The Fun of Buying Two (and Only Two) Parts of a 90-Part Publishing Event

This year at DC Comics, the villains are taking over! (No, not the editors. Wrong verb tense.) Now in progress at comic shops nationwide, Forever Evil is the first major crossover event to march like General Sherman through the entire DC Universe since the New 52 initiative launched two years ago. The core is a seven-part miniseries buoyed by three months’ worth of tie-ins across five ongoing series, one issue apiece of two other series, three different six-part miniseries coming in October, and — last I heard — fifty-two different one-shots replacing most of DC’s ongoing series this month, all starring villains instead of heroes, all available with fancy 3-D covers for an added one-dollar upcharge. (All figures assume DC announces no surprise additions to the lineup, or any abrupt cancellations due to overextending themselves.)

For enraptured fans of DC’s New 52, it’s a veritable grand tapestry of drama. In a world where many of our rebooted heroes are presumed dead, all the rebooted villains have united and threaten to ruin everything everywhere for all time.

Or something like that. I think. I don’t really care.

Even though I’m reading far fewer titles than I ever have since the dark days of the 1990s, I try to keep up on comic book news in case of new developments within my areas of interest. For me this meant skipping most articles about Forever Evil. I have no use for variant covers. I no longer consider super-heroes a mandatory ingredient of every single comic I buy. I’ve already gone on record previously about my disappointment with the majority of the New 52 (just follow the trail of bread crumbs via the “DC Comics” tag on this post). Unfortunately, by not buying into the corporate marketing schemes that my fellow hobbyists support in droves, I limit my opportunities to participate in the discussion, consign myself to the outermost fringes of the community, and have to consider the possibility that the aging process is slowly pruning the ways and fields in which I can officially still think of myself as a card-carrying geek. I’m just no longer at a place in my walk where I stand to be enriched in any possible way by Extreme Aquaman.

On the other hand, it’s a liberating feeling to buy only what I want to read, not what I have to read to keep up with the Joneses. It’s in that spirit that I’ve bought only two (2) issues out of this entire crowd and have no plans to delve into Forever Evil beyond those. The lucky winners are:

1. Justice League #23.3: Dial E. Until this month, one of my very few New 52 touchstones was Dial H, horror/fantasy novelist China Mieville’s take on “Dial H for Hero”, a longtime favorite DC concept of mine about magical rotary dials that turn the bearers into random, silly super-heroes. Mieville’s fantastical wanderings lost coherence late into the run, but I appreciated the two determinedly non-beautiful main characters he designed as his focal point, both a far cry from the average enhanced super-protagonists of other, better-selling comics. I loved that he was obviously having the time of his life brainstorming superhuman names that will never, ever be reused by anyone else.

Sadly, Dial H wasn’t drawn by hot artists and never had a cash-grab Justice League cameo, so no one bought it and DC canceled it before Forever Evil began. Its planned Villains Month tie-in, Dial E, was reclassified and released as a Justice League book, even though the New 52 fan majority won’t appreciate or buy it, either. It appeared to be the least ordered tie-in at my local comic shop. I’m not sure they even bothered to stock the variant-cover version. For we five Dial H readers, it’s a disjointed but apropos romp in which an H-dial falls into the hands of four delinquents, who take turns transforming and living the high life of crime. Every page premieres a new throwaway character that DC could turn into a movie franchise someday once they’ve exhausted the rest of their library. Thrill to the debuts of…Suffer Kate! Mechasumo! Mise-En-Abyme! Wet Blanket! Ayenbite! (Have fun looking that one up.) And more!

As if that weren’t my money’s worth alone, each page features a different artist, including some very familiar names — Jeff Lemire, David Lapham, Emma Rios, Frazier Irving, Liam Sharp, Jock, Riccardo Burchielli, and several newcomers I’ll need to add to my radar for future reference. It’s the best possible wake DC could’ve held for Dial H. Best of all, it has virtually nil to do directly with Forever Evil at all. Works for me.

2. Swamp Thing #23.1: Arcane. Admittedly, horror hasn’t been my thing in a very long time. On rare occasions I find reasons to issue a temporary pass. I saw writer Charles Soule appear in two panels at this year’s C2E2, thought he presented himself well, and made a point of following up when he later took over Swamp Thing. In my teen years I discovered Swampy late into Alan Moore’s trendsetting run, and stayed on board with him for several years. (The first issue I tried was #46, a Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. Funny, all things considered.) For varying reasons, things I liked earlier in my life tend to qualify for temp-passes in later years more easily than new offensive works ever will.

Swampy’s New 52 reboot turned me off with issue one, but Soule’s run has so far kept annoying human Alec Holland offscreen and thus far acquitted itself with creepy aplomb, albeit heavy on big-name guest stars (Superman, the Scarecrow, John Constantine). I’m guessing their sales need a lift. Alas, the reimagined rendition of classic villain Anton Arcane who headlines this issue is a direct continuation of the extended “Rotworld” storyline from the issues that preceded Soule’s. I’m only vaguely familiar with it, as it’s the reason I gave up on Animal Man despite a promising takeoff — I wasn’t in the mood for a series in which the hero would be fighting the same group of villains for years on end without a decisive victory in sight. (It didn’t help that Animal Man and Swamp Thing had their own crossover early on. I quit any and all New 52 books that held crossovers in their first year. I saved myself a lot of money and griping that way.)

Arcane himself is sufficiently disturbing, gross, and malevolent in new and different ways, but his daughter Abigail also figures into the plot, and now she’s gray, has wings, is an agent for decay and rot, and…wow, did I miss a lot. I might as well have skipped all the pages containing her, for all they meant to me without knowing her full New 52 backstory. Arcane, on the other hand, might bear watching in future arcs as long as he’s not the only villain we’ll see in the next sixty consecutive issues.

…

…and, unless someone wants to mail me free copies of other tie-ins just for laughs, that’ll be the entirety of my Forever Evil experience from start to finish. Got what I wanted; done now. Based on these two samples alone, my average grade for all of Forever Evil works out to a B-plus. Bravo, DC! You should have no problem maintaining that winning streak as long as I continue limiting my monthly DC intake to just Swamp Thing, The Green Team, and Batman ’66. It’s a good thing those last two aren’t even participating in Forever Evil, and right now it’s so much better for our relationship this way.