Remember DC's Tangent line?

I thought I did. I have a bunch of the comics, but not all of them. When I pulled them out of their longbox slumber this past weekend, I realized that I remembered very little of it.

And what I thought I remembered, I had wrong.

Tangent was a fifth week event for DC for Christmas 1997.

For those of you who came to comics in the post-manga/post-Raina time frame, let's drive down memory lane and look back on the whole "Fifth Week Event" thing...

Secret Origins: Fifth Week Events

Once upon a time, comics came out like clockwork across the four weeks in a month. You could almost count on your favorite series hitting comic shops or newsstands on the same week of each month.

"X-Men" would come out on the third week of the month. "Superman" would be on the first week. "Captain America" would always fit in on the second week. Etc.

I have to be honest: I don't remember which books were on which weeks. I'm making up examples here. You get the idea, though, I hope.

DC's Superman titles were engines of military precision back in the early to mid-90s. When they had the triangles on the cover giving you the proper reading order, DC had to hit their marks.

Some months, though, had a fifth shipping week.

Doing the math: There are 52 weeks in a year, but 12 months with 4 weeks each only adds up for 48 weeks. That leaves you with four weeks to fill up over the course of the year. They don't happen at regular intervals, but they will happen four times a year.

(Don't multiple 52 x 7 to come up with 365 days in a year, though. The calendar is not a perfect beast. Blame a Caesar or a Gregor or someone about that. Kodak tried to fix it, but even they gave up on that.)

For those Superman titles, DC came up with an extra title, "Superman: The Man of Tomorrow", just to fill in those fifth weeks. It lasted from 1995 to 1999, by which time DC had its Fifth Week events up and running.

Fifth Week Events

Fifth week events became a regular DC thing back in the day. These days, with no single comic book ever being on schedule, it isn't quite so necessary to figure out a way to fill out that fifth shipping week of the month that happens four times a year.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, that extra week became an interesting ground for experimentation.

The much-beloved Amalgam titles came out as a fifth week thing, back in the day when DC and Marvel got along nicely enough to publish fun things together.

Who can forget the "Justice League of ?" event, with one shots where you could replace that question mark with "Arkham," "Aliens," or "Amazons," amongst others?

Remember GirlFrenzy, a series of one-shots that featured women as the leads in books usually starring men? You also had "Young Justice: Secret" and "Batman: Batgirl" and "Superman: Lois Lane," amongst others.

New Year's Evil featured villains for the week in eight more one shots. If you were aching for stories with Darkseid, Gog, the Rogues, Scarecrow, or Mr. Mxyzpylk, you were in luck.

This even gained some notoriety for that "Gog" story by Mark Waid and Jerry Ordway. It lead into another Fifth Week Event, "The Kingdom." That continued the story of "Kingdom Come", but Alex Ross left the project over creative differences. The two-part bookend mini-series was drawn by Mike Zecc and Ariel Olivetti, with a bunch of one-shots in-between drawn by names like Frank Quietly and Barry Kitson, amongst others. Mark Waid wrote all the books.

"Sins of Youth" was a Fifth Week Event, and that introduced us to "Young Justice," which Peter David and Todd Nauck did together for many wonderful years.

"Power Surge" kicked off the "Power Company" series by Kurt Busiek and Tom Grummett.

Marvel, by the way, didn't ignore this entirely. They came out with a few of their own, like "Marvel Mangaverse," "Marvel Knights 2099" (where Robert Kirkman wrote a Daredevil issue), and even a "What If?" run.

That "Marvel Knights 2099" event was the outlier. It happened in 2004. DC stopped doing Fifth Week Events in 2002 with "Power Surge," and even Marvel hadn't done any in years when 2099 popped up.

The Tangent Event

Dan Jurgens created the "Tangent" event in 1997, which is basically an Elseworlds story where the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in much bigger explosions than it did in reality. The world changed drastically, and superhumans had greater real world impact.

The event went so well that it had a sequel in September 1998.

The creator list on both events looks like a Who's Who of DC talent of the time. Amongst others: Mark Millar (writing Superman!), James Robinson, Kurt Busiek, Chuck Dixon, Peter David, Ron Marz, Mike McKone, Todd Dezago, Paul Pelletier, Matt Haley, Karl Kesel, and Gary Frank.

I've hit my word count already, so come back next week and I'll review a book or two.

To Be Continued...

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