I started reading 52 about, uh, 53 weeks ago, I think, and made it through about the first ten, twelve weeks before stopping. Not that I wasn’t enjoying it, but all I could see was the micro and I didn’t think that was fair. I decided to let it accrue and then I’d tear through it in chunks. I needed the macro. I blame that wholly on my own approach to The Job, and not on the work itself.

So, realizing the book was close to ending, I got caught up in big swooping chunks over the last week and-- holy great goddamn, what fun read. The ever-escalating structure just fucking HUMS, rushing along great guns, each crescendo leading to another bigger, better, and more berserk one just around the corner. Never in a million years could I have predicted the arcs we followed-- and, you know, I kinda think about this stuff for a living. There were some twists, turns, and reversals that just punched me in the jaw.

The manic degree of pure invention that was going on here was stunning, too. DC books almost always have a precious air of preservation and nostalgia to them; DC books, to me, oftentimes feel haunted by their own continuity and not necessarily enriched by it. (A lot of books feel that way, not just at DC, it’s just that, at DC, it feels sometimes like a house style, you know?) But 52 threw all the comforts of safe storytelling out the window, for good or for ill, and tried to be something... well, if not “new” then at least ‘different’. Novelty was in its bones: characters were reborn and thrown into wildly inventive and over the top imaginative situations in a book that defies and denies conventional wisdom and practice. There were some big ideas going on here, some big thrills and some heavy duty weirdness both on the page and in them that, sometimes, in all their stoic grace and attitude, DC books miss.

(Don’t believe me? Go pick up a SHOWCASE volume and compare it to its present day counterpart. See that mania that’s missing? I like that. It’s nice. 52 has that mania.)

52 was a DC comic with blood roaring in its ears and you could sense it.

Best of all, this was clearly an All-Star Team of creators playing home run derby-- swinging hard for the fences time after time after time, storyline after storyline. 52 proves irrefutably it’s the singer and not the song, both in terms of craft and in terms of sheer entertainment value-- we don’t need to read Superman stories to get Superman sized comics. Maybe the most pleasant, most amusing, and most surprising, er, surprise, that I got from reading 52 was just that-- with hardly a staple character to be seen, and with the exception of Animal Man very few characters I had any sorts of feelings about, 52 cranked out a massively engrossing storyline without any the familiar hooks to save it. Now, the creators may not have landed the ball over the fence every time, but fucking hooray for reach exceeding grasp for a change-- so many comics are pedestrian exercises in GOOD ENOUGH that to see something go so wildly for broke like 52 fills me up with energy.

(Raise your hand if you thought 52 #52 would have sales numbers comparable to 52 #1. Now sit down, because you are a liar.)

Montoya’s arc, which really began in Gotham Central-- shit, before that, even!-- resolves here wonderfully. I think Rucka gets hit over the head with a lot of unfair critique over what are, to date, incomplete works-- see the ongoing Montoya commentary here or anyone talking about Tara Chase in Q&C-- so Renee’s journey here has just been great to see, both as a fan of the writer and/or the characters involved, and as a great big refutation of all the bullshit that gets thrown at the guy. Clearly I’m assuming some stuff about #52 here, but you get my point: the spiritual resurrection of Renee Montoya was a terrific and rewarding read, her growth as satisfying to me as was the stasis of Buddy Baker: Cosmically Gifted Family Man.

(My gut tells me Ralph’s storyline resolution was an unplanned gift to the writers. I will bet all the gum in my whole pocket that his storyline resolve was an unexpected miracle that systemic complexity and writerly magic can sometimes conspire to present and that, when Ralph first had that gun in his mouth in week 1, it was for a wildly different reason than we saw in week 42.)

The biggest problems are the biggest problems I always have with big DC work-- a zany over-reliance on pre-knowledge of continuity and/or history serving to alienate chumps like me. I was never lost, but I could tell when I should’ve been getting more out of it. There’s gotta be a way to fold that stuff into the content of a book without having to have characters drop three pages of pipe for us slow kids. I don’t think of the book as continuity porn, as some have called it, so much as trivia porn. It’s so inside baseball that it’s football, you know? I was never lost (INFINITE CRISIS is the opposite end of this spectrum where, try as I might, it was just fucking Greek to me) but it clearly went over, around, and under my head on occasion.

(I have almost no idea about ONE YEAR LATER. I cannot speak to how, if at all, 52 has addressed or dealt with that shit aside from explaining why Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman all fucked off for some Me Time. And I DON’T CARE.)

I don’t like critique and commentary that hinge on reader preconception-- I don’t give a fuck what got said on what website in the lead-up to a series’ release, or a movie coming out, or a book hitting the shelves. The creative process is mutable and pre-release hype is just vapor. You view the work as the work, not as the fulfillment of its advertorials, and certainly not in light of your expectations.

(Exceptions to the rule, of course, but come ON. Go with me here.)

Tonally, there are issues but I think there always are these days with the superhero mainstream. At least 52 is consistently inconsistent, if that makes sense-- the needle veers into the red regularly, and not as the gimmick behind a Very Special Issue. And, hell, some of the book’s biggest and most successful moments aren’t exactly all-ages-- Luthor’s New Years Rockin’ Eve (as breathtaking as that was), the Alligator thingy, the whole, um, third act-- but it’s not exactly trashy, either. It’s, uh, explicit. So sometimes that sits weirdly with me. Not because I’m a prude-- hi, read CASANOVA-- but it just strikes me as unnecessarily exploitative. Or maybe just unrewardingly exploitative? That said, those are my issues with the superhero mainstream and 52 is clearly being written for a more mature audience than an all-ages superhero romp would be written for, and maybe that’s that.

