New History of the DC Universe was always going to be a Herculean task for any single writer to pull off, even for a celebrated comics veteran like Mark Waid. Not only is it a book designed to help make sense of all the confusing DC canon revisions that started with Flashpoint and continued through Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths, but it’s a book that’s also trying to reconcile the DC canons that existed before and after Crisis on Infinite Earths – two canons that are innately incompatible with each other. These eras are even less compatible with the DC canon that has emerged post-Flashpoint.
At best, New History of the DC Universe #2 is still a pretty straightforward read and is very new reader-friendly, complete with gorgeous artwork from Michael Allred and Brad Walker that calls back to both DC’s Silver Age and Bronze Age. New and casual readers will be able to follow along without needing to know anything about past or current DC canon. But whether or not readers will find this book truly useful as a “Guide to the DC Omniverse” is debatable. This will likely be true once new and casual readers start to actually read the stories in the book’s bibliography, some of which significantly contradict the New History of the DC Universe’s written text like Infinity, Inc.
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The group that’s going to be the hardest sell on this latest revision, however, is the more seasoned fans who have been reading DC Comics for years, even decades. Some will go with the flow and accept the book for what it is, while others will only become more frustrated with the latest batch of unnecessary retcons. One example of this already happened in issue #1, by establishing that the Justice Society disappeared in Ragnarök shortly after the US Senate hearings of 1955, instead of at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985, as it originally happened.
Issue #2 continues this trend with the events of The New 52’s Justice League: Origin by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee now happening as part of DC’s Silver Age history, and by extension, its Bronze Age history. This also means it’s now happening before the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, which is acknowledged in this very issue. This change is mind-boggling for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that Justice League: Origin happens as a direct consequence of the Flashpoint event, which will be acknowledged later on in this series.
Justice League: Origin was also the storyline that officially marked the start of DC’s New 52 era that informed DC canon for the next five years. The other reason this change is nonsensical is the fact that the Justice League’s New 52 origin is also directly tied to Earth-2’s origin in this same era, which immediately poses problems for the characters of the Huntress (Helena Wayne) and Power Girl. Aside from the fact that Huntress and Power Girl are two characters whose histories were immediately compromised by 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot, the Apokolips War was also the reason they wound up on Prime Earth for a time post-Flashpoint.
If the Justice League’s New 52 origin is now happening way ahead of schedule, this now directly impacts Huntress and Power Girl’s pre-Crisis Earth-2 histories. This is especially a problem for the latter character because there are now two versions of Earth-2 Power Girl in existence: the pre-Crisis original residing on Prime Earth with a confusing new status quo, and the New 52 iteration that returned to Earth-2 in 2014.
At best, Justice League: Origin being moved to DC’s Silver Age preserves Cyborg’s New 52 origin, but I’m not convinced this change actually benefits the character since he was always a Teen Titans character, and was never a founding member of the Justice League. More than anything, this is a change that could have easily stayed relegated to the post-Flashpoint continuity instead shoehorning it as part of DC’s Silver Age history, where it’s bound to establish a confusing retcon. This will especially be true once New History of the DC Universe reaches this era in issue #4.
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While it’s understandable that New History of the DC Universe is needed to streamline the current mess that is the post-Death Metal continuity, unfortunately the book is not doing that at all. Instead, it’s repeating the biggest mistake that’s been hurting DC canon since Crisis on Infinite Earths’ finale: the trend of constantly revising DC canon to make every era of DC work within the constraints of a single Earth continuity. This has not only resulted in more confusing revisions that don’t actually align with DC’s true publication history, but those confusing revisions have also facilitated an endless cycle of retcons by creators beholden to different DC eras. Unfortunately, New History of the DC Universe doesn’t break this trend.
