Another week, another post-Infinite Crisis DC offering which I pick up in the forlorn hope that they might have stopped making impenetrable continuity pretzels.

52 is an unusual format - a weekly comic with four writers and a range of contributing artists, which follows the DC Universe in the year-long gap between Infinite Crisis and last month's "One Year Later" stories.  The fifty-two weekly issues are supposed to tell the story of the gap year in real time.  (In other words, it's a belated riff on 24.)

Now, in theory, this gives the four contributing writers - Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and Mark Waid - total freedom to write what they want for a year, without worrying about crossovers or anything of that sort.  Of course, things may not be quite so clear.  As events progress, the "One Year Later" books will also presumably be filling in many of the gaps, so the writers will be telling a story where most of the audience know the end point.  And if you start acknowledging that and writing accordingly, well, the accessibility level could crash pretty quickly.

That isn't a problem with the first issue, which spends its time setting up a premise which everyone already knows: Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman aren't in the book.  The cover helpfully points out that they're missing, for the benefit of anyone who didn't already know.  And yet the story itself is built to a big revelation on the final page that DC's big three are missing.  It's not quite as irritating as the recent Fantastic Four issue which spent 22 pages building to a revelation that was already shown clearly on the front cover, but this book and Civil War #1 are operating along similar lines by devoting their first issue to setting up a premise that 99% of the audience already knows, simply because we all kind of accept that it's a formality which must be gone through.  There's a real problem here which people are tiptoeing around - save to make the occasional grumble about how things were so much better when you didn't have to give away the plot in advance - but it's really past time that creators started thinking seriously of ways to address this.

52 is, quite literally, a comic book written by committee.  In fact, with breakdown and finishing pencillers on board as well as a conventional inker, it's practically drawn by committee as well.  What seems to be happening is that each writer is handling scenes for a particular storyline.  But inevitably, each is having to tone down any rough edges of personal style, and the result is a book which seems to lack any sort of individual voice.  It's not that hard to work out who's who - Grant Morrison appears to be doing Booster Gold's scenes, and Greg Rucka is presumably writing the character from his Gotham Central book.  But as a whole, it merges into a kind of super-competent house style.  The art is much the same, aiming for "thoroughly serviceable" rather than any more individual virtues.

It's a strange book, in that nothing is strictly speaking wrong with it.  It just doesn't excite, and doesn't seem to have much sense of identity.  They've taken a group of talented writers, and a selection of reasonably interesting characters - particularly Booster - and ended up with just another big event superhero comic.  A nicely written one, but just another big event all the same.  I can't pinpoint anything in particular that doesn't work, save for the fact that we all know the premise in advance, but that's not really the problem.  It's professional, polished, and yet somehow completely unengaging.  Even if it's an unusually good committee, it's still a story created by committee.

Perhaps if I were a committed DC fan I would feel differently.  But I've said that about so, so many DC projects over the last two years that I'm really losing patience with the company by now.

Rating: B-

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