Living for the fifth week

My local comic store started the year with a restock of its $1 comics, because they are true and beautiful people, and I saw them post about it on Instagram and I was there an hour later, and was the first to suck up the cheap stuff.

I mainly went for the Unknown Soldier comics, because I still have a deep affection for the bandaged WW2 warrior that goes back to the days when I first learned to read. But I also hoovered up some absolute mint mini-series published by Vertigo around the turn of the millennium, mainly for the Glen Fabry and Phil Winslade art.

And I also scored almost every issue of the DC fifth-week comics event that brought back the Justice Society in 1999, and that was quite a score, because I'm always trying to live in the fifth week.

DC used to have this small gap in their publishing schedules with the 'fifth week', and would fill it with some specific event full of one-shots by some very interesting creators. They only did it for a little while, and haven't really done it for years, probably because the entire distribution system doesn't work like that anymore, and almost certainly because many regular readers took it as an opportunity to save money on comics that week, instead of buying something that 'didn't count'.

Of course, the ones that aren't tied so much into contemporary continuity are the ones that age the best, and are far more readable a few decades later. The most successful fifth-weeks were the ones that had a looser connective tissue - the GirlFrenzy, New Year's Evil and Silver Age events were mainly a bunch of one-shot wonders, while those that strived to tell a bigger story like The Kingdom or the Tangent books often feel half-baked.

But no matter how well the stories hold up, they often come with gorgeous artwork - that Justice Society one alone has pages and pages of wonderful work by Russ Heath, Michael Lark, Eduardo Barreto, Chris Weston and many others, and that's always worth hunting out.

They'll never be worth any real money, and may be little more than snapshots of a specific moment in time, but they're always worth digging out of the dollar bin.