A Month of Wednesdays: January 2026

 BOUGHT: 

New History of the DC Universe (DC Comics) After Marv Wolfman and George Perez completed their 1985-1986 Crisis on Infinite Earths series, which collapsed DC's small constellation of parallel Earths into a single world, they teamed on the two-issue History of the DC Universe. This not-quite-a-comic was inspired by the old Time-Life History books, according to Wolfman, and featured paragraphs of his prose over big illustrations by Perez.

From the remove of about 40 years, their task was actually a fairly simple one. The new, post-Crisis Earth basically just folded Earth-2 into Earth-1 with relatively few other additions (Earth-S's Marvel Family, for example).  And because there was already something of a natural dividing line between Earth-2 and Earth-1, with the former being home of the Golden Age heroes and the latter the home of the Silver Age and later heroes, it wasn't too difficult to meld them into a sensible history (Hawkman's history aside, I guess), the main casualties being the few duplicate characters (Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Robin) and the JSoA/JLoA crossovers. (It no doubt helped that Roy Thomas had already placed the majority of characters from other publishers, and thus Earths, into DC's Golden Age in his All-Star Squadron).

For the modern sequel to History of the DC Universe, the Mark Waid-written New History of the DCU Universe, the task is infinitely more difficult. Not only does Waid have to work in 40 more years of history (which likely explains why this series is four issues instead of two), what a 40 years. There was the minor timeline tinkering of 1994's Zero Hour (the final issue of which featured a timeline that performed a similar function to the original History of...), there was 2006's continuity-altering Infinite Crisis and them some 20 years of messing with DC's timeline, continuity and multiverse, the latter expanding, contracting and changing, with the work of other imprints and publishers like Vertigo, Milestone and WildStorm coming and going.

There was also the matter of Flashpoint, which lead to DC's most drastic reboot ever, The New 52, which recreated a new universe without a History of... or timeline to let readers or even DC's writers know what was canon anymore. That was followed by a whole series of meta-stories about DC continuity, complicated enough to make one long for the pre-Crisis universe of alternate Earths designated by letters and numbers.

I eventually got so much that I stopped paying attention (I didn't read the dumb Watchmen crossover story, Doomsday Clock, which seems to have attempted to explain the post-Flashpoint mess...of course, Dark Knights: Death Metal did too, so...I guess I'll just be over here on Earth-Shruggy Emoticon). But Waid? He not only had to read all those damn stories, understand them and synthesize them into a story straightforward enough to told in a relatively short prose-and-illustration series of floppies (In this effort, he was seemingly assisted in his research by Dave Wielgosz).

So DC has needed a book like this for some time now. I've long since concluded that any time a writer wants to do a COIE-like continuity rejiggering crossover event, they should also have to follow it up with a History of... series, for the benefit of readers as well as for their fellow creators, or, at the very least, a Zero Hour-like timeline. I think, say, Geoff Johns would be a lot less cavalier about rewriting the history of the DC Universe every five years or so if he knew he would have to do so much homework afterwards, you know...? 

Of course, if anyone could write a history of the DC Unvirse at this point, it would be Waid. Hell, he had just recently done it for Marvel in 2019's History of the Marvel Universe, with artist Javier Rodriguez.

 (For what it's worth, I think that Marvel Universe history was much better made and a much more enjoyable read but then, the Marvel Universe hasn't spent decades on stories about changing its own continuity; the only real tinkering I can think of at this point was the "One More Day" story, in which Spider-Man sold his marriage to the devil for a continuity reboot, and maybe the invention of the fictional Siancong War, which acted as a "floating" conflict to replace historical ones like Vietnam, so that war veterans wouldn't be nailed down to a particular time and could "slide" with the rest of the sliding timeline).

The collected New History includes an introduction by Wolfman, which is where I learned his inspiration for the original History was the Time-Life books, and in which he shares some background info about his work on that, while blessing Waid and company's new book. I have to imagine it was written with something of a sense of relief that he didn't have to write this history, tracking changes that are "nearly impossible" to keep abreast of. But, as he says, "Fortunately, those of us who write and draw comics are known to be masochists, and we live for diving deep into our characters, their loves and powers, and their often-convoluted life." 

