As the holidays arrive and the year comes to a close, we thought we’d take a look back at 2013 and commemorate some of the moments that really stood out in the world of DC Entertainment in a two-week DCComics.com series we’re calling “Ten Moments that Mattered.” Some of these moments were happy. Some were sad. They played out in the pages of our comics, on the big and small screen and in the halls of our office. However, all of them made a profound difference in the world of DC Comics and in the hearts and minds of our fans. 2013 was a big year for us, but even in a big year, not all moments are created equal. Here are ten that mattered…

In a year that saw the return of The Sandman, 100 Bullets and Astro City, and the launch of high profile new comics like The Wake, Trillium and Coffin Hill, the one thing that hasn’t been surprising about Simon Oliver and Robbi Rodriguez’s FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics is how it seemed to come out of nowhere. Launched mid-summer, the series started with a tense first issue that put aside any questions about how action-packed a comic about a government bureau that responds to science anomalies could possibly be. However, it was issue #2 where the series really came into its own—in specific, issue #2, page 19, panel 2.

Having volunteered to enter the “Bubbleverse”—an unstable, mirror dimension which has inexplicably emerged within the city—FBP agents Adam Hardy and Jay Kelly discover that the world within is just like ours, only better. The streets are clean, the air is fresh, the people are pleasant. That is until a construction mishap results in a worker falling several stories towards a pedestrian below. But rather than the bloody mess one would expect, well…




The two bodies intertwine into an amorphous, blobby…thing, which then takes on a life of its own. It’s at that moment that we realize what Oliver and Rodriguez have done. They’ve given us a work of hard science fiction that mines action, shock and horror from the often bizarre and surprising nature of its subject. The book’s one part suspense, one part science, blended and tossed into the Hadron Collider for an afternoon. And much like the scientists defining the cutting edge of modern physics, we may have our predictions about what to expect, but we never know for sure.

Be sure to check DCComics.com again tomorrow for another moment that mattered in 2013.