War! Huh! Good God y'all! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin'!

Friends, duty is a terrible burden. That sense of obligation to something beyond ourselves, that drives us forward -- at times despite our better judgement, or our personal desires, or just the fact that we're so gosh darned bone tired that putting one foot in front of the other seems like a herculean task, to say nothing of stepping up and fighting the good fight -- is a difficult yoke to shoulder. Duty can be imposed either internally or externally, but either way it falls to the individual to answer the call. Regardless of the stakes, regardless of the consequences of not stepping up, we are each and every one of us responsible for how we respond.

It is in that spirit of willing acceptance of the call of duty -- and in weary but fervent anticipation of the fact that our long journey is nearly at its anticlimactic end -- that I turn my attention to Week 50 of the year long train wreck DC Comics calls 52.

Heh; train wreck seems an apt term. A train wreck is what happens when you don't have Superman there to stop the train that is barreling down the tracks, running out of control toward the gap in the bridge, or the fuel tanker stalled across the tracks. Superman is the guy who can use his own body as a makeshift rail to bridge the gap, or reach out with a casual hand to stop the train barrelling toward its fiery destiny. Without him, the train goes off the rails, even when the final station stop is in sight.

I'll also cop to the fact that I went ahead and bought all four issues of the tie-in miniseries WORLD WAR III. I did this with full knowledge and acceptance of the fact that I am a sucker. I knew I was being played for a dupe, and that nothing in the series was worth the investment of my time, my attention, or my money. I rationalized it thusly: to date -- and to my horror -- I have invested $125 in following 52. What's another sawbuck against that investment? You can say many things about this decision, but at least you can't say it's a sign I'm on the road to hell, because good intentions were nowhere around this purchase.

At best, it's a parenthetical train wreck; the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and while this little series magnifies details about the precise pattern and weave of that handbasket, it really exists as an exercise in heroic narcissism. It's not about the war, but about why Martian Manhunter is Sad, and why he feels cut off from humanity. And, yes, along the way they manage to work in little details about how Aquaman got turned into a squid, and how Black Adam ripped off a guy's face, and punched Terra's heart out through her spinal column, but mostly, it's about why Martian Manhunter is sad. Because that story's never been told before.

As for Week 50, the aforementioned World War III plays out across the pages of this single issue.

Before we get to the details of this issue, let's pause for a moment to consider the implications of this idea: Given the real time conceit of 52, this means that a war that spans the globe, that was precipitated by an attack that killed millions of people, begins and ends in the span of one week. A 168-hour war.

Why? Apparently because series writer Greg @#$%ing Rucka thought it would be a spiffy-keen idea. To quote from this week's DC Nation column:

In reviewing all the OYL changes, we realized that most could be tied to one massive event. One that could affect all our heroes on a global level And that's where World War Three was born. You'll have to forgive my memory--I'm always at a loss for the old "who said what"--but I remember Greg Rucka discussing the implications of a World War fought by super-heroes. And while everyone debated how it would be fought, they all agreed on one thing; the war would definitely be fast. One week fast.

To quote Guy Gardner taunting the Flash: "Haw! You're not even half-fast!"

A war that encompasses the entire globe, fought in one week. A war perpetrated and carried out on all levels by superhumans. By that very definition, this is a war in which ordinary humans have no role to play but that of victims, where all human works -- hell, where every drop of rain and blade of grass -- is nothing but collateral damage.

Even if these creators are right -- and aren't just adopting an idea that fits the conceit of the project on which they're working -- a war that lasts seven days, particularly one that leaves millions of victims and billions, arguably trillions, of dollars of damage in its wake, won't end in seven days. Hell, look at history. Israel fought a six day war almost 40 years ago, and it's part of a pattern that has been @#$%ing up that part of the world ever since. You don't put something like this back in the box at the end of a week, because you've used the time to explain why Raven is sad, or why Martian Manhunter is wearing pants, or why Billy @#$%ing Batson now has a streak in his hair.

Unless, of course, putting the whole thing back in the box at the end of the story is what you have in mind. Even if Dan Didio is correct, and this story was needed to explain away all the changes that happenehttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.italic.gifd between the end of Infinite Crisis and the beginning of One Year Later, this is a clumsy, half-assed, hamfisted, and downright incompetent way to do it. How do you get from a global catastrophe to the establishment of a new status quo -- one in which there isn't a massive, global-level humanitarian crisis taking place all over the world? One in which the war among super-heroes doesn't spark other wars once the storm surge of spandex recedes? One in which all the cities that are destroyed get rebuilt, and the millions of dead are buried, and hunger and disease and looting and hopelessness and post-traumatic stress of an incalculable scope doesn't hold sway in tens of millions of hearts and minds?

How is it possible to go from that to a status quo where a repowered Superman spends his time fighting the same old battles, and making the same old speeches to Lex Luthor? Or where a newly-lighthearted Batman can find the time in the wake of watching Harvey Dent embrace Two-Face again to adopt Robin? Or where the Teen Titans get back together, and nobody really talks about the fact that they went through a war mere days before their story picked up? Look, like it or loathe it, but Marvel did have a point with Civil War: at some point, something will happen that's big enough to get people asking the question about how smart it is to allow superheroes to run around unchecked. The execution suffered, but the fundamental question is germane. In Marvel's case, all it took was the destruction of one city in Connecticut. With millions dead, an entire country destroyed, and who knows how many victims around the world, the DC heroes just dust off, wrap up the story, and take their marks on the OYL stage?

