Category: Zero Hour Strikes
Last article published: 31 May 2022
This is the 37th post under this label
Premise: Co-hosts Siskoid and Bass cover the whole of DC Comics' Zero Hour 1994 crossover event in THE ZERO HOUR STRIKES! PODCAST. Every issue, every tie-in, every zero issue, and a little more besides! Siskoid revisits it; Bass discovers it for the first time!
Available: Fire and Water Network, Apple Podcasts, Spotify
Number of episodes total: 33
The first was about... Teasers and Prologues
How it all began
Even before my podcast partner Bass and I ended our run of First Strike: The Invasion Podcast, we were scouting for another crossover event to cover in a new, but similar show. Listeners were asking, but I think we weren't ready to stop producing a monthly to do together. Why Zero Hour: Crisis in Time? Well, it met several criteria. First, it was a different kind of crossover event. Invasion was "subset of the universe attacks/goes mad", while Zero Hour was a "crisis/shuffle the deck chairs" event. But still like Invasion, it had a clear theme (time travel to Invasion's aliens). Third, it was published 6 years after Invasion, time enough to discuss where DC's various series/characters were in a new era. Fourth it was still a DC event, so interesting to the same group of listeners and set in the shared universe I was most familiar with. And finally, I remembered liking it. History would show I was wrong about the latter.
The Process
With Invasion, it was pretty simple to identify the tie-ins, where the story began and where it ended. Zero Hour wasn't built the same way, so we endeavored to cover not just the series and the tie-ins, but the Zero issues that followed. It seemed like it wasn't enough to cover the shuffle, we also wanted to see where the deck chairs landed. That meant a lot more issues than Invasion in total, but I didn't want to spend the rest of my natural life doing the show either (I reserve that for oHOTmu OR NOT?), so most episodes - especially the ones about Zero issues - covered 2 to 4 books. And we're glad we fast-tracked it because, as I already intimated, Zero Hour was a big mess, and the core series particularly bad. The problem, as we came to discuss it, was that a specific story was hijacked to serve as a reboot for every struggling or failing series, and as editors and writers tacked stuff on, it lost a lot of focus. It's obvious in the way that "temporal anomalies" don't work the same from book to book. At 33 episodes, It think it was just the right size. Invasion had been 40, but only because we were more willing to include later stories that tied into it.
Reception
Though I was drumming my fingers impatiently until it ended, the show was as popular as Invasion was. People love indexing shows, I guess, but for the podcaster, it means you can't just find your joy - you have to cover the bad with the good, and where there's more bad THAN good, it can be difficult maintaining your enthusiasm. It was popular enough that I was once again bombarded by questions about, and suggestions for, the NEXT event index show.
The Future
And I didn't want to do one. By rights, we might have jumped another 6 years to the year 2000, but I was out of comics then. Therefore, no interest in that period's events. Early on, I thought of switching to Marvel and doing Acts of Vengeance, but then the popular podcasting event JLMay decided to cover it (yes, I know it has nothing to do with the JLA, I'm not in charge), so there went that idea. In fact, JLMay did me in with a number of possibilities. Or it was just that the crossovers I liked were already being other shows in my larger circle. And so I decided to end that "legacy" show though it had started with the Fire and Water Network as one of the first new podcasts on the service. FW Team-Up has an indexing element to it and that's enough for me.
Did I cover everything you needed me to? The floor is open to questions.
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