#zero hour: crisis in time

[ufonaut]

DC'S I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST CRISIS #1

Written by DAN DiDIO, REX OGLE, DAVE WIELGOSZ, RACHEL PINNELAS, MATTHEW LEVINE, and others Art by M.L. SANAPO, ADAM GRAPHITE, SID KOTIAN, WILL ROBSON, JORDI TARRAGONA, and others Cover by DAN HIPP Variant covers by EJIKURE and NICOLA SCOTT $9.99 US | 80 pages | Prestige | Variant $9.99 US (card stock) ON SALE 10/2/24

In the blackest night, when the darkness feels infinite, the very fabric of the universe begins to tear…as every major crisis in DCU history rises once again! These eight chilling tales, set during the events of crises past, serve to warn you, dear reader: when in crisis, watch your back. In the fractured world of Flashpoint, Professor Pyg is stalking Gotham City’s nightclubs, sniffing out victims! During Blackest Night, Scarecrow lurks outside a movie theater, recruiting new test subjects to perfect his fear toxin! Even heroes like Nightwing aren’t safe when his death might just have the power to reverse the damage of Infinite Crisis! All these, plus new stories from Crisis on Infinite Earths, Millennium, Zero Hour, The Final Night, and Final Crisis are collected in DC’s I Know What You Did Last Crisis, a deadly new horror anthology coming to haunt you this fall!

[thescarehoe]

I really do just love this panel. ":)"

[smashedpages]

The Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! miniseries served as a soft reboot for DC in the mid-1990s, as they attempted to clean up some of the continuity inconsistencies left over from Crisis on Infinite Earths a decade earlier. And in September of 1994, it gave way to Zero Month -- "The Beginning of Tomorrow!" -- where every monthly DC title was renumbered as issue #0, giving creators a chance to reset and reintroduce their characters to readers. DC gave out a free sampler that month, which spotlighted the zero issues as well as a few new titles that launched after the event, like Starman and Manhunter.

[mayamarvil]

Babe come over, my butler/father figure isn’t home

Superman: The Man of Steel #37

[manyacivilmonster]

many things wrong with dc, but not the way they built out bart and clark's relationship pre-flashpoint. brother-in-law to brother-in-law hostility.

[somewherefornow]

ARTHUR CURRY/AQUAMAN & J’ONN J’ONZZ/MARTIAN MANHUNTER in ZERO HOUR: CRISIS IN TIME (1994)

[inhousearchive]

House-ad for the 1994 DC event Zero Hour.

[supergirls-s-curl]

Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #2

[momachan]

"All I know, Triumph, is that Extant twisted my guts recently! There's no way the two of us can be on the same side!"

Zero Hour: Crisis In Time (Zero Hour (1994).

[impregnatedafterpostbirthdaysex]

[dc-trinity90s]

Kyle’s Corner - September 1994 - Zero Hour - Kyle becomes the only Green Lantern in name and legacy

[ufonaut]

"a disaster beyond description" - the parallax view on parallax (& coast city's destruction)

i've often talked about the importance of pre-parallax retcon hal jordan, what a radical move his downfall had been for an art medium so uniquely focused on status quo and how much walking that back in post-2005 continuity damaged the character & his development. however, something i've become increasingly interested in lately is the outsider point of view on the magnitude of coast city's destruction and hal's descent into madness -- the reverberations of one of the darkest days in the dcu were far and wide for a good long while there but rarely acknowledged outside of nostalgia pieces nowadays and even more rarely understood as a thoroughly visceral, well-written, well-planned arc that intentionally portrayed the superhero world as largely unsympathetic to the trauma of one of their own but the average civilian as grappling with that loss nearly on the same scale that hal did.

to that effect, i thought i would show a highlights reel of this outsider POV and how much it adds to the weight of the pre-2005 story. while i've accepted some tie-ins to major events (ie zero hour 1994, final night 1996), this will feature titles entirely unrelated to green lantern presented in real life chronological order by publication date in order to showcase the impact that's compelled me so (that's no convergence: green lantern, no legends of the dcu #33-36, etc).

"every office, every home, every school and hospital is atomized. the west coast and its entire ecosystem is instantaneously shattered-- and more than seven million men, women and children that once called the coast city area home-- die."

to set the scene, the explosion that destroys coast city actually appears in superman 1987 #80 (cover date: aug 1993) as part of hank henshaw and mongul's plan.

the destruction had spread as far as santa barbara & the los padres national forest. getting closer to ground zero, hank henshaw also proceeds to resolutely take care of a handful of the sole survivors:

(adventures of superman 1987 #503, cover date: aug 1993)

you all know the reading order here. past the return of superman and the events of emerald twilight, the first outsiders to have gotten the news are the darkstars

whose immediate course of action is to brand hal jordan a criminal (darkstars #23, cover date: aug 1994)

and as zero hour-induced temporal anomalies keep coming up, the darkstars start seriously considering further tampering with time in order to prevent "the creation of a power-mad monster" (darkstars #24, cover date: sept 1994).

it's a sentiment that the majority of hal's justice league colleagues share, as zero hour: crisis in time and the final night both tell us, but a more sympathetic view comes two years later in the spectre 1992 #47 (cover date: nov 1996)

and a more neutral one from waverider in superman: the doomsday wars #2 (cover date: dec 1998)

interestingly enough, more details of the in-universe perception of hal's actions comes from deadman: dead again

where we learn that "sources close to the JLA" have actually issued a press statement naming hal as wholly responsible for the green lantern corps massacre, with no hint that they've been equally forthcoming about the motive behind his actions (deadman: dead again #4, cover date: oct 2001)

the last pre-retcon word goes to superman: day of doom #3 (cover date: jan 2003), a sobering portrayal of the immense horror of coast city's annihilation and subsequently a look into the reality that had made hal snap:

post-retcon, nostalgia pieces like dcu: legacies #8 (feb 2011) and dc retroactive: superman - the 80s (oct 2011) both treat the mad-with-grief version of the story as the truth -- as does the 2015 convergence event --but outside of these few instances, the tour de force of storytelling that is this years-long arc has been cast aside in favor of an unnecessary retcon. as the zero hour: crisis in time 30th anniversary approaches, i'd say it's just the right time to remember that hal (unrepentant hal, power-hungry hal, hell-bent on making everything right hal) had had a perfectly proportional reaction to the tragedy he'd endured, if not outright a justified one.

[eggsistential-breakdown]

TWO FULL DECADES AROUND THE SUN

[mae-kent]

from ‘Superman Intelligence Quotient’ from Wizard: The Superman Tribute Edition

post-crisis refers here to the time period between crisis on infinite earths (1985) and infinite crisis (2005).

[mayamarvil]

They fight like bitter exes

Superman: The Man of Steel #37

[manyacivilmonster]

bartkon crumbs, i will find you in any universe