To say nothing of those of us who read the damned things...!

For Wolfman's original History, he used his creation Harbinger as the more-or-less unnecessary narrator, the premise being that she was herself noting what the universe was now like after Crisis, which Waid has his narrator refer to as "the great crisis" throughout.

That narrator? Barry Allen, who tells us that, in his day, he "probably saw more of the Multiverse—past, present and future—than anyone who ever lived." Given that he was dead, or at least MIA in the Speed Force, for about 30 of the 40 years since the great crisis, he seems an odd choice, but Waid has written him as someone who was consciously exploring the Multiverse in the past. 

Although, as with Harbinger, I don't know that we need a narrator. Barry only physically appears on the first and last pages of the series, sitting down at his desk to write and then getting up to visit a comic shop. The only way Barry narrating really seems to impact the history as it's told is having the narrator say "I" and "we" throughout; there's not really much room for Barry to editorialize on the events. 

Now, the big difference between New History and the original History (and, I suppose, the Marvel history Waid wrote) is that Waid isn't teamed with a single artist the way Wolfman had Perez (and Waid himself had Rodriguez for the Marvel one). 

Instead, Waid is working with a whole League: Doug Mahnke, Todd Nauck, Jerry Ordway, Howard Porter, Hayden Sherman and Brad Walker all provide art for some passages and Dan Jurgens pencils and Norm Rapmund ink a passage. The various artists work with seven different colorists. 

Now, I like all of those artists individually, and they are all great artists. Based on their styles and their resumes, you can probably guess which eras each was responsible for. I think any one of them would have been a decent choice to draw the whole damn thing, and I do kind of wish there was a single artist could have done so, if only to give the book, and thus DC history, a consistent look, and make the book something of a style guide as well as a history.

Of those involved, I think I would most have liked Allred to draw everything—like artist Steve Rude, I think Allred draws the most pure superhero art—although arguments could certainly be made for Ordway or Jurgens as drawing definitive versions of heroes. Thinking about who today's DC equivalent of George Pereze might be though, I suppose that would be Dan Mora, although he's got no shortage of work to keep him busy. I would also have liked to see Chris Samnee draw the whole DCU, but at least he provides a swath of it on the hardcover's dustjacket (Mora, by the way, draws four character portrait style variants, featuring Wonder Woman, Batman, Flash Wally West and Superboy Jon Kent). 

Now I would like nothing more than to go through this page by page and comment on various aspects of it, including who is not included (No Red Bee?!) and who is (Orca, The Whale Woman?!), whether and how Waid resolved various continuity conundrums (Hawkman, Donna Troy, Power Girl, The Legion of Super-Heroes, Supergirl) and the answers to questions that have changed in various reboots (When did Wonder Woman debut, for example, and did she found the League or naw?). But I don't want to make this post any longer than it might otherwise be, so I won't even linger on my own particular favorite characters (I will note that Plastic Man here debuts in what would have been DC's Silver Age, on a page with Zatanna, Eclipso/Bruce Gordon and Animal Man, so somewhere in the mid-1960s, our time, consistent with the first DC-published Plas comics; as with Zero Hour, then, he debuts after Elongated Man here, but it's clear he's a "modern age" hero rather than a Golden Age one, as the original History implied).

I'll resist the urge for now but may return for a gigantic post on the book in the near-ish future.

I will note that there probably could have been one more pass by editorial, as there are places the art seems off, if not wrong, the most egregious being on a penultimate splash page devoted to today that references the ongoing DC K.O. event. The narration mentions that "the resurgence of the League heralded a new era—and some new looks," specifically saying "Batman updated his appearance following a clash with Hush," but Howard Porter and the colorist gives us what looks like Batman's "No Man's Land" era costume. The shape of his bat symbol looks like his new, current costume, but the coloring looks to be black with blue highlights, rather than the brighter blue he's been wearing. 

