This last week turned out to be a sharply sad one for me, in the realm of comics. I was reading a spattering of the latest “Convergence” spin-off issues from DC, all of them set in the various fractured sideline-realities and featuring DC characters from various titles and imprints over the decades before the company’s “New 52” continuity-reboot. It’s been fun seeing these old characters again – Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family, for instance, or the normal, traditional Superman who’s hopelessly in love with Lois Lane, or Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes, or the WWII-era Justice Society of America, the first super-team of them all. But as these isolated two-issue stories have started wrapping up, it’s finally dawned on me that these things are every bit the wistful – and final – good-byes they seem to be on the surface. And that’s made reading them unexpectedly hard to do.

Take two issues as examples. In the wrap-up to the “Shazam!” storyline, written by Jeff Parker and drawn by Evan Shaner, once all the teaming up and fighting are over, our heroes – Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel, Captain Marvel Junior, Bulletman, and Bulletgirl (and a talking tiger in a war plane – a long story) – are flying into the sunset when Captain Marvel says: “There’s never really a happy ending … or even an ending. All we have are the moments, and this one is pretty special to me … in the sky again, with my best friends. With my family!”

And things are even more explicitly valedictory in the wrap-up to “The Justice Society of America” two-parter, in which our heroes – Hawkman, Doctor Fate, the original Green Lantern, and the original Flash – use a one-time-only spell to recapture their lost youth and powers so they can defeat a killer robot attacking the city. The issue – written by Dan Abnett, drawn wonderfully by Tom Derenick, and actually called “One Last Time” – largely consists of that battle, during which our heroes realize that doing this, using their powers to champion the cause of right, has been the joy of their lives:

I share my friends’ frank appraisal. They speak of the wonder of being super-men. The sheer, glorious, thank-god-I’m-alive, this-never-gets-old, unbelievable, astonishing sensation of being members of the Justice Society. It kept ups going through the toughest moments. The compensation of feeling blessed. We thanked fate and fortune and the stars every day that we were getting to do the things we were doing. We were lucky we ever got to do them at all. Just once would have been an utter privilege. We were damn lucky we got to spend our whole lives doing them. Now we’re getting to be those people again, one last time. And we’re going to savor every second of it.

But when the fight is over, they revert to old men again and shuffle off to get some coffee. And reading that scene, it really dawned on me: DC is saying one last good-bye to these characters before shifting their main focus back to the militarized, joyless main line they created a few years ago. Here’s hoping some of the sunlight and optimism of the concepts they’re shutting down this month leaks into that main line, even if these great old characters don’t.