Last Week in Comics #4: DC Universe 0

DC Universe 0
W: Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns
A: Various
I: Various
Ed: Dan Didio


DC Universe 0 is purported to be the kick-off point to DC Comics's summer miniseries and crossover Final Crisis. Like all of DC Comics' crises, this one promises to fix the complicated continuity of the DCU once and for all. As the captions in the page to your left summarizes:

The first crisis brought death to nearly all of creation. One lone universe was spared. A second crisis witnessed the violent resurrection of 52 new parallel universes. And so begins the final chapter in the sage of the multiple earths. The final crisis.

Why any one would believe that Final Crisis will solve the "problem" of the multiverse is beyond me. While the page to the left has a certain narrative economy, it actually ignores two other attempts to clean up continuity between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis: 1994's Zero Hour and 1999's Kingdom. By the end of the summer that means there will have been five attempts to clean things up since the mid-1980s. On average, there has been a "crisis" every four years with the duration between crises getting shorter and shorter. Either this means that the creators at DC Comics have managed to tell increasingly convoluted stories since the mid-1980s, or these crises have not adequately done their job, and/or these events are profitable and thus have a commercial worth that makes up for their artistic and functional demerits.

In a very real sense these projects are doomed to failure. None of the crises have been truly revolutionary acts as none of them have rolled back the clock to the year zero. They have tried to solve the problem of having a complex 40-year old narrative structure by telling another narrative. In a very real sense, they have tried to dig the DCU out of a hole by digging deeper. All that these crises do is to add an extra lawyer of narrative on what has come before. Nothing becomes streamlined; the ontological structures within the narratives themselves become increasingly more byzantine, more complex. The forms of the DC's Modern Age (1986 -present?) rests not on the supposed ashes of the Silver Age as the above page would make you believe, but on its very fertile and sprouting ground. Unless Final Crisis is preprepared to say goodbye to all the stories since the late 1930s than this crisis will only create a new, but temporary status quo. And even if it was willing to take this daring step it would only be a half-victory. As Kingdom's Hypertime revealed with some insight if not elegance: these are all just stories and we remember them even if they aren't "official" anymore.

If we cannot count of Final Crisis or its lead-in DC Universe 0 to make good on its mandate to rearrange the DCU in a more intelligible way, we should try and understand it on a more local level. We should instead ask, "How does it read as a story and only a story?"DC Universe 0 manages to be both an expression of Faulknerian modernism and nothing more than a shameless in-house ad for this summer's story lines. I suppose this might be the inevitable fate for any comic that is co-written by the inventive mind of Grant Morrison and the mainstream, nostalgic wasteland of Geoff Johns's talent.

Let's start with DC Universe 0 the commercial before we get to DC Universe 0 the modernist experiment. To be frank, there is no organic story to DC Universe 0. It consists of a host of fragmentary episodes that spotlight or foreshadow coming events in several DC books, most of which will probably have little to do with Final Crisis. Each section is then followed with a purposeful house ad in a unified style promoting said storyline. The difference between the house ads and the "content" comes down to little more than length. The connection between these storylines is of course never made clear and if Final Crisis does attempt to do so, it will probably do so unsuccessfully. This of course means that the narrative of DC Universe 0 is fragmentary and as any good student of modernism will tell you, fragments are part and parcel of the modernist aesthetic.

What holds together DC Universe 0 is a disembodied consciousness that slowly becomes self-aware as it narrates the issue's events. The first page of the issue features a splash page of a a galaxy with a small lightning bolt rushing across from it. Two captions collectively read, "This is everything. This is me." This disembodied consciousness who elides his identity with the totality of the universe allows Morrison and Johns to essentially link together this heap of unrelated images. As the issue continues the narrator becomes self-aware and the captions shift from black to red until the identity of the narrator, now separate from the universe, becomes apparent.

While this does show some formal inventiveness both on the part of Morrison and Johns, and on the part of letterer Nick Napolitano it does not mean that the issue's utter commercialism is mollified by its turn to stylistic modernism. Instead this stylistic turn in fact aggrandizes the very reader who would taken on the task of the disembodied consciousness. For the managers and editors of DC Comics are hoping that someone else will read the legion of comics that DC will put out this year. Reading all these titles, reading across the universe, subsuming oneself into this universe is at once the ultimate act of modernist self-effacement and at the same time the ultimate act of comic book consumption.