Convergence #8

Last Stand

Jeff King & Scott Lobdell Writers
Stephen Segovia, Carlo Pagulayan, Eduardo Pansica, Ethan Van Sciver Pencils
Jason Paz, Scott Hanna, Trevor Scott, Stephen Segovia, Ethan Van Sciver Inks
Aspen MLT's with Peter Steigerwald Colors
Travis Lanham Letters
Andy Kubert with Brad Anderson Cover
Tony Daniel with Tomeu Morey; Jill Thompson; John Romita, Jr. Variant Covers
Geoff Johns, Beth Sotelo, Mark Roslan Special Thanks
Brittany Holzherr Asst. Editor
Marie Javins Editor
Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
By special arrangement with the Jerry Siegel family.

Convergence was DC's big event of 2015. It involved tons of alternate versions of heroes and villains, playing off Grant Morrison's work on Multiversity and all the parallel Earths. But this event also had a more practical — or even sinister — purpose: Quickly create a slew of comics to fill in the gap while DC moved its headquarters from New York to Los Angeles. Which is why this comic was created by a small army of people.

Anyway, none of the variant covers feature any version of Bart Allen, so we'll only focus on the main cover. It shows the Parallax Hal Jordan from Zero Hour, the Barry Allen and Supergirl who died during Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the Superman and Lois Lane who somehow survived Flashpoint and had a son named Jon (the best character to come from this whole story). These heroes are in the massive hand of Telos ... or Brainiac ... I can't tell. This is an incredibly convoluted story (what else can you expect from Scott Lobdell?). And frankly, this is a rather underwhelming cover for the conclusion of a company-wide event.

I'm not going to try to recap this story. We're coming in at the very end of it, and it is woefully confusing and unnecessarily complicated. Besides, we're only here for one tiny, little, blink-and-you-miss-him Impulse. So, suffice it to say, this event threatened to destroy the multiverse. And at the conclusion, the multiverse was restored, and on a big, four-page spread, Ethan Van Sciver shows several of these worlds evolving and/or merging. So it seems like the Impulse and Young Justice of the late '90s turned into Earth 16 from Multiversity: The Just.

And so the DC Universe was restored, falling back more or less into what it was before. DC dropped the New 52 label from their comics, but the continuity is essentially the same. So at the end of the day, this event accomplished little more than fill time.

As nice as it was to see Van Sciver draw Impulse again, he really did not do a good job on this spread. The anatomy and proportions are all off — especially the Superman characters, whose chests bulge in strange, unnatural ways. Setting aside Van Sciver's toxic online personality, it truly was a shame to watch his skills as an artist deteriorate through the years. What a waste of talent.

The digital version of this comic didn't include any of the variant covers, but it does have one house ad of sorts. In place of the DC All Access page is a promotion of DCYou, the company's post-Convergence ... event? ... fad? I'm not sure what to call it. Anyway, it features an interview with Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok about the Darkseid War.

Next time, we'll take a quick look at another DC Sneak Peek of the post-Convergence, DCYou world.