DC Comics isn’t the first name you think of when you think of event comics. While event comics have inundated every corner of the comic industry since their debut 43 years ago with Marvel Super Heroes Contest of Champions, Marvel is more well-known for their events, and has produced some very fine ones, even if a lot of them are pretty mid. In fact, looking back over the history of the event comic, the House of Ideas have created the most popular events of the just about every decade that events have existed in, with the ’90s’ best usually considered to be Infinity Gauntlet.
Infinity Gauntlet is an amazing work, and one of the best events ever, hands down. However, if we’re being honest, the best event of the ’90s wasn’t Infinity Gauntlet. It was a four-issue DC miniseries, one that spun out of Grant Morrison’s JLA, and had the most interesting narrative conceit of any event comic ever: DC One Million. DC One Million, from Morrison and artist Val Semeiks, isn’t the flashiest or most important event, but it’s easily the best of its decade, a perfect event series with the best tie-ins ever.
DC One Million Took Readers to the 853rd Century and Blew Their Minds
It all began with one of the best Justice League stories ever, “Rock of Ages”. Wally West, Kyle Rayner, and Aquaman met the Hourman of the 853rd century, and the story ended with the Justice Legion A from that time meeting the Justice League. This began the main plot of DC One Million. The team from the future had come back to bring the Justice League to their time to see the return of the Prime Superman from the Solar Fortress of Solitude. Meanwhile, in the present, Vandal Savage got his hands on nuclear equipped Rocket Red suits, taking the Titans hostage with the League gone and destroying Montevideo, Uruguay. In the future, Savage and the Tyrant Sun Solaris have a plan, using their memories of the past to destroy the heroes in all times.
That was the gist of the series, and it was wild. What made it even better was that every superhero book in DC’s line was given a #1,000,000 issue. The 853rd century was chosen because that was when Action Comics would hit issue #1,000,000 if it kept a monthly schedule (this is actually a piece of Morrison’s ’90s utopianism, when they were trying to use chaos magic to manifest a better future for mankind through comics; yes, everything I just typed is true), and the story’s tie-in issues would take readers to this far off time to see the legacy of heroism that the heroes had created. There are some amazing tie-in issues, with JLA, Starman, Resurrection Man, and Chance the best of them. However, they’re all good when it comes right down to it.
DC One Million is one hundred percent a gimmick story, but it was a gimmick we had never really seen before. We had taken trips to all kinds of alternate futures, but never had we moved so far into the future. While some of the “leaps in technology” can seem quaint in 2025, at the time this was bleeding edge sci-fi, and it was a lot of fun. The #1,000,000 issues used the gimmick in the best ways; at the time, DC had the best writers in comics, so the various issues were top notch.
DC One Million #1-4 was the heart of it all and it was Morrison at their best. Morrison stories are usually poo-poo’ed by fans for being too complicated, but this story was straight forward Morrison-written superhero sci-fi, using temporal mechanics to beat the seemingly impossible odds that Savage and Solaris put the heroes up against. If there’s any weakness, it’s the art; Semieks was a good artist, but his style isn’t the flashy kind you usually associate with event stories. It works fine for what it is. Sure, getting JLA artist Howard Porter would have been better (letting Semeiks fill-in for him on that book), but the art not being mind-blowing doesn’t damage the story. The last page is hilarious, showing that evil always shows the seeds of their own destruction. It’s all so fantastic.
DC One Million Is Comics’ Best Kept Secret
DC has put out some amazing events over the years, but most fans expect the same things out of them, namely continuity-altering, multiversal shenanigans. DC One Million doesn’t have any of that. It didn’t change the history of the universe, and it didn’t bring back the old multiverse. It just gave readers an amazing superhero story, a sci-fi masterpiece with some of the best gimmick tie-ins ever. As important as Infinity Gauntlet is, it can’t match the sheer fun of DC One Million.
If you want to see how great an event comic can be in total, hunt down one of the DC One Million omnibuses. This is one of the few event stories where I would say that you need to read as many of the tie-ins as you can. Morrison was able to get basically everyone at DC on board with their idea for the story, and it paid off perfectly. This is the best event of the ’90s, and it deserves its flowers for being one of the greatest event comics of all time.
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