The Justice Society gets together after a year apart. They still appear to be on the same Earth as Batman and the Spectre. No surprises.
Outsiders 34: The first half of the book is this really boring lesson on African kid gangs. The Outsiders break their cover to stop them. Nightwing is the leader and appears to be Dick Grayson. However, Captain Boomerang has now joined the team-this is the kind of shocker I wanted. All the Outsiders were presumed to be dead during the missing year.
Batman Annual 25 takes place years earlier instead of later. It lays out how Jason Todd returned to life after getting beaten to death by the Joker. The means was a pretty cheap after-effect from Superboy punching on the walls during his imprisonment prior to Infinite Crisis #1. Alternate realities flashed back and forth for a time; in one of them, Jason Todd survived. He wakes up buried in the coffin (we all love Kill Bill, don't we?) and gets some surprising help from Talia and Ra's Al Ghul. Despite the cheap device, I thought this was a decent story. I understand Jason's motivation for hating Bruce Wayne-why doesn't he kill the Joker?
So far, I am disappointed with One Year Later. It's too early to condemn the whole thing as a failure. Maybe subsequent titles will make use of this time gap to shake up their heroes. Nuff said.
Comments
One surprise in the JSA issue is that Jay Garrick zips along as he always did, yet in Infinite Crisis #4, he says the Speed Force is gone. So how did he get it back?
Posted by: Michael G | March 6, 2006 12:45 AM
Yeah, I noticed that Jay has his super-speed power back, too. I knew they wouldn't leave him without it for long.
Posted by: Kid Flash | March 6, 2006 3:29 PM
