Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #4-0

Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #4-0

Originally released in 1994

Written by Dan Jurgens

Art by Jerry Ordway

Looking into another Crisis event, I went with Zero Hour.  The Crisis On Infinite Earths story caused some confusion within the timelines of some characters, along with some aftereffects that might have been unpopular (such as Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman no longer being founding members of the Justice League), and I was under the impression that this story set out to fix them.

The basic premise is that time is being destroyed, both backwards from the end of the universe and forwards from its beginning.  A villain called Extant is seemingly behind it, though he's working with a shadowy figure.  Extant seems confusing, to say the least.  A fusion of a hero called Hawk, a time traveler called Waverider, and various others, Extant seeks to make the world in his own image.

The story seems mean-spirited at times, as it partially seemed to be written to remove the Justice Society (the heroes of World War 2) and the Legion of Superheroes (heroes from the 30th century) from existence.  I get that, in most cases, having Golden Age heroes as still being active gets increasingly implausible as time goes on (with some exceptions like Doctor Fate or the Spectre), but wiping out the Legion of Superheroes felt spiteful in a way.

They don't get any sort of grand final battle or dramatic moment; they just cease to exist when a wave of entropy envelops their timeline.  It's arguably better than how the Justice Society were treated, where Extant effortlessly beats all of them (the Spectre is absent), killing Doctor Fate and Doctor Mid-Nite while aging the others to the point where they're near death, with the exception of Alan Scott, who gives up being Green Lantern regardless.  However, it didn't seem like there was any reason to write the Legion out of existence.

The whole situation seems completely hopeless, as emphasized by the treatment of Wally West.  In Crisis On Infinite Earths, Barry Allen died, but in doing so, he caused a major setback to the Anti-Monitor's plan.  Here, Wally seemingly dies in a similar way, but it accomplishes absolutely nothing. (He's presumably brought back afterwards, but he's not shown)

Even when the heroes stop one of the waves of entropy that's barreling towards the present, Extant's partner shows up and casually brings it back after the heroes have left. There's this sense of inevitability that time is going to be reset one way or another.

Time being distorted leads to some changes, such as heroes from the past (like a pre-Killing Joke version of Batgirl) or future (like Bart Allen, a.k.a. Impulse) winding up in the present, though aside from that, not much seems to be done with the concept.  (A second Robin is shown following Batman, though it's unclear if it's Dick Grayson or Jason Todd, and nothing comes of it here - I'd guessing it was handled in a tie-in issue)

The nineties were a rough time for a lot of DC's heroes - Aquaman lost his hand, Batman's back was broken, Superman died... Now it's another hero's turn to have their dark turn in life. Though in this case, their dark turn already happened, and this just makes it worse.  By the time of issue 1 (the series' numbering counts backwards, starting from 4), Extant's partner is revealed:

After the destruction of Coast City at the hands of Mongul and Cyborg Superman, Hal Jordan went to the Guardians of the Universe to get them to restore it. They refused, or weren't able to, so Hal went insane and slaughtered the Green Lantern Corps., leaving Kyle Rayner as the only space-faring Green Lantern. (Alan Scott isn't part of the Corps., and some like Guy Gardner are still around but have different powers)

Now Hal's calling himself Parallax for some reason, and he's destroying the entire universe at every point in time in order to remake it into what he considers a perfect universe. I can't imagine how badly this went over, especially with Green Lantern fans.  Actually, I can, because Marvel did something similar in the lead-up to the Secret Empire event where Captain America was revealed to be a deep-cover HYDRA agent, though it was revealed pretty quickly that his history had been altered by a Cosmic Cube.

Here, Hal's treatment wouldn't be retconned or altered until roughly a decade later when Geoff Johns started writing Green Lantern, meaning that for roughly ten years, Hal Jordan, the Silver Age Green Lantern, had his lasting legacy be that he went insane, killed or depowered every Green Lantern but one, and killed trillions or more in an attempt to remake the universe. Needless to say, this event is not kind to Hal.

The event isn't even clear about what changed as a result of the alterations to the timeline.  It's a little annoying, though it's arguably for the best - it seems like it's better to give the writers who are in charge of the individual series the opportunity to decide that, rather than having the team behind Zero Hour arbitrarily choose what is or isn't canon while everyone else has to follow suit. That's led to problems in shared universes before, like with Zack Snyder establishing that Wonder Woman abandoned humanity for a century in Batman v Superman, or with the Russo brothers ending Avengers Endgame with Thor traveling with the Guardians of the Galaxy when neither Taika Waititi or James Gunn (who were the people behind the newest Thor movies and Guardians of the Galaxy, respectively) had no idea what to do with that plot point.

I wasn't a fan of this event, honestly.  Hal's transformation into Parallax seems pointless and mean-spirited, a lot of the deaths seemed unnecessary, the heroes were mostly irrelevant (or at least they didn't accomplish much), the plotline with Extant and Waverider was confusing (maybe it's part of another series that I'm not aware of), and it doesn't even feel like it takes advantage of points in time being mashed together.  There's some great art by Jerry Ordway, but I'd be hard-pressed to recommend this story.