Otherwise, I think the book is fairly readable, and certainly fun to look at. As the story of a whole universe, I found it interesting that things just get more and more complicated as they go on. When we first enter the age of heroes in the 1940s through the 1960s (well, books published in the '60s, anyway), it's mostly a series of debuts of heroes, but as we get into the '80s and '90s, it's death, resurrection, new legacy characters, a universe-altering crises. 

Waid manages to make a certain sort of sense out of it, but this is in part by ignoring some efforts entirely (There's no mention of Convergence, for example, and Jon Kent's birth is moved to the year of 52; no idea how he got to be a pre-teen between then and the Rebirth-branded era), and all that work poor Peter Tomasi did to reconcile the New 52 Superman and with the pre- and post-Flashpoint Superman, a riff on the classic Superman Red, Superman Blue concept. 

Although I think there's really only so much that can be done. For example, I just read this about a week before typing these paragraphs, and if you asked me know who was the Flash at any point between 2006 and 2026, which Flashes were alive, dead or lost in the Speed Force or to continuity, I couldn't tell you. It seems a lot of the changes since The New 52 are something akin to "a wizard did it," but here, it's "Doctor Manhattan did it."

Perhaps less exciting than Waid and company's story is what follows it in the collection, the 56-page "New History of the DC Universe Timeline" written by Wielgosz, which I personally found more interesting, in that it is so much more thorough (There's the Red Bee!). Rather than original art, it is illustrated by images taken from the comics referenced and, usefully, each event referenced is followed by the title and issue or issues in which it originally appeared. 

The only way I would improve upon it is to list artists credits, at least those of the pencil artist, below each of these image, akin to the way a news magazine would list a photo credit. I recognize a lot of the artists, but if this book becomes an evergreen one, it would nice to have credits for newer readers to follow artists they like.

Similarly, I don't think there is a good way to actually do it, but I kind of wish the main story had footnotes or endnotes that similarly could direct a reader to a particular story point and credit the creators responsible for it. That is, this is unquestionably a celebration of DC's characters, but it would be nice if it similarly honored its creators. 

Oh, one more point that may be of interest...at least to some readers. Because the DC Universe setting has been so unsettled for so long, Waid doesn't even really even attempt to lay out its future, despite Barry's first-page boast of having seen so much of it. 

Instead, there's a single two-page spread on the third-and-second-to-last pages of the book, drawn by Sherman, with panels in the shape of concentric circles. Barry is cryptic here:

That brings us to now. Tomorrow, of course, remains unforseen.

I'm joking. Having traveled extensively in time, I've seen all sorts of tomorrows.

Yes, despite every effort to put it right, our timeline still ripples on occasion, but there will always be constants.

Great disasters. Long eras of peace. Fearful futures, futures utopian. Super-villains. Superheroes who carry on our legacy--not just a few, but an entire legion.

That last bit is above a longshot of three silhouettes, seemingly two males and a female, that are likely meant to suggestion the LOSH founders. It's the closest we get to a visual reference to the LOSH, while we see the likes of a couple of Time Trappers, Reverse Flash, Abra Kadabra, Kamandi, Batman Beyond, the 853rd Century's Justice Legion A, Wonder Woman's daughter Trinity and Mark Russell and Ben Caldwell's version of Prez, among others I didn't entirely recognize. 

The timeline is far more generous with the future, offering three and a half pages under the heading "The Many Tomorrows of The DCU...", which includes an introduction of the fluid nature of the future, while noting "many possible futures—and future beings—have been encountered over the years."

Included are everything from Jack Kirby's O.M.A.C. to Future State, Dan Jurgens and company's Armageddon 2001 to Geoff Johns' grown-up Teen Titans "the Titans of Tomorrow" and various incarnations of the Legion of Super-Heroes. 

For fans of DC Comics, this is probably the best book the publisher has released since Jimmy Olsen's SuperCyclopedia. Although less a valentine and more a book report, it's filled with some eight decades worth of characters, concepts and stories, offering long-time readers and fans something to obsesses over and quibble with, and new readers a guidebook to what is probably the biggest and most complicated stories ever told.