52 can get, like any massive event, too diffuse and manic, too sprawling and weird. On a few occasions I had to power through a set piece and then read the follow-ups to really understand what had happened; as the core conceit of the book rewards insiders first, and the format of the book is cold, unflinching, and uncaring as to your narrative needs, this is inevitable-- I could’ve read an entire issue paced and presented like Morrison and Ha’s recent AUTHORITY #1 if it had been devoted to Buddy and Ellen on that porch; Is 52 the first miniseries (?) that had a spinout miniseries to give a big set piece scene the space it “needed?; god bless Keith Giffen, etc.

(After DC began running Giffen’s thumbnails on 52thecomic.com I wrote the man a REALLY ill considered and moronic bit of fan mail praising them. Embarrassing. That said? You can learn an awful lot about storytelling by studying those pages.

Also? I would kill for some behind the scenes stuff on this series. Script drafts, commentary from the creative team, all of that. I would love to see a nuts and bolts breakdown of how any random issue was created, from the recollections of the Hive Mind involved.)

(It would also be hilarious if none of the principals ever spoke of 52 again.)

Was 52 helped or hurt by its one issue/one week structure? Probably a little of both. You lose a lot of what normally gets done (the exception was clearly New Year’s Eve) but gain interesting new tools. 52 ends up being the closest thing to actual American Manga as I think we’ll ever get-- the synthesis of American superhero comics with the scale and scope that comes with the promise of endless tankubon pages... Will COUNTDOWN obey such fidelity to conceit? Maybe it has to now, I don’t know. Maybe American audiences simply lack the conceptual vocabulary for that kind of storytelling inflicted on this kind of genre. Maybe I do, as a reader.

(I didn’t pay too much attention to the passing of “real time.” How’d they do?)

Those pages, man. Maybe both the biggest blessing and curse to the whole of 52, the stone-cold and unflinching reality that surely has saved the book twice as often as it compromised the narrative goals. But the story’s gotta get told in those 4 panels, period, the end. The great equalizer-- Black Adam falling in love gets no more panels on the page and no more story space than Black Adam shattered on the wheel. The stories DO get resolved, but when we don’t get 8 pages devoted to PENULTIMATE SCENE X it might feel, inevitably, like things are being rushed or short-changed. World War III-- and they call it that-- is dispatched with the same necessary economy any other event in the series, resolved for all intents and purposes in one issue, when clearly this story alone could’ve eaten up a year of books... But that’s the experiment and the challenge and, say what you will, they sure as shit committed to it in all its weirdness and glory.

(Upon the second reference to That Weirdly Important Cocoon, I realized I’d missed the first reference of it, somehow, or that it didn’t register-- so I had to go back and find it. It takes time to adapt to 52’s grammar. The storylines are all getting resolved, but we’re so trained to expect a degree of space that 52’s conceit simply denies.)

(The even greater points remain: I am not 52’s target audience; I am not an easy-sell on what it tried to do. And yet, here we are.)

An internet ironist parlor game of WHO WROTE WHAT sprung up almost immediately-- hell, even when the goddamn PREVIEW PAGES had been released, people were insisting Morrison wrote this or that. (In fact, it’s amusing ((infuriating)) to read the bitterly hip insisting up and down that the only bits of 52 they enjoy are Morrison’s, and Morrison’s alone, as if they have some kind of Magical Grant Detector and they would never, EVER deem to read any of that AWFUL Geoff Johns’ comics and-- ewwww-- actually enjoy them.) And while there are times when you could swear, in spite of yourself, that the ship is being steered by a certain captain, much to my delight it becomes harder and harder to even pretend to detect as the book goes on.

I know from my own experience just working with Ed on IRON FIST that there are things he’ll compliment me on that I honestly don’t remember writing or think he wrote, and vice versa. I think there’s a kind of focus-transference that happens; I know I can write a pretty passable Ed if I have to, and vice versa. I know that the more we work together, the more we’ve learned how to compliment one another and fill in for the other here and there. Imagine the effect of a WEEKLY GIG produced by THESE FOUR GUYS. Imagine a Morrison infused Rucka’s steely structure. Johns’ blockbuster sensibilities steeped in Waid’s balance of talent and discipline. You can mix and match all you like, and by the end of the book you get the feeling the creators have been doing it, too.

(Also? Mark Fucking Waid, ladies and gentlemen: summing up whole characters and TEAMS in six fucking panels, every week, for like 30 weeks. Staggering. Frightening!)

(But? How great would it have been if those dossier pages were just a scoonch more relevant to that week’s storyline? Don’t get me wrong, I loved seeing Eric Powell drawing Metamorpho as much as anybody else, but I’d love to have seen those pages devoted to decoding some of the more arcane character bits...)

It’s no wonder to me that the writers involved were so crippled by its scope. At the New Year’s pivot, the book just goes off the chain, throwing idea on top of idea, escalating the whole thing into a remarkably satisfying system of setups and payoffs, all hinging on characters otherwise easy to ignore. I was delighted and surprised and best of all WILDLY ENTERTAINED by 52. So much so that I’ll go to the store Wednesday to read the resolution, rather than wait a few weeks for the box to come from Midtown.

What a miraculous thing.