The consistent problem that has featured with every revision is that it’s been entirely subjective to both the individual creator and the needs of DC editorial at every given time, rather than a true streamlining of events. Instead of meaningfully addressing the problems that both the Crisis and Flashpoint reboots created and actually repairing their damage, it created an unfortunate status quo where the DC Multiverse no longer has a well-defined canon. Instead, canon just becomes whatever writers and editors need it to be for new stories to work. This has been the status quo since post-Crisis.
At some point, DC needs to acknowledge that past eras that thrived in a multiverse will never work as part of a single Earth continuity. The prime example of this is putting DC’s Golden Age heroes from Earth-2 and their successors on the same Earth as their Silver Age (Earth-1) counterparts, with their Earth-2 histories only partially intact. The latter has especially posed problems for consistent publication of the aforementioned Helena Wayne Huntress and Power Girl, much to the frustration of fans of both characters. This has even been a problem for Fury, Wonder Woman’s daughter from Earth-2.
After four decades, DC needs to stop revising continuity so that it comes close to making a whole multiverse full of conflicting canons work on a single Earth’s timeline. Even more so if this single Earth is not going to be rebuilt from the ground up with a new history that actually makes sense and is easy to follow. A more useful approach to a book of this nature is to simply document DC history as it actually happened, instead of revising that history to what creators and editors want it to be until the next Crisis event revises DC canon for the umpteenth time.
Leaving all eras of DC continuity fully intact without confusing revisions and unnecessary retcons would keep all of DC’s older stories new-reader friendly. It would also allow a book like New History of the DC Universe to serve as a true guidebook to DC’s rich history, and for readers to better identify which stories belong to which era of DC. This is a task Mark Waid could easily accomplish given his extensive knowledge, love and passion for past DC eras.
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In this case, New History of the DC Universe #1 needed to simply document that from 1935 to 1985, DC existed as a multiverse, with Crisis on Infinite Earths destroying this multiverse and merging the surviving Earths into a single Earth. Issue #2 then needed to focus on how the Crisis reboot changed DC history from 1986 to 2011, when Flashpoint rebooted the DC Multiverse a second time. The only significant events that would need to be acknowledged in the post-Crisis era are 1994’s Zero Hour as the first revision of post-Crisis history, and 2006’s Infinite Crisis reacknowledging the pre-Crisis multiverse. Likewise, 2007’s 52 would need to be acknowledged as the rebirth of the DC Multiverse.
New History of the DC Universe #3 could have similarly just documented the post-Flashpoint era (aka The New 52) as it originally happened from 2011 to 2016, with DC Universe Rebirth reclaiming some of the post-Crisis history. The only storylines that need to be acknowledged here are the Apokolips War that served as the origins of both the Justice League and Justice Society (on Earth-2) in this era, 2019’s Doomsday Clock and 2020’s Dark Nights: Death Metal. By issue #4, Waid could have simply informed readers how the DC Universe has been shaped by both soft and major reboots over the course of DC’s publication history, leading to the DC Universe of today.
The latter premise appears to be the goal of the New History of the DC Universe (establishing what is canon post-Death Metal), but this is being accomplished with unnecessary retcons. In this case, events like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Flashpoint, Doomsday Clock, Dark Nights: Death Metal, and Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths should be framed very early on in issue #1 as events that have significantly shaped the DC Multiverse over time. They should otherwise be irrelevant to the current in-universe history. This is to say these events should not be treated as fixed points in DC’s in-universe history, but rather as events that only the readers are aware of, not the characters themselves.
In its current format, New History of the DC Universe will quickly become irrelevant once the next Crisis event revises DC canon again, or once writers introduce new retcons that restore or remove the aspects of canon this miniseries is altering or outright erasing. One such retcon that can still happen in the future, for example, is a writer restoring Fury’s true origin as Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor’s daughter, and not as the daughter of some random character (Helena Kosmatos) that was created as a post-Crisis replacement for her parents. Given the problematic trend New History of the DC Universe fails to break, this may prove to be a wasted endeavor further down the line.
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