Oh, and if, like me, you start by flipping through to see if one minor character or another was included (The Invisible Hood was, but the Red Bee wasn't?!), then take solace that they more than likely appear in the timeline and/or one of Scott Koblish's four insanely complete-looking variant covers, featuring hundreds of characters by era, and, in the back of this book, keys pointing to which character is where (Although it seems Koblish left the Red Bee out of the Golden Age one...)

BORROWED:

Batman-Santa Claus: Silent Knight Returns (DC Comics) It's not hard to imagine how the 2024 Batman-Santa Claus: Silent Knight series ended up with the sub-title it did, as writer Jeff Parker and/or someone at DC decided to do a Christmas-y riff on Batman's Dark Knight nickname; plenty of past Batman comics have similarly extrapolated titles from the idea of Batman as a knight. 

So, when it came time for a sequel, Silent Knight Returns, alluding to The Dark Knight Returns, was the obvious title. Indeed, first issue artist Lukas Ketner draws a panel in which Santa and Robin leap into action, striking iconic poses from DKR. And Pete Woods' variant cove for the fifth issue similarly has Santa in a famous Batman pose from DKR. 

I was so sure that the sub-title was a DKR reference that, when the sequel series was originally announced, my first impulse was to take to social media and make a joke about how disappointed Brian Kent must have been when he heard DC was publishing a book entitled Silent Knight Returns, and it was not about him. 

Kent, of course, is the secret identity of the relatively obscure-ish medieval hero The Silent Knight, who was often the cover feature of The Brave and the Bold in the 1950s, and has since mostly been relegated to cameos in time-travel stories (Mark Waid and George Perez teamed him with Superman in an issue of the 2007-2010 Brave and the Bold).

That sub-title did give me pause though; what if it ends up actually featuring The Silent Knight? There was at least a chance, right?

Well guess what?

Kent turns out to be the villain here.  As with the original Batman-Santa Claus, the series seems poorly named, as it's not really a Batman story so much as a Justice League or DC Universe in general story. Both Zatanna and Robin get far more panel-time than the Dark Knight does. DC probably should have gone ahead and called this Santa Claus: The Silent Knight Returns, or maybe JLA/Santa Claus, but then, one imagines Batman's name in a title helps move the needle when it comes to comics shops ordering books, huh? 

So yes, Brian Kent, The Silent Knight, returns, appearing as a creepy, floating, empty suit of armor, a somewhat redesigned version of what he wore in the fifties. When he touches a victim with his sword, he drains away their life force, leaving behind a desiccated corpse. 

He's attacking some poor folks in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, when a group of seven Justice Leaguers arrive to confront the seemingly haunted armor. This is an interesting group, as it is the basic Big Seven configuration of the League (only with Robin in for Martian Manhunter), but not the original line-up. So, in addition to Robin, we get Superman, Batman, Green Lantern (John Stewart), a Wonder Woman (Nubia), and Aqua-person (Mera) and a Flash (Thunderheart Irey West...who I actually had to Google, I'm so out of the week-to-week goings on of the DCU; the last time I remember seeing her, she was Impulse II).

When the battle goes badly for the League, Batman sends the kids away at super-speed, but only Robin makes it out. Given the magical nature of the business, he goes to Zatanna for help, and, while muttering to himself near her Christmas tree, he inadvertently summons the big, burly, warrior version of Santa Claus introduced in the previous year's Silent Knight. 

The action then divides onto two parallel tracks. The Leaguers find themselves trapped in a weird dimension space they can't escape, and must contend with various monsters there, while Zatanna, Robin and Klaus investigate a sigil of the Knight's, and end up at a conveniently-timed solstice party featuring a whole bunch of DC's magical types (Baron Winter, Felix Faust and Gentleman Ghost all get speaking parts, but this is definitely one of those scenes where it's fun to scan the backgrounds for familiar characters). 

