Just as it was a year ago, so is it today. Here at ComicBook.com, we wanted to take a look at DC Comics’s The New 52, one year later (not to be confused with One Year Later, the event that took place following the DC Comics event called 52), to see how things look and whether these prequel stories really work as prequel stories to the 52 new #1 issues that rolled out last September (give or take, since some of these newly-released zero issues are prequels to stories that didn’t come out last year).That said, we won’t be trying to soak in quite as much here, so don’t expect the page-long analyses of each issue that we went into with the first issues. With the relaunch, it was important to consider a number of factors. With these zero issues, we just want to see whether the zero issue is a good comic, whether it fits with the #1 and what it might say about the future of the title.Green Lantern #0Much has been made of this title, from the “I’m not a terrorist, I’m a car thief” defense of the new main character to the cryptic epilogue featuring the two guys who have been the stars of the title up until now.Ultimately it’s not a bad issue but, like so much of what he’s done lately, it just isn’t worthy of Geoff Johns’s Green Lantern run. The story is the kind that would have worked better in the days before every fan had the Internet and ready access to retailer solicitations, as the whole issue was an introduction to Simon Baz, a character who readers had already met through solicitation text and the fan press long before the issue ever hit the stands.There’s not much else here in terms of meat for the story, other than the not-particularly-shocking revelation that Amanda Waller may be behind planting a bomb on Baz, or is at least somehow messed up in his life before the ring ever came and found him.The story is going to be accused of pandering, and that’s a fair enough accusation. The fundamental problem there is that mainstream comics don’t depict many Arab characters, and so when they do, the temptation is always to go straight for 9/11. When you do that, though, it reduces the character’s identity to something emblematic of race or culture, rather than that of an interesting individual, and it feels like you’re trying too hard to make everyone know “he’s just like everybody else! Really!”, which is the kind of thing that really shouldn’t need to be explicitly explained.Then again, there are a lot of people who look at a character like Baz and go straight for racism as their go-to tool for “humor.” You can see it on just about any social network site, and so maybe tackling the “I’m not a terrorist” plot early on, as ridiculous as that panel was, was necessary.
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