Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue at random, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

Since the Booster Gold issue reviewed yesterday was a somewhat belated Zero Hour crossover, I thought for this week’s Dusting Off it might be fun to take a look at one of the original issues, to see if there was in fact any worth in a crossover that is among the most widely-derided of DC’s early ‘90s boom of yearly “event” stories.

Superman : The Man of Steel had the dubious distinction of being the fourth monthly Superman title at the time (after Action Comics, Adventures of Superman­ – the original series from 1939 renamed – and the Superman series that began with John Byrne in the ‘80s). While the four books had different creative teams, the tendency of the time to bounce from big story to big story meant that, really, Superman as a whole was essentially a weekly ongoing (in much the same way as the multiple Spider-Man titles functioned during the Clone Saga). But when Zero Hour came along, each of the titles got the chance to tell its own, individual standalone story.

And as it happens, the one cooked up by Louise Simonson and Jon Bogdanove here is rather neat. Indeed, given what a mess the overall story was, it’s worth noting that a few of the tie-in stories – such as this, and Alan Grant’s excellent “The Battling Butler!” from Shadow of the Bat – actually managed to make good use of the concept of time being in a state of flux, with histories being rewritten and different versions of characters popping in and out of existence.

In fact, despite being a Superman book, the issue actually revolves prominently around Batman. In a move that would be quite startlingly echoed by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary/Batman special some years later, the basic conceit is that different versions of Batman – from the original 1930s detective, to Denny O’Neil’s brooding vigilante, to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight – keep appearing, disappearing and even transforming into one-another. The main plot around which this is hinged, meanwhile, is pretty unspectacular – something about a rock concert, a singer who may or may not be a vampire and who also appears to be Jimmy Olsen’s girlfriend, and (for reasons unknown) the Mutants from The Dark Knight Returns. It also loses points for featuring an appearance by Zeb, a pony-tailed wassock in love with Lois Lane who might be a contender for most irritatingly crap character in modern comics history.

But the issue gets a free pass out of Mid Nineties Superman Drossville, because that main plot really doesn’t matter as much as having fun with all the different Batmen. Both Simonson and Bogdanove excel – the former capturing various dialogue styles (the page of “Miller” dialogue, while a bit fish-in-a-barrel, is a hoot, as is the Denny O’Neil variant’s comment on Superman’s long hair), and the latter pulling off some pretty uncanny aping (whether tracing or otherwise) of different artists’ styles, particularly the etched linework of Neal Adams.

It’s starting to sound like a recurring theme (and sorry, but a lot of the DC issues I have from this era were parts of crossovers), but it bears repeating – even if the central storyline is rubbish and overblown, good stories can come out of a crossover if the writers are good enough to spin a decent standalone story out of the opportunities offered (and, lest we forget, James Robinson’s Starman was born out of Zero Hour, his first issue a #0 tie-in). There were even some half-decent Armageddon 2001 stories, which I may look at in a future week…