Hooray for spandex!

At the same time as "Infinite Crisis," there has been another, much more self-contained DC crossover going on: writer Grant Morrison's brilliant "Seven Soldiers" project, which wraps up in late June -- the first two paperback collections (of four) are out already. It's made up of seven four-issue miniseries, drawn by seven art teams, reinventing seven bottom-of-the-barrel, virtually unknown DC characters -- Klarion the Witch Boy, the Shining Knight and so on. (You won't miss anything if you've never seen any of them before.) The seven protagonists never meet one another, but their individual narratives collectively form an eighth, tightly choreographed story about maturity and cultural evolution: Morrison suggests that "superhero" is just another word for someone who has attained the next stage of enlightenment beyond his or her culture. (A fan makes a convincing argument here that the overall arc of "Seven Soldiers" is meant to echo Ken Wilber's "spiral dynamics" model of human consciousness.) And for all the project's conceptual complexity, Morrison still manages to pull off over-the-top nuttiness. Best caption: "All in a day's work ... for FRANKENSTEIN!"

Both Morrison and Johns are part of the four-writer team directing "52," another massive DC project, beginning May 10. (The other two are Mark Waid, a comics-history encyclopedia with a knack for pacing and flow, and Greg Rucka, who specializes in gritty spy stories like Oni Press's "Queen and Country"; he also worked on the cult favorite police-procedural "Gotham Central," whose best character, lesbian ex-cop Renée Montoya, is one of "52"'s protagonists.) It's a 52-issue, weekly miniseries that will progress in real time. The background: As of the comic books published in March, the time frame of most of DC's ongoing series jumped ahead a year, during which Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman -- three characters whose metaphorical significance is the concept of human perfectibility -- had all been missing. "52" follows what happened during the lost year from the overlapping perspectives of six characters trying to find their way in a world whose anchor has just disappeared.

The conceptual resemblance to "24" isn't an accident: The new wave of television drama -- not just "24" but the likes of "Lost" and "Six Feet Under" -- seems to have provided the model for the way "52" progresses, too. The pace is swift enough that it takes careful rereading to catch everything; multiple subplots gallop along in tandem. But the writing team knows that superhero comics can also get away with abrupt changes in setting and scale. In the course of the first month's worth of issues, "52" encompasses space opera, hard-boiled detective fiction, psychological suspense, light comedy, Grand Guignol violence, medical drama and straight-up good-guys-vs.-bad-guys action, all butting up against one another. (Keith Giffen, who's doing layouts for the whole series, gives it a consistent look, with slightly overlapping images and perspective that moves gracefully from panel to panel.) It's clear that all the plots will eventually come together, if not how.

The cast of "52" is once again gigantic, but the story is much gentler to non-obsessives than "Infinite Crisis" -- the writers don't mind throwing in a little subtle exposition, and every issue after the first will include a backup feature explaining a bit of the DC world's history or a character's background. The tone of the series is less world-making than world-mapping (at a panel discussion in February, writer Rucka noted that he and his colleagues are thinking of Google Earth as a reference point): It's not about changing everything in this fictional cosmology, it's about showing readers how 65 years' worth of collaborative invention fits together.

The biggest challenge mainstream comics face right now, though, is roping in new readers, who have gradually been trickling away as the economy of the comics industry shifts to squarebound collections and manga, and racks of comics at newsstands become a fading memory. One particularly nice form of customer outreach is happening May 6: Free Comic Book Day, a now 5-year-old tradition in which several thousand American comics stores offer a choice of about 30 different special giveaway comics, many meant for kids, to anyone who comes in.

Unfortunately, a lot of this year's mainstream freebies --Marvel's "X-Men/Runaways," DC's "Superman/Batman," independent companies' "Star Wars" and "Transformers" and "G.I. Joe" comics -- are somewhere between uninspired and horrid. If you're visiting a comics store this Saturday with a young child, grab Andy Runton's adorable "Owly: Breakin' the Ice" (Top Shelf) or the surprisingly charming "Donald Duck" giveaway (Gemstone/Disney). If you're by yourself and of legal drinking age, go for Bryan Lee O'Malley's "Free Scott Pilgrim" (Oni Press), a trailer for his loopy video game/manga-influenced graphic novel series, or French cartoonists Phillipe Dupuy and Charles Berberian's slice-of-life comedy "Mr. Jean" (Drawn & Quarterly), or Joel Priddy's daffy, minimalist one-shot "The Preposterous Voyages of IronHide Tom" (AdHouse Books).

As usual, the most pointed critiques of the comics world come from within, and one story in another Free Comic Book Day title, "Bongo Comics Free-for-All!" sums up the question of the moment. As it begins, the Comic Book Guy in "The Simpsons" is delighting in an issue of "Archie Disassembled" (a riff on Marvel's big 2004 crossover "Avengers Disassembled"): "Big Ethel kills Moose to get Jughead's attention? Oh, Brian Michael Bendis, you've done it again!" When C.B. Guy is bonked on the head by a box of "Radioactive Man" comics, though, his personality changes. He kicks his customers out and shuts down the store: "Why would you want to read this? It's overpriced, vapid, and juvenile, packed with enough grammar mistakes to make a third-grade child blush!"

Well, he's right, sometimes. God knows there's plenty of cynical, awful superhero products packing comics stores' clearance bins, and some of the worst offenders are "event" comics and crossovers. So why do people keep buying them? Because when they're good, their charge of fantastic invention is like nothing else -- a well-executed crossover offers a sense not only of experiencing a crucial moment in a huge, fictional history but of being able to understand the meaning of that moment by seeing it through multiple artists' (or characters') eyes. And, at their best, they give even the terrible comics that came before them meaning and value, as unreliable but irreplaceable documents of a world whose wonders are only more colorful versions of our own world's.

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