'52' was the big DC comics event of two years ago. I only just got around to reading it. I've got an excuse, sort of.
Let me state the basics just so we're on the same page about this series, you and I. Weekly comic. Lasted a year. 'Real time' gimmick (1 issue=the events of one week). Focusing on DC's second- and third-string characters; your Superman, Batman etc are nowhere to be found.
52 issues of a continuity-heavy crossover comic is rather more than one writer could be expected to produce in a year, and as a result the series was written by not one but four of the biggest paychecks in comics. Druggy weirdness guy Grant Morrison; slick mainstream guy Mark Waid; nostalgia and ultraviolence guy Geoff Johns; gritty realism guy Greg Rucka.
Rucka. He's the reason I got to this so late.
Now, I bow to no-one in my admiration for Greg Rucka's writing. I love his Atticus Kodiac novels. His and Ed Brubaker's Gotham Central is the greatest police procedural ever in comics. His spy series Queen & Country may end up being the most consistant longform comics serial there has ever been. I even liked his Perfect Dark videogame tie-in novels, for God's sake. And anyone who gets between me and the comics store the day the third Whiteout series is released is going to wind up with a Stu West-shaped hole in them.
Still, when I read an interview with Rucka where he revealed — this thing has been out for a year; you had your chance — that he was writing the part of the book where the old Charlton character The Question died of cancer I thought "Stuff that." Actually I'm being polite. I did a 180 degree turn in my computer chair and shrieked "Not another fucking superhero with cancer!"
Nothing personal against cancer, you understand. I just happen to think it's a bad fit with the bright costumes and gravity-defying antics of the superhero genre. I'd feel the same way about a comic that detailed a masked crimefighter's struggle with lupus. Or irritable bowel disease. It all takes me back to that dark period in the '90s when every comic cover seemed to feature the hero being nailed to a cross. I'd rather be used for live practice by a krav maga class. Not interested in reading that. No.
Then I broke my rib. And I was sitting around with a lot of time on my hands. And there was a complete run of 52.
I don't have any real principles. Not ones I live by, anyway.
This is where I have to make an embarrassing admission. Not only did I tolerate the Question storyline. Not only did I actually like it. But I think 52 would have been a worse book if it hadn't been there. First of all, as the Question is breathing his last, his protege hauls him halfway up a Himalaya looking for a magical cure from an ancient religious sect. Which, if you're a superhero and you really, really have to die of cancer, that's probably the way you should do it.
Also this. 52 is full of all sorts of crazy and wonderful stuff. Cosmic odysseys. Magical travelogues. An island full of mad scientists. An egotistical superhero who's only in it for corporate sponsorship. Super-families. Sad talking animals. Time travel — alongside all of that and more, there needed to be something that was emotionally down to earth to make it a satisfying read.
Which it is. I don't think we're talking here about a series that will go down as one of the all-time greats. In ten years, people won't be making lists that go 'Sandman, Maus, American Born Chinese, 52...' But I will say this: it took me the best part of two days to read this series, soup to nuts, and when I was done I had that empty feeling you get when you've reached the end of a really good, really absorbing novel and you've just realised there isn't any more.
Job's a good'un, as they say.
