The Trouble With Zero Issues

Over the weekend, ComicBook.com will take a look at the last three weeks of DC Comics’s zero issues, stories told in the five years missing between the first issues of Action Comics and Justice League and those of the rest of the New 52’s publishing line.And along the way, we’ve seen a handful of retcons, blunders and all the other sorts of things that you get when you try to insert a new story into the timeline of the old ones.These mistakes are almost a stock-in-trade at the Big Two, since they’ve got decades of history that they have to incorporate into their books and fans who know all of it and want their favorite story to count, regardless of what that does to the timeline. Going back to the early days of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, Marvel realized that an interconnected universe where all of the characters coexist could take their books to the next level and make everything a “must-read” for fans. Years later, DC and Marvel fall back on “events” and the interconnected universe because its what makes them special and exciting. Does anyone actually believe a tenth Batman title will magically make the other nine as good as The Walking Dead? Not objectively, no, but it creates an overall experience that smaller publishers cannot afford to replicate.