There's only one way it's possible. Somebody's gonna have to hit a reset button. Otherwise, the whole enterprise falls apart. Somewhere in the next two weeks, whatever Booster Gold has been working on, or the spirit of Ralph Dibney, or the three spacebound stooges will maguffin the %$#@ out of things, and millions of people will come back to life, and the leaning tower of Pisa will rise again from the rubble, and peace and happiness and puppies will reign again, making the world safe for Superman to punch hell out of the Kryptonite Man with a clean conscience.

And so, I'm forced to ask, what the hell is the point? Why do it if it doesn't matter? Why walk into a place that is both so dark and so filled with story-telling potential? Millions dead. Countless others displaced. What is the role of superheroes in such a world, especially when they are complicit in creating those circumstances? Why shake up the status quo merely to reinforce the notion that the status quo is the only viable state, and that the only change that is truly possible relates to haberdashery? Is it a failure of talent? Of imagination? Is it simple sadism?

And really, even if there is a point I'm simply incapable of seeing, I don't buy the core of the story. So Black Adam is on a rampage. So he is so full of rage and grief that nothing matters to him, and any vestige of conscience or restraint is lost amid the maelstrom of these powerful emotions, making him as powerful and dangerous as he has ever been. Fine, I get that.

Only here's my thing:

Martian Manhunter. Power Girl (who's a kinda sorta maybe never really clear on this but, you know, as close as makes no odds Kryptonian analogue). Two Green Lanterns (Gardner and Stewart); three if you count Alan Scott. Three Marvels. And, oh, yeah, Mister @#$%ing terrific, a character established as the third smartest guy on the planet (presumably coming in right behind Wayne and Luthor). Plus a couple of Amazonian-empowered heroines.

Where does the war come in? How is this thing not essentially over before it starts? Given the talent and power available, we're not talking about a world war. We're talking about an episode of 24. It's only a war because the brane trust decided they wanted a war, decided that after making a personal investment of a year of their lives, and after dragging readers along for the better part of a year, there needed to be some manner of payoff, no matter how devoid of logic.

It's poorly conceived. It's risibly executed, or would be, if there was anything risible about the subject matter. It reflects the same one-note, tone-deaf approach to currency, and relevance, and real-world detail we've seen in this series's depiction of everything from how stock offerings work to how long it takes the police to make an arrest.

More to the point, it perpetrates the ongoing conceit of the series: ain't no hero like a legacy hero. There is nothing of value in the new. Four legs good, two legs bad. It's the stuff my little 52 Zoo Crew has been ranting about for a year now. Take out Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, and you're left with a void (at least that seems to be the gospel according to the creative and editorial teams behind 52). Promote whoever you want, but never forget that they're placeholders.

We see it in everything from Jay Garrick's throwaway "For once Guy's right..." line. Really? Twenty years after the Giffen-DeMatteis Justice League, and his own series, and his death and resurrection and rehabilitation, and we're still stuck with the same tired old "Guy Gardner is a jackass, but even a broken clock is right twice a day" schtick? Why? Do the brane trust not read DC comics? Do the editors? Hell, say what you will about Geoff Johns and his slavish devotion to the past, but he's been one of the prime movers of Gardner's rehabilitation. But we still get lines about why it's usually okay to ignore the guy (er, Guy)?

But that absolutely pales in comparison to the treatment of the Infinity, Inc. characters. I get that the brane trust invested in their unworthiness. I get that the legacy heroes see them as sullying a proud tradition. That's all well and good. But with the fate of the world on the line (however unnecessarily), they decide to make these characters abject cowards? Why?

Good, bad, or indifferent, aware of the true meaning of heroism or not, these characters somehow made it halfway around the globe to answer the call of duty, to answer a call they imposed on themselves, because no one else believed in them enough to impose that call on them. They suited up. They stepped up. They even got validation from the old guard. Alan Scott went so far as to call Nuklon "son." And what happens? They turn tail and run. Because they're not true heroes. Because they don't pass the test. They don't get a baptism of fire, merely a look of utter contempt from Wildcat before the JSA runs into action, because That's What Heroes Do.

Now of course cowardice is the flip side of heroism. Of course for every person who runs headlong into the burning building, there is someone who runs away from it. It's easy to make characters with no history, no real backstory or dimension, embody the other side of the heroic equation. But it's just as easy, and suggests a lot more storytelling potential (unless they're setting these characters up for some sort of redemption arc, but i'm not sure I believe that) to use these characters, and this situation, to tell a baptism of fire story.

And yet, for all that, I will confess that while I hated the conceit behind World War Three/Week 50, I appreciated the outcome. The innovative use of the Marvel power. The (reversible, but for the moment sympathy-inducing) fate of Black Adam. The likelihood that the answer is simple, and obvious, because that's how Billy Batson rolls, but still completely beyond Adam's comprehension: hope, or love, or forgiveness, or something like that.

Two issues left. A lot of territory to cover. To what end? To what import?