52 Week 1: A Year in the Life

Welcome to Comic Watch’s look back at DC’s 52 year-long maxiseries! Throughout 2023, each week we’ll be taking on a chapter at a time in order to figure out just what made it so great. Was it the writers? The artists? The weekly format? The heroes and villains? All of the above? Find out, gentle reader!

52 was groundbreaking in the way it laid stories on top of stories in a cohesive overarching plot in a way that hadn’t been done on such a high level before; and the unbelievable level of writing talent in this series speaks for itself: Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, Geoff Johns, and Grant Morrison all banded together to weave multiple narratives in and out of one another, each week of the year, for a calendar year within the DCU without Superman, Wonder Woman, or Batman due to fallout of Infinite Crisis. What would a DCU look like without the Trinity? 52 set out to tell that story, and did so with a shocking level of skill and aplomb. And as a ringer – DC stalwart Keith Giffen provided the layouts for every issue, even as each was finished by a rotating cast of A-list artists, in order to provide a kind of artistic continuity despite changing pencillers every few issues.

This first issue sets the foundation for the DC universe all the way up until 2011 and the Flashpoint, which opened the door to New 52 and a more-or-less complete revamp of DC’s continuity. The weekly issue long-form format gave the creators carte blanche to let narratives develop in groundbreaking ways. The absence of the trinity allows more minor characters to shine and take the spotlight in new and interesting ways. Much more to come.

Black Adam is a continual source of violence and one liners throughout the series

The art by Joe Bennet, Roy Jose and Alex Sinclair is stellar with lots of tense emotion being shown and some action. A decent size crowd scene towards the end of the issue is fun to pick through and find characters in. 

The plot kicks off in a major way with Booster Gold, who, in his usual grandstanding way, predicts when Superman will return. When Kal-El doesn’t, Booster has a pretty public breakdown – because if what he’s being told about future events isn’t happening, then that means something is definitely wrong with time itself. And that, friends and neighbors, doesn’t bode well for anyone.

One of 52‘s greatest strengths is that ostensibly, it happens in real time. Each issue allots one week’s worth of time; throughout each issue, the passage of each day is notated. This allows the writing team to play around with the pacing – for example, this first issue distributes its events out pretty evenly across seven days; subsequent issues might devote themselves to just one day or two or three, depending on what’s happening with a particular subplot that week. That also allows the myriad subplots themselves time to ebb and flow in a natural, cohesive way, just like they would in real life. It also means that while issues like this first one set up multiple subplots, future chapters have the flexibility to devote themselves to just one of them. Again, everything gets to be dependent upon how a particular narrative would play out in real time. It’s an incredibly audacious approach to comics storytelling.

And speaking of subplots, the first issue of 52 sets up all the major ones, without overtly tipping any hands as to where any of them might be going. We have:

• Black Adam reasserting himself as ruler of Kahndaq;
• Ralph Dibney, still grieving over the loss of his wife Sue in Identity Crisis in a suicidal state until he gets notice of a message written for him on her tombstone;
• Captain Marvel foe Dr. Sivana being mysteriously kidnapped while a captive Mr. Mind watches;
• The Question meeting a very, very drunken and depressed Renee Montoya for the first time;
• Natasha Irons being chastised by her uncle, Steel, for acting like she deserves to be a hero when she hasn’t earned it;
• And, of course, Booster Gold discovering that the future has deviated from his records.

Pay close attention – none of the above characters are A-listers. While one half of what made 52 so special was its narrative techniques, the other was that it gave DC’s deep, deep bench of B-listers (and C- and D-) chances in the spotlight. One of the eternal paradoxes of the DC universe is that it has such a rich, dynamic history of flat-out bizarre and neglected and just plain cool characters that are always around, yet the universe itself forever spins its axis around the Big Seven. 52 subverted that trope completely by taking at least the Trinity out of the equation, and keeping other League-level heroes in the background. Finally, the second-stringers were getting the spotlight.

Throughout the course of this series, theabove core subplots would play themselves out, winding together and apart in creative, organic ways, while at the same time, built around a core narrative theme of post-war rebuilding. When the heroes win, but their victory appears Pyrrhic, what does that mean? Especially when the most well-known – Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman – are missing in action? How do you move forward when the world seems irrevocably changed? And what does a DCU without its Trinity look like, anyway?

52 was all about that journey.