One or two little links

Title: It’s worth unpacking this a little. DC is, of course, the publisher of this comic and the corporate owner of its intellectual property; DC stands for DETECTIVE COMICS, one of the first series it published, beginning in 1937. The “DC Universe”–DCU for short–is the shared setting for most of the superhero comics DC publishes, a setting that extends beyond Earth to the entirety of existence. (In fact, the DC Universe is a “multiverse,” a set of parallel universes–52 of them at the moment.) And “zero” implies that this story happens “before the beginning” of the forthcoming FINAL CRISIS story. “Zero” also has two other connotations in the context of the DCU. One is that this issue was originally more or less intended to be the final issue of COUNTDOWN, a.k.a. COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS, a weekly series that began with issue 51 and counted down to issue 1–instead of its original plan of ending with issue 0. (Despite its title, COUNTDOWN actually appears to have had few direct ties to FINAL CRISIS; where they’re relevant, they’ll be described here.) The other is an allusion to ZERO HOUR, a 1994 five-issue miniseries about the destruction and re-creation of the DCU; the month after it ended, all DCU titles published issues numbered 0.

This is especially admirable considering that, by swapping the Qwest Field Event Center for the Convention Center as this year’s venue, ECCC had more space to play with. This was a definite boon in terms of panels (at the Qwest Field Event Center, panels were held in an open, second level directly over the exhibitors, which was distracting and made it difficult to hear) and overall comfort. Post-show, con organizer Jim Demonakos enthused that, in regards to the venue, there were “no real cons, which is nice and one of the reasons we made the move, we wanted to make sure that we had all the space we needed to do all the cool stuff we wanted to accomplish at the show and that, in the end, was what we were able to do. I’m very happy with the new venue.”