Black Hammer: The End by Jeff Lemire & Malachi Ward

So a few years ago there was a Black Hammer story-segment [1] called The Last Days of Black Hammer, which sounded like it could have been an ending. But that was a flashback; it told us things we already knew in greater detail, like so many superhero comics. It was not an ending.

Series creator and writer Jeff Lemire might be getting more blunt; the new Black Hammer book for 2024 was explicitly The End.

And, this time, it actually was. (Well, I don't want to oversell it. This is Vol. 8 of the main Black Hammer sequence; there's already a Vol. 9 out, so I mean "end" in a story sense rather than an actually stopping sense.)

I have been reading the Black Hammer stories, with somewhat of a gimlet eye, since mid-'21. I should mention that I haven't been particularly a fan of superhero stories for at least twenty years; they are artificial in silly (and seemingly absolutely required) ways that I find more and more annoying as the years go on. I keep coming back to this one, I think, because it's discrete, because I respect Lemire and enjoy most of his work, and because just whaling on something in writing is one of the little-discussed great pleasures of criticism.

OK, so let me set this up. In 1996, this superhero universe had its required crossover: worlds lived, worlds died, nothing was ever the same again. One superhero team from Spiral City, which apparently didn't have a team name because we've never learned it, was mostly exiled to a pocket universe afterward, while their leader and big gun, the titular Black Hammer [2] died defeating the Big Bad, Anti-God. [3] The main cast moped on a farm in that pocket universe for a while, and then - in a story I only vaguely remember, and am mostly going on faith that it was actually told in the pages of these comics - were freed from the tiny pocket universe to the exact same location, but on our Earth, a world outside of the superhero multiverse, which was Better Somehow. (This is explicitly a no-superpowers world - our world, remember? - but superheroes can pop in and out and their powers work just fine on this planet like anywhere else, so it's somewhat of a distinction without a difference.)

In between stories about the Moping Crew on the Farm, there were a lot of flashback and side stories about other superheroes back in Spiral City, including the Moping Crew themselves, mostly set before the big fight with Anti-God. Finally, in the Reborn series, Black Hammer's daughter Lucy - who had taken up as Black Hammer II for about twenty years after his death, but got older and settled down with a family even later than that - faced Shocking Revelations and The Return of the Villain She Thought Was Gone Forever.

The End is what happens next. My dismissive description is: Jeff Lemire said, "What if Crisis, but me?" It is very, very much in the Crisis mode. Anti-God is working his way down the string of infinite universes - hey, if they're infinite, shouldn't that take infinite time? wait, don't answer that - while he sends the Evil Black Hammer (older, with white in his evil-coded facial hair, like the old-man evil Hulk and a thousand others) ahead of him to whack all of the other Black Hammers in all of those universes first.

Because only a Good Guy with a Really Big Hammer can defeat a stone-faced kaiju-sized villain intent on eating your universe, of course!

So we get panels of worlds like beads on a string, getting crunched or eaten or whatever one after another. We see two versions of Earth with each other upside-down in the sky (like, really close!) and the requisite evil Hellamentals run around killing people and causing destruction, because if you're capable and willing to eat an entire universe, you need minions to smash things on one particular planet first, for Reasons.

And we see, in what is surely the point of the whole thing, alternate versions of all of our heroes, assembled from other universes, including the inevitable Parliament of Weird - every superhero multiverse must have a Parliament of That Guy; it's required - who are gathered by characters we vaguely remember from some of the many, many random Black Hammer spin-offs, who squabble with each other in the best Marvel Manner, and who fight Anti-God in various ways, which are all ineffectual (leading to many of them getting killed on the page - multiverses are great for disposable versions of characters the reader is expected to care about) until the One Last Crazy Idea That Just Might Work.

Anyway, before the Crisis kicked off, Lucy fled with her family to what DC Comics would prefer I don't call Earth-Prime, to live with the Moping Crew on their farm. She is pursued by the Evil Black Hammer, and she and her family eventually fight the guy. They lose and the entire multiverse is destroyed, the end!

Sorry, just a little joke there. Of course they beat the old man who is an alternate-world version of their father and grandfather to death. That's much better.

Then they pop back into the main multiverse to take part in the really, really final fight, because the page count is dwindling. And Anti-God, we think, is defeated for ever and ever.

But, then, we also thought that way back at the beginning of Black Hammer, and we were wrong then.

As always, I do not take this seriously in the slightest. It's Superhero Grand Opera, and the fat lady is screeching for all her might in a really silly costume downstage center, trying to make us all really invested, but I just don't feel it. No shade on Lemire, who keeps everyone talking like human beings and does his best to make it as grounded as possible (spoiler: not very much) along the way. Or on artist Malachi Ward, who draws a bewildering array of versions of characters in a solid adventure-comics style - not as flashy as some of the previous Black Hammer artists, but dependable and clear. (This could easily have been a mess with a flashier artist, frankly.)

I cannot recommend any of the Black Hammer books for anyone with an attitude towards superhero comics anything like mine. Or, well, maybe I can, because I do enjoy making fun of them, and maybe you will, too. But I expect you need to have a very different opinion on the value of yet another Crisis knockoff to enjoy this on a non-camp level.

[1] They're all in Big 2 all-epic mode, so none of the main-sequence miniseries have been actual stories, since there was one beginning (at the beginning) and no end previously - all middle, all the time.

[2] How literal are superhero comics? Black Hammer is a Black guy who hits things with a comically oversized hammer. That literal.

[3] Anti-God has no personality or traits other than wanting to destroy all of the universes (for no stated reason). Visually, he's basically Darkseid in a Spirit Halloween "Galactic Planet Eater Guy" costume.