Warning

I am going to be doing some comics-related blogging here. Worse, it's going to be superhero-comics blogging, not Ware/Clowes grownup-comics blogging. I have been reading more DC comics than usual lately, due to a big stunt that DC is pulling that I have totally fallen for.

For two years, most of the DC titles have been converging into one massive storyline that climaxes with a limited series called Infinite Crisis. I've read about half the relevant stuff so far; some of it's good and some of it's dumb, but as a whole it's an impressive feat of narrative coordination. Infinite Crisis itself is total fanboy fun and completely inaccessible to anyone not steeped in DC Universe lore.

But what's relevant for our purposes is what happens after IC: all the core DC titles jump one year ahead. The issues in question have a big "One Year Later" insignia on the covers, providing a place for new readers to jump on and affording the writers an opportunity for some mystery: what happened during that missing year?

The missing year will be covered in a weekly series called 52, out in a couple months. (All we know so far is that the big-shot heroes are MIA, and 52 will focus on the minor-leaguers trying to fill their shoes.) But I'm going to take One Year Later as an opportunity to read a bunch of DC comics, including some I've never read and others I haven't looked at in years, and see how they rate. If any are good, I'll keep buying them until I'm sick of them.

I won't be buying every 1YL book (you could probably pay me to read a sword-and-sorcery version of Aquaman, but it wouldn't be cheap). But I will buy most of them, and then I will post a brief review, and you will learn what a college-eduated man thinks about escapist entertainment for slow-reading adolescents. Stay tuned.