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Written by Bryan A. Hollerbach Friday, 30 December 2011 17:22

In a meditative mood as this year concludes and the next commences, our crotchety columnist bids adieu to one of the mainstream’s finest offerings of the past decade, reflecting on Wednesday’s shipment of writer Brian Wood and artist Riccardo Burchielli’s DMZ #72.

To certain readers, of course, shanghaiing that infamous January 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling into a rumination on the provenance of a comic book will stink of hyperbole. So indeed would it seem…in the context of this increasingly stunted industry. In a larger context, however, in a context transcending dimwit Newsarama “10 lists” and all the other daft appurtenances of what passes for analysis in comics, the finale of DMZ, by rights, should more nearly inspire not the aforesaid guffaw but a cackle of utmost madness, precisely to the extent that the moral salubrity of Wood and Burchielli’s work could redeem, at least in part, the burgeoning spiritual dubiety of the moment. That is, with a “hello, I must be going” sense of timing that borders on the diabolical, DMZ as fiction may be concluding concurrent with its commencement as fact.

Five years later in “real time,” whatever that means anymore, an unusually large number of civil wars and other incivilities simmer and seethe across the globe, the population of dictators and despots has in no wise declined, and, most queasily, the specter of nuclear conflict once more haunts the world. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street protest has gone viral nationwide, with both elected and nonelected suits from coast to coast scrambling for figurative antibiotics, and a U.S. Congress half of whose members are millionaires purports to speak and act for the American middle class, a collective entity staggering in the tracks of the dodo. Sooner rather than later, in short, the front page may transform Wood and Burchielli’s funnybook into kiddie bedtime reading, there in the cardboard box or beneath the bridge abutment.