Blam’s Lag

25 years after Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC Comics is doing what many fans and creators felt it should have done back then: making a clean break with the continuity it’s rewriting, streamlining, and/or leaving behind entirely by starting every pertinent series over with #1.

This isn’t the post where I talk about that rapidly approaching “New 52” initiative from reading and retailing perspectives, however. Nor is it the post where I go all retcon scholar by tracing the history of DC’s reboots, reimaginings, and reintegrations from the establishment of the Multiverse, through the 50th-anniversary event that could not long ago be shorthanded simply as Crisis and which had its own 25th birthday last year, on to Zero Hour and the dithering recent run of Infinite Crisis, 52, Countdown, Final Crisis, and, yes, this thing that’s come after Final Crisis. Rather it’s another stopgap post where I tell you that that stuff is on its way, fingers crossed, as quickly as possible, but, alas, not necessarily — oh, the irony she hurts — in time.

So I ask my fellow fanboys and fangirls who recall the prolonged dwelling on Crisis in the pages of All-Star Squadron to indulge me as they did Roy Thomas, who had Mekanique somehow stave off the merging of the known multiverse in Squadron’s early-’40s setting for a spell despite the fact that the event basically occurred outside time and affected all of reality at once. (We’ll leave aside the fact that All-Star Squadron was canceled soon after Crisis, if only in favor of the replacement series Young All-Stars.) I think that The Spectre did something similar in the Last Days of The Justice Society one-shot, by the way, so you can think of me either as a shiny gold robot woman from the future or as a giant bone-white guy in a green Speedo, gloves, and hooded cloak who metes out divine vengeance; the salient point is that I need to will a protective bubble around Blam’s Blog — or just metaphorically stick my fingers in my ears and sing la-la-la — for the coming round of reviews to remain relevant as Flashpoint concludes and the latest New DC Universe debuts.

My laptop should be going in for another round of repair to try to fix that Wi-Fi problem this week, meaning that — while I have everything backed up in multiple formats, including all my documents on redundant USB flash drives for ease of continued writing — if I can’t get a loaner there will probably be another hiatus in publishing here.

Priority in the immediate future goes to the rest of my own imagined DC Universe relaunch, now that as much has been reconstituted or rewritten from faulty backups as possible. After that it’s a race to complete my reviews of issues from the past year of Superman and Wonder Woman, as well as to at least begin my sprawling look at the Batman titles from the point of Batman Reborn through the still ongoing Batman Incorporated. Then with luck comes my take on this whole “New 52” deal, along with thoughts on reboots both within the DC Comics line and elsewhere in media, followed, or in a less fortunate scenario merely supplanted, by yet another post on what’s in the ever-changing, ever-taunting, ever-clogged queue...


Related: JL Bait • The Clog • 52 Geek-Out