Month: March 2015

In 1994 DC Comics published Zero Hour, a five issue mini-series designed to not only serve as a major summer crossover but also fix some of the continuity problems that had plagued their universe after the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Some have suggested that Zero Hour caused more problems than it fixed but at the time it was the dawn of an exciting new era for DC. To kick off this new age DC followed Zero Hour with Zero Month. As the name suggests all of the main DC books were rolled back to zero though each one had a different approach to the idea. Some books featured a new origin. Some contained tweaks to the existing origin. Some contained brand new versions of old characters. All of them served as a jumping on point for new and old readers alike.

To celebrate this new era (or perhaps to bury it) some of us in the comic book blogging community have banded together from remote galaxies to discuss how the characters we cover were rebooted/revamped by looking at the solicitations of our character’s zero issues as well as delving into the Wizard Magazine Beyond Zero Hour Special, which was a magazine published around the time of Zero Hour to promote the series, what was coming next and the history of DC in general.

As this is a blog crossover be sure to check out the links below to find out how other characters were treated during Zero Month.

• Firestorm Fan
• The Aquaman Shrine
• The Legion of Super Bloggers
• Pop Culture Affidavit
• The Speed Force
• Corps Conjecture
• Being Carter Hall

So…Superman and Zero Month.

The Superman titles were doing extremely well leading into both Zero Hour and Zero Month.  The books had exploded in popularity thanks to the Death and Return of Superman saga and the creators did not disappoint with how they followed up on that story.  While Spilled Blood was not the best of ideas (though it did bring some of the early ’90s to the Super-titles) the Superman offices spun two characters from Reign of the Supermen, Superboy and Steel, into their own titles while giving Supergirl her own mini-series, which wasn’t quite fair but that’s how things played out.  Superman/Doomsday Hunter/Prey was a satisfying follow up to Death and Return story and included the return of the Cyborg and the origin of Doomsday.  In the Superman titles proper the creators briefly had Superman’s powers overloading before launching into the Battle For and Fall of Metropolis, which featured the utter destruction of Metropolis and the fall of Lex Luthor.

It was an exciting time to be a Superman fan.

Continue reading MORE THAN ZERO: ZERO MONTH 20 YEARS LATER

Welcome to another of the re-tooled Who’s Who Wednesdays, a regular feature here at the Fortress where every Wednesday (hence the name) I will present an entry from the original series of Who’s Who comics that DC published between 1984 and 1988.  Superman was well represented in those series and I wanted to share the entries with you just in case you have never seen them.  Today’s entry is Psi!

(originally published in Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #18 August 1986)

Be sure to check out Episode Eighteen of the amazing Who’s Who: The Definitive Podcast of the DC Universe hosted by Rob Kelly and the Irredeemable Shag.  They covered this entry in that episode.  It is an awesome podcast that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Remember that you can click on the images to make them larger.

The easy joke to make at the top of this post is that I already own Action Comics #1.

In fact, I own two different covers to the book.

If I wanted to I could own even more covers to this comic.  According to the Action Comics Cover Gallery page over at Mike’s Amazing World of DC Comics there are like four or five more variants that are out there and some of them are even reasonably priced as far as eBay goes.  I just haven’t plunked down the money for them.  I mean I like variants but there’s a line.  It’s completely arbitrary and based solely on my mood at the time, but there is indeed a line.

Continue reading WHY I WILL (PROBABLY) NEVER OWN ACTION COMICS #1

It’s been awhile since I have done one of these Acquisitions posts.  This is not due to me not buying any Superman books or comics in the past couple of weeks…months…years…whenever it is the last time I did one of these.  Far from it.  I have been getting stuff here and there, just not blogging about it.  Recent purchases have made me want to get back into that game.  First up are some variant covers I picked up for a reasonable price at my local comic shop.

There was a time when variant covers were the whipping boys of the comics crash of the ’90s.  This is something of a fallacy but comics fandom has never met an oversimplification of a complicated problem that it didn’t like.  The thing is they never really went away and in the past ten to fifteen years they’ve made a big comeback.  It’s easy to dismiss them as a money grab and to be fair in some cases that is their design but that doesn’t change the fact that we as consumers have a choice in buying them.  It also doesn’t mean that some of them aren’t pretty damn cool.  DC has done pretty well with theme months in the last year or so and while I don’t normally buy them these practically begged to come home with me.

Why?

Continue reading ACQUISITIONS 03/06/2015

Welcome to another of the re-tooled Who’s Who Wednesdays, a regular feature here at the Fortress where every Wednesday (hence the name) I will present an entry from the original series of Who’s Who comics that DC published between 1984 and 1988.  Superman was well represented in those series and I wanted to share the entries with you just in case you have never seen them.  Today’s entry is Syrene!

(originally published in Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #23 January 1987)

Be sure to check out Episode Twenty-Three of the amazing Who’s Who: The Definitive Podcast of the DC Universe hosted by Rob Kelly and the Irredeemable Shag.  They covered this entry in that episode.  It is an awesome podcast that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Remember that you can click on the images to make them larger.

Today I present more bits of business from the Zero Hour edition of Previews.  To be fair there were hundreds of other comic books solicited in that particular Previews, not to mention trading cards and T-shirts and so on, but for my purposes it will henceforth be known as the Zero Hour edition of Previews.  In any case this is a three page interview that Michael R. Smith conducted with Dan Jurgens.  I apologize up front that some of the text was cut off on the first page.  This was an unfortunate by product of the cutter I used to slice the binding off of the Previews.

Enjoy.

The main take away I…took away from this interview is how forward thinking Dan was when it came to Zero Hour.  In the Wizard article he discussed the main reasons behind the series and teased some of the high points of the story.  Here he focused on Zero Hour as a chance to really start the next age of DC and his comments about the younger characters was interesting.  I’m still not down with what happened to the JSA during the story but I appreciate where he’s coming from.  I also liked the comparisons between this story and the Death and Return of Superman.  It’s an easy question to ask but Dan’s answer gave some insight into the creative process of a company wide crossover compared to a character specific crossover.

I have a few other non-solicitation images to post but I figure I will wait to do that until next week.  More to follow, as I used to write at the end of every post.