Convergence # 0 & 1 (DC)

writer: Jeff King, Dan Jurgens (#0), Scott Lobdell (#1)

artist: Ethan Van Sciver (#0), Carlo Pagulayan (#1)

Here it is!  The big DC event that finally brings back the pre-New 52 landscape.  All of them!

And yeah, Marvel is doing something remarkably similar in its new Secret Wars, and yeah, it's another multiverse story, which DC has done many, many times, even yeah, Marvel has made a considerable splash, too, with the whole Spider-Verse concept.

But this is pretty awesome.  And yeah, there are shades of DC vs. Marvel, too, pitting different realities against each other, but none of that particularly matters.  What matters is DC doing what it always does and usually getting little to no recognition for it: paying homage to its own past.  Not in the way Marvel does.  For Marvel, the past is directly connected to the present, even though Marvel finds creative ways around how that past is usually ignored or subverted without being outright replaced.  For DC, it's a matter of history being built on, usually at the expense of that history (so fans like to complain), but constantly acknowledging it.

Which is to say, Convergence owes Crisis On Infinite Earths a huge debt, just as Crisis owes "The Flash of Two Worlds."  And without Infinite Crisis there would be no Convergence.  And you need Final Crisis in that sequence.  And you need Zero Hour.  And so on.

What does Convergence do differently?  Well, for one, it's not really part of that sequence.  It is, in that DC has finally stopped worrying about competing realities.  That's what Crisis was all about, trying to end any such debates.  And then Infinite Crisis said it wasn't such a problem after all.  And then Final Crisis opened the doors for finding out how much fun it really can be.

But it starts a new narrative.  This one involves an existing concept, being Brainiac, the Collector of Worlds, who has long gone about the business of creating bottle cities to preserve specimens.  Now we have Telos, who is kind of like the keeper of those specimens, an intermediary in the tradition of the Monitors and Watchers, only this time condensed and not held back by a stance of noninterference.

What he comes equipped with is threats.  He states at the outset that if anyone attempts to subvert the rules, he will put an immediate end.  He wants fights.  He wants a sole survivor.  Of course, the individual spin-offs will flirt with subverting the rules all over the place.  How Telos deals with that will likely play out in the pages of Convergence itself.

In a way, Convergence mainlines the idea of comic book limbo first introduced by Grant Morrison in Animal Man.  Where DC is saying that old ideas don't really go away (which technically was done long ago with the Justice Society, who began as contemporaries of Superman but beginning with "Flash of Two Worlds" became something else), this isn't just a multiverse story, it's dealing with the direct consequences of having all this in-house competition and dramatizing it in the most direct way possible.

Lead writer Jeff King is new to comics, and so DC has paired him with a couple of veterans to pull this off.  In the preview issue, this means Dan Jurgens, and it has a true Jurgens flavor as a result, very straightforward storytelling, Superman confronting Brainiac and not being a happy camper and whatnot.  The first issue is with Scott Lobdell, meanwhile, and regardless of what fans tend to think about Lobdell, this means more intricate storytelling, flowing directly from the events of Earth 2: World's End (neither King nor Lobdell, mind you, had anything to do with that one).

Likewise on art there's a tale of two styles.  The Ethan Van Sciver who shows up in #0 actually is not a particularly ideal Superman artist.  The rest of the issue shows excellent work, though.  Carlo Pagulayan, meanwhile, is an ideal selection for #1.  He has a nice, clean, all-encompassing approach.

Also well-worth reading are the references to relevant comics at the back of each issue.