As you might imagine Zero Hour took up a lot of real estate in the edition of Previews (Diamond Distributions ordering catalog) that solicited the series. Here’s the cover to that edition.
More on this image in a minute.
Since it was a weekly book all five issues were solicited. There were also a number of house ads and other bits of business. Presented here are a few of those images. First up is the Gem of the Month page.
The image used in the Gem of the Month feature is an odd one for me. Up until a month or so ago I had never seen it before. It’s weird mainly due of how Extant looks. In all the other promotional material he has a flowing cape and looks much more, for lack of a better term, nineties to me. Here he is presented as a mysterious character all wrapped up in his own cape. It looks cool but at the same time it looks off. Not bad. Just different.
Kyle Rayner, the Green Lantern in this piece, looks a bit odd too. The green pupils throw me off a bit but I like how he is being showcased here. The other characters look good and it is no surprise that Batgirl and Hawkman are featured so prominently.
This image makes me extremely curious. I have seen it before as a poster that came out of Comics Values Monthly as well as the last page of the first issue of Zero Hour. It’s a neat piece of art and I like how it resembles the cover to Crisis on Infinite Earths #5. It also makes Extant look like the big bad of the piece, which makes me smile all these years later. Jurgens and crew really pulled off that bit of subterfuge. My curiosity stems from wondering if it was meant to just be a promotional piece or was this a cover that was re-purposed elsewhere.
This image is also a time capsule of mid-’90s DC Comics. Most of the faces are familiar and some have stuck around even into the New 52 but a lot of them have changed or are just gone. You would think that such a realization would make me sad but it doesn’t. All good things come to an end and these images and Zero Hour in general are a happy reminder of a time when I started to really connect with DC and its characters.
Next Time: More images from this edition of Previews.