The week's other landmark book is 52 Week 52, the concluding part of DC's year-long epic.

Commercially, there's no doubt that 52 has been a huge success for DC.  Unlike Marvel - and, it must be said, unlike most of DC's own other major titles - they've managed to get it out, on time, every week for a year.  Despite the intentional absence of DC's three biggest characters, it's been a huge hit.  Given the lacklustre performance of the rest of DC's superhero line, it will be missed - unless, that is, Countdown can replicate its feat to some extent, or the momentum from this book carries over into spin-off titles.

But did it work as a story?

It's a strange beast, 52.  The original brief was to explain what happened during the one year gap created by DC's "One Year Later" stunt.  Somewhere along the line, though, the creators seem to have lost interest in that concept, and gone off on a different direction.  So the big changes ended up being shunted into the World War III crossover, while 52 went on its own merry way.

That direction involved a bunch of storylines involving assorted B-list characters - the Question, Black Adam, Steel, Booster Gold, and so forth.  What tied those storylines together was, frequently, less than obvious.  We've ended up with a series in which a bunch of separate stories politely co-exist, rather than forming any coherent whole.

Even so, there's been plenty to enjoy in the book.  The curse of modern superhero comics is a determination to be taken seriously.  This book was willing to do nothing of the sort, and give us cheerfully ridiculous plot elements like a talking crocodile, a pacifist Lobo, and an entire island of mad scientists.  It's a refreshing change to see a high-profile DC book embrace this kind of absurdity instead of seeing it as something to be explained away.  And crucially, the four writers - Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and Mark Waid - were able to draw on that sort of thing without the book feeling like a retro title.  It may, at times, have felt a bit like a book written by committee, but it certainly stuck to its guns by taking these elements and trying to put them in a modern context without shame.

On the other hand, the "real time" gimmick was a mistake.  It wasn't used very effectively, and it only served to create problems when they reached the big climax and had to spill over into other titles.  I see that Countdown isn't going to adopt the same format, and that's a smart move.  Nor does 52 leave me with any great desire to buy more DC comics, not even Countdown.  It was a sound, professional effort, and an achievement on a technical level of getting it done at all, but as a story it was always good rather than great.

The final issue is a mystifying affair, in which the remaining plot threads are shunted to an epilogue in favour of an extended lecture about the Multiverse.  Many writers clearly hold to the view that Crisis on Infinite Earths was a terrible mistake and should be undone at all costs.  Certainly, DC botched the aftermath badly.  But if people really want to write stories set in old Earth-2 continuity, what's stopping them?  It only becomes a real issue if you want to do stories about travel between the worlds.

Purely in terms of plot mechanics, I suppose I can see how this restoration of the Multiverse fits in with the story.  But themetically it seems to come out of the blue.  The idea is that Infinite Crisis created 52 identical earths, and in this story Mr Mind goes around trashing them all to make them different.  By what appears to be sheer coincidence, this means that one of them is Earth-1, one is Earth-2, one is the WildStorm Universe, and so forth.

No doubt there are some DC diehards who find this an absolutely thrilling finish, but nothing in the last year of stories has done anything to explain to me why I should care.  All I get out of it is yet another bloody DC comic degenerating into a lecture about how everything was just wonderful back in the day.  51 universes get trashed, and we're supposed to get a warm fuzzy feeling because, according to Rip Hunter. "That's not broken, that's the way things should be."

I wasn't planning to pick up Countdown anyway, to be honest, but at the last moment 52 manages to alienate me even further from DC.  Why is the Multiverse "the way things should be"?  Because it's the way things used to be.  If DC just wanted to say "Hey, we've got parallel universes after all," then that would be fair enough.  It opens up story possibilities.  But what they've got now is a bunch of parallel universes designed exclusively to play retro nostalgia stories, plus one for Wildstorm.  I can't see the point. 

How many people really have fond memories of the Multiverse?  It's been gone for 21 years!  I don't remember it.  I don't care about it.  Yet this story seems to assume that it doesn't have to make me care about it, because it's the Multiverse, and it's just plain great.  That attitude worries me.  It's terribly backwards-looking.

Still, they got the book out on time and, odd finale aside, it was just fine.  If the aim was to turn me into a DC reader then it didn't succeed; but they did hold my attention for a year with an unfamiliar cast of C-list characters, and that's an achievement.

Rating: B-

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