It has been a month since the Amazing Ghost Fighter was last seen battling Murder Legendre at his decaying bayou mansion. He has not been seen in public since.

    It has been three and a half weeks since Warden Braffert began to notice how emotionally distant Annette has been recently. All surface smiles and cold walls in her mind.

    It has been three weeks since Harley Quinn entered her third trimester and declared that every time the Amazing Ghost Fighter’s sister plays her trumpet, the kid does the mamba.

    It has been two weeks since The Professional was given his orders and actually called Matilda to say good-bye.

    It has been thirteen days since Dr. Foster Forest (Supernova) was briefly sighted in the company of Phoenix at Stark Industries in Los Angeles.

    It has been six days since The Joker received a strange report of a terrible accident at a private mental hospital near Gotham City. It has been five days since he returned from investigating it. And stopped smiling.

    It has been eight days since hardliner forces in the former Soviet Union announced that they would no longer tolerate clandestine America intervention on the side of the Red Kommissar’s Moscow-based faction.

    It has been five days since Harold Smith realized what the intelligence reports his field operatives in Latvaria were sending him really meant. It has been five days since Smith sent The Suicide Squad on the mission. He hasn’t heard from them since.

    It has been four days since Shonra, the Imperial court telepath of Majestrix Lilandra of the Shi’Ar empire, started waking up every night screaming.

    It has been three days since a NATO base in Turkey, rumored to be a staging area for U.S. aid to anti-Soviet Russian forces, mysteriously blew up.

    It has been two days since N.O.R.A.D. went from DEF-CON 4 to DEF-CON 3.

    It has been one day since each and every bank simultaneously called in all of their markers and loans in OsCorp, instantly throwing the company into turmoil and making it teeter on the razor’s edge of bankruptcy.

    It has been twelve hours since stress made Harry snap at Mary Jane.

    It has been four hours since Gwen Stacy told Eddie Brock for the first time that she loved him.

    It has been three hours and sixteen minutes since Captain America received an encrypted message from the Pentagon that made him immediately drop a month-long hunt for Sunderland Corporation bases in South America and leave for Washington, D.C.

    It has been forty-eight minutes since the Justice League communications system started malfunctioning.

    It has been four minutes since a very old man in a very far away place looked at the huge display screen at a bustling, chaotic operations center and softly murmured, “The game is afoot.”

    It is 11: 59 p.m. September 13, 1956.

    In one minute, it will be exactly two years since the Patchwork Man effortlessly destroyed T.H.U.N.D.E.R. and two years and six months since his first major confrontation with the Justice League ended in a draw.

    11:59:01 p.m.