Waiting for the Trade
by Bill Miller
by Karl Kessel and Ron Marz
collects Final Night 1-4 and Parallax Emerald Night 1
Why I Bought This: As
someone who doesn’t read a lot of DC this was an event I was always curious
about and at a recent comic show I attended the trade was being sold for $5. At
that price why not?
The Plot: A
creature called the Sun Eater shows up attempts to eat the Earth’s sun causing
Earth’s heroes and a few villains to unite in an attempt to save the planet.
Chapter 0 - A mysterious alien girl arrives on Tamaria to
warn them of the Sun Eater. The Tamarians are a warlike race and don’t trust
her until its too late. Their sun and world dies but alien chick escapes and
heads to the next planet in the Sun Eater’s path: Earth.
Chapter 1 - Alien chick crashes in Metropolis where she is
greeted by Superman and the Legion of Super Heroes. Saturn Girl uses telepathy
to teach alien chick English and she warns them of the Sun Eater. Earth’s
heroes gather at Star Labs where scientists verify the threat will arrive at
the Sun in six hours. Big Barda suggests using a boom tube to teleport the
creature to the edge of the universe as plan A. Superman gather heroes with
heat-based powers together for Plan B. Batman is put in charge of the more
urban heroes in using them to keep order from the mass panic that will occur if
the other teams fail. Mr. Miracle’s team which includes Captain Atom and Dr.
Polaris along with some heroes I don’t recognize confront the Sun Eater (it
looks a living dark cloud/black hole) first and attempt to create a vortex to
pull it into a boom tube however the boom tube has no effect because the Sun
Eater exists on multiple dimensions. Next up Superman’s team (with Firestorm,
Ray, Fire and a few others) combine their powers to create a second sun that is
held in check by Green Lantern’s (Kyle Raner) power ring in order to decoy Sun
Eater away from the true sun. However it catches their mini-sun and eats it
completely nearly killing all of the heroes in the process. The Sun Eater
envelops the Sun causing the sky to turn black.
Chapter 2 – It’s been 27 hours since the sun went dark. Lex
Luthor arrives in Metropolis to try and save the day with science. Meanwhile
various heroes deal with fires burning out of control or criminals trying to
take advantage of the situation. Superman’s powers are fading without sunlight.
Luthor sends GL into the sun to get readings on what exactly the Sun Eater is
doing, after which he abruptly disappears. The alien who warned everyone, now
named Dusk, is attacked by an irate mob and decides humanity doesn’t deserved
to be saved. She is then saved from the mob by new hero Ferro.
Chapter 3 – Demons from Hell offer to save the Earth if
every inhabitant on the planet sells their souls but humanity turns them down.
Gaea and Spectre are doing their best to keep the planet warm from the inside.
The STAR Labs team realizes the Sun is about to go “hyper nova” in an effort to
ward off the Sun Eater. Phantom Stranger shows Dusk the good side of humanity.
Some of the heat-based heroes aid a village in Africa ,
while other heroes like Superman and Alan Scott go home to visit loved ones.
Guy Gardner (currently in his Warrior cyborg identity) is getting drunk when he
is confronted by a green flash.
Chapter 4 – Cyborg (the Superman foe, not the Teen Titan) is
at the edge of the universe running from Parallax (Hal Jordan Jordan kills him in vengeance for Coast City Jordan Jordan
Chapter 5 – With two hours before the Sun goes nova, Luthor
has a plan to place a field of gizmos around the Sun that will use the energy
of the nova to generate a force field that will contain the explosion and
hopefully kills the Sun Eater. Luthor assigns the task of erecting the force
field generators to Green Lantern but then GL gets teleported away in a green
flash. With GL gone someone will have to manually pilot a ship to place the
devices and that person will likely not come back. Superman volunteers with the
hope that the nova will jumpstart his powers rather than killing him. However
before Supes can leave Ferro steals the ship reasoning the world can’t lose
Superman. Parallax shows up and offers to help. He notes he could jumpstart the
Sun but the resulting melting of all the ice and snow will cause floods that
kill lots of people. Of course he can bend time to avoid those affects too.
This causes Batman to be a douche and accuse Hal of playing God again. So
Parallax instead agrees to just take care of the Sun Eater and restore the
planet’s natural equilibrium but not to save any lives already lost. Meanwhile
Ferro fails to deploy the force fields properly and is killed in a nova blast;
or at least he should be when Parallax freezes time and sends him back to
Earth. Hal then absorbs the Sun Eater into himself and changes the nova energy
into green light described as life force energy that heals the planet at the
cost of his own life. Afterwards Superman and Batman debate whether Hal was
really a hero.
Critical Thoughts:
This is a quick read, so even when parts of the story don’t work it never fully
spoils your enjoyment because you’re not investing a lot of time into it. I like Hal Jordan a bit more than most of
DC’s A-list and this is a good story of him trying to redeem himself from the
events that preceded Zero Hour—probably
the only other major DC crossover I’ve read and one I always felt Hal was kind
of justified in to begin with, so in that sense I liked this story overall.
I like the idea of Lex Luthor being Earth’s best hope for
salvation before Jordan Jordan
The impersonal nature of the villain also makes this a
bizarre event story. On the one hand you don’t have the sort of big epic cosmic
evil plan you expect in this kind of story, on the other hand the stakes are
certainly high enough and the challenge facing the heroes unique enough to
qualify as a major threat. Still without true villainy this becomes more a tale
of how the heroes (and Luthor) react to a natural disaster than the kind back
and forth rising action you expect in an event story. The human touches with
Superman and the Green Lanterns play out well in this environment; while the
urban riots, African subplot and Dusk learning about humanity don’t ever
achieve what the author wants them to evoke.
I will say I don’t know who the hell Ferro is, or even if he
has super powers, but he seems way out of the place in this story. I assume he
was some new character they were pushing for a solo book at the time because
his debut gets the Chapter 2 cliffhanger spot (prompting an anti-climatic ‘who
the hell is this and why should I care?’ moment) and then of all the heroes on
Earth he’s the one who thinks Superman is too valuable to lose and is left to
deploy (and screw up) Luthor’s plan. If this story was supposed to be his big
push it fails, because after reading it I could care less if I ever saw him in
a comic book again.
Grade: C+. The
Sun Eater is an interesting concept in terms of a global threat for the heroes
to face but the action itself lacks dramatic tension. Still the character work
on Jordan and Luthor is interesting enough to earn this a slightly positive
grade.