It’s been a fair while since I read a DCU comic – almost nothing since the end of 52, in fact. Still, even someone as largely disinterested in DC Universe comics can’t fail to notice that big things are happening. DC’s second weekly series, Countdown, has ended, apparently without getting to the place it was supposed to. Whoops. Someone get Grant Morrison on the horn. Enter DC Universe #0, which sets the stage for Final Crisis in all the ways that Countdown managed not to. Apparently.

DC Universe #0 isn’t so much a story as a guided tour of the current state of the DCU. Both Marvel and DC have been screwing around with mega-crossovers for years now, and just keeping up with continuity is getting to be a harder and harder game than ever. DCU #0 tries to explain where most everyone important is and what they’re doing, with the notable exception of the Shazam family of characters. The problem is, it neither explains who anyone is, nor what situation they’re in. It just shows them doing some stuff and you have to try and piece it together from what’s going on in their parent titles. The Batman segment is especially impenetrable. It’s Batman and the Joker! I know those characters! I shouldn’t be left unable to understand a damn word of their conversation.

The opening description of the recent Crises is almost impressively succinct for what’s been going on, but the rest of the book is a jumble of characters and situations that fail to engage. It feels more like a sampler than a story in itself, which is a pity because it ends with a fairly important revelation that you suspect really needed a stronger companion material. Narrating this tour is a mysterious figure. (Spoiler time, folks. Please exit the review immediately if you’re bothered.) Initially, I thought this was part of the fruition of Morrison’s “Sentient DC Universe” idea that he was talking about a few years back, but it becomes fairly clear who it is – it’s Barry Allen. If they’re serious about bringing back the man Seb and I once named as our No. 2 Best Death in Comics, it needs to be for a better story than Crisis Nine or whatever this one is, and it certainly should’ve been done in a better comic than DCU #0.

There are some nice touches – the way the caption boxes fade from Black to Red is a great detail, and that final page is a fantastic image. Lopresti’s Wonder Woman is Hughes-esque without being gratuitous, and the Spectre sequence is probably the best of the bunch, appropriately creepy. Perez drawing anything is always worth seeing. On the whole, though, it fails as a book. It’s supposed to be leading into Final Crisis, and yet it doesn’t adequately introduce anything or anyone. It’s the comics equivalent of channel-surfing. My first DCU comic for some time, and probably my last one until this Crisis is over as well…