Info About This Great Comics Event:
"Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!" is a five-issue
comic book limited series and
crossover storyline published by
DC Comics in
1994. In it, the former hero
Hal Jordan, who had until then been a member of the intergalactic police force known as the
Green Lantern Corps, mad with grief after the destruction of his home town of
Coast City (during the "
Reign of the Supermen" storyline) and having obtained immense power as
Parallax, attempted to destroy, and then remake, the
DC Universe. The crossover involved almost every DC Universe monthly series published at the time. The issues of the series itself were numbered in reverse order, beginning with issue #4 and ending with #0 (i.e.,
Counting Down To Zero). The series was written and penciled by
Dan Jurgens, with inks by
Jerry Ordway.
[1] This series is noted for its
motif of the DC Universe gradually "fading out" as events reached their climax.
Background
Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! was intended by DC as a belated follow-up to their landmark
limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths, and was indeed subtitled "
(A) Crisis in Time!". It promised to do for the inconsistent future timelines of the DC Universe what
Crisis had done for its parallel worlds: unify them into a new one.
This event served as an opportunity to reconcile some of the problems left unaddressed by
Crisis and other problems that had been unintentionally caused by it. In particular, the revised characters of the post-Crisis universe had been rolled out gradually, with DC continuing to feature the old versions until the new versions were launched, some of them a year or several after the first wave of revised characters were published (i.e.,
The Man of Steel,
Wonder Woman vol. 2,
Batman: Year One). The character of
Hawkman was one of the most problematic, since the revised version did not first appear until 1989. This raised the question of what version of Hawkman had been seen since 1986 (he had been
retconned to be both the
Golden Age Hawkman and a
Thanagarian spy). The
Legion of Super-Heroes faced similar problems with the eliminations of
Superboy and
Supergirl from DC continuity (
Mon-El, a character with similar powers, had been recast as Valor to take Superboy's place as the Legion's inspiration and most powerful member). These and other retcons were not always well received by readers and often introduced new problems.
The Sandman: Worlds' End is loosely connected with
Zero Hour, as can be seen from the Sandman annotations.
[2]
Plot
The story begins when characters from
alternate realities such as
Alpha Centurion, an alternate version of
Batgirl, and
Triumph suddenly started appearing in the main DC Universe, to everybody's confusion; this happens because time is being somehow "compressed." Then a wave of "nothingness" is seen moving from the end of time to its beginning, erasing entire historical ages in the process (an effect similar to the anti-matter wave that destroyed many universes in
Crisis on Infinite Earths).
The apparent villain of the story presented in the miniseries was a character named
Extant, formerly Hawk of the duo
Hawk and Dove (and a onetime
Teen Titan). Extant had acquired temporal powers, using them to unravel the DC Universe's timeline. In a confrontation with members of the
Justice Society of America, Extant aged several of them (removing the effect that had kept these heroes of the 1940s vital into the 1990s), leaving them either feeble or dead. However, the true power behind the destruction of the universe — caused by temporal rifts of entropy — turned out to be
Hal Jordan, who had been widely regarded as the most distinguished
Green Lantern in history. Calling himself
Parallax, Jordan had gone insane, and was now trying to remake the universe, undoing the events which had caused his breakdown and his own murderous actions following it. The collective efforts of the other superheroes managed to stop Jordan/Parallax from imposing his vision of a new universe, and the timeline was recreated anew, albeit with subtle differences compared to the previous one, after the young hero
Damage, with help from the other heroes, triggered a new
Big Bang. Jordan survived
Green Arrow shooting an arrow into his heart though.
This "blanking out/recreation" of the DC Universe was reflected in many of the tie-in issues; near the end of several of the tie-ins, the world began to disappear, and the last page of the book (or in some cases, several pages) had been left blank.
Aftermath
DC published a fold-out timeline inside the back cover of
Zero Hour #0 which identified various events and key stories which were part of its newly singular timeline, and when they occurred. Although fixed dates were given for the debut of historical characters such as the JSA, the debut of the post-Crisis Superman was presented as "10 years ago" and subsequent dates were expressed the same way, suggesting that the calendar years of these events were
fluid and relative to the present rather than fixed, as a way to keep the characters at roughly their present ages.
The
Legion of Super-Heroes continuity was completely
rebooted following
Zero Hour, and the various Hawkman characters were merged into one (even though, contrary to the storyline's purpose, this created new sets of contradictions and confusions). Each ongoing series at the time was given an opportunity to retell (or clarify) the origin of its hero(es) to establish the official version in this revised continuity, in a "#0" issue published in the subsequent weeks after
Zero Hour. They resumed their previous numbering or went on to #1, for new series, the following month. Several series took new directions following
Zero Hour; for example, new teams were formed in the
Justice League books, Oliver Queen's son
Connor Hawke was introduced in
Green Arrow, and
Guy "Warrior" Gardner discovered an alien heritage which gave him different powers.
A major part of
Batman's origin was retconned after the events in
Zero Hour. In this version, Batman never caught or confronted the killer of his parents (thus rendering
Batman: Year Two non-canonical), and more importantly, Batman was thought of as being an
urban legend. Also,
Catwoman was not a prostitute, but rather lived in the low rentals area of Gotham. Finally, contributing to a plot point not fully explored in
Batman: Year Three,
Dick Grayson was legally adopted by Wayne.
But this "warm reboot" did not solve all continuity matters and in fact actually
created other continuity problems— the fold-out timeline included
Armageddon a story that required the supposedly eliminated alternate timelines to even work, Matrix Supergirl who required an artificially created alternate timeline still existed, and "
Who is Hawkman?" actually became
less clear. For those and other reasons, DC later introduced a variation of the pre-Crisis concept of the
Multiverse, in the form of
Hypertime. In the end, this more ecumenical solution did not satisfy DC editors either, inevitably leading to the
Infinite Crisis event in 2005, which revived and brought back several pre-
Crisis concepts.
Zero Hour also served to launch or end several ongoing series. A few of these were dictated by the changes in continuity that came out of the story, but most happened simply because it provided a convenient marketing opportunity to start new series. However, each of the new series (save for
Starman) were canceled after a couple of years, due to poor sales. The critical success of
Starman was a turning point for DC's editors and how they viewed DC's Golden Age characters and their ongoing story potential, starting a trend reflected in a small family of books set in the present but reflective of the past, such as
Starman's successor title,
JSA.
Zero Month
"Zero Month" immediately followed with every DC Universe title published being numbered issue "#0", and featuring the slogan, "The Beginning of Tomorrow!". DC have since repeated this idea with
The New 52's "Zero Month", a year after the start of the initiative.
Booster Gold #0 (2008)
In 2008, fourteen years later, an issue of
Booster Gold vol. 2 was published as "
Booster Gold #0", and was announced as an official
Zero Hour tie-in by DC Comics. The issue used the same cover style as previous tie-ins to the event, referring to the "
Crisis in Time" and using the semi-metallic "fifth color" ink used on the original
Zero Hour issues. Like the other tie-in issues, Booster's origin was explained as part of the adventure in the issue. The cover was a homage to
Zero Hour #4, with
Ted Kord's mask replacing
Wally West's, alternate
Blue Beetles replacing the alternate Hawkmen, and the heroes around the edges replaced by Booster in the center.
[3]
Collected editions
The series has been collected into a
trade paperback titled
Zero Hour: Crisis in Time (
ISBN 1-56389-184-0).
Extracts Taken From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hour:_Crisis_in_Time
More Info:
https://sites.google.com/site/theannotateddcproject/annotations/zero-hour -
http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Zero_Hour
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