The most important guess turns out to be Jason Blood, who knew Kent back in Camelot, and explains how the heroic knight has become what he is today, the result of a quest, a curse and a fairy castle.

With Jason's worse half Etrigan, a trio of completely random heroes summoned by Zatanna's spell seeking allies (Mary Marvel, Metamorpho and Robotman Cliffe Steele) and Klaus' warrior elf wife Ulah, they join the other Leaguers and this crisis worth of heroes end up fighting an amry of monsters, storming the Knight's weird castle and, ultimately, saving the day.

It's all quite fun, although more than a little random. I mean, I like Mary Marvel, Metamorpho and Robotman, for example, although I have absolutely no idea why they are here, and they don't actually contribute anything that, like, any other heroes couldn't have (or that the Leaguers already introduced into the story couldn't).

Well, there is one exception, I guess. At one point, in order to distract the Knight, Etrigan transforms back into Jason Blood, who appears in a full suit of armor with sword and shield, and challenges Kent. 

"Where did he get that armor?" Superman asks, and Parker and whichever of the last issue's artists drew this panel answer thusly:

There's also some fun business with Etrigan throughout. Parker's approach to his rhyming depends on the scene (he rhymes more often than not, but there are still a few instances of not). I enjoyed watching the other characters call him out for failing to rhyme, or for rhyming poorly.

(The coloring may look a little weird at the bottom of those panels, but that's because of the fog in the realm the action there is set.)

While I didn't love the climax, in which Kent is defeated but not redeemed and restored to a pre-curse, heroic nature, over all this was a rather fun, Christmas party of a comic book adventure. DC just needs to do a better of job of matching their titles to their content, I think (See also last month's Batman and Robin: Year One, as I said pretty much the same thing about that). 

There's also a two-page epilogue during which the heroes are invited to a party by Klaus and Ulah, similar to the ending of the previous Silent Knight. During this sequence, Batman and Superman give a gift to Santa, which shows just how unlimited the Justice League is these days, and sets up an avenue fo any future Justice League/Klaus adventures. 

Komi Can't Communicate Vol. 36 (Viz Media) According to Wikipedia, this is the penultimate tankobon of Tomohita Oda's series, which it appears will indeed end with Komi (and Tadano, and their classmates) graduating high school and Komi completing her series-long goal of making 100 friends.

This volume is almost entirely set at Komi's grandmother's house in the country, where Komi has brought Tadano for an intense study camp, hoping to help him do well enough on his entrance exams that he can get into the same university that she has already been accepted to. 

The cast is thus much smaller than that in most of the previous volumes. I think my favorite gag might be Komi's little cousin, whose idea about what makes a cool boyfriend (driving a motorcycle, for example) doesn't match what she sees in the extremely normal-looking Tadano. But she ultimately witnesses his kindness, his politeness and attentiveness and willingness to help Komi, and she sees why her gorgeous but quite cousin so likes Tadano: Dating him is a little like having a butler, isn't it? 

I'll miss getting new volumes of this series when it ends but, at the same time, I think it's gone on about as long as it can at this point, given that Tadano and Komi have consummated their mutual crushes by dating one another, and how much Komi has changed over the course of the series. Now it is only through the eyes of new characters or strangers in which we see the dual nature of the title character—that is, someone who looks so cool and collected on the outside, but is always freaking out under her perfect exterior—that powered so much of the earlier volumes of the series. 

Titans Vol. 4: Terminated (DC) The fourth collection of the current Titans ongoing, and the second by writer John Layman and artist Pete Woods, continues a trend I've found disappointing. Specifically, the tendency of the creators to "play the hits", or at least cover songs of the hits, pitting the team against their traditional foes. Original writer Tom Taylor offered a riff on Brother Blood and bad Tamarneans, and then Trigon. Layman's last volume had Deathstroke organizing Clock King and Mammoth into a villain team, and this volume he adds Terra to the mix. 

On the plus side, Layman concludes his storyline about Deathstroke's team's attack on the Titans, curiously named "The Crime Syndicate" after the evil opposite JLA from another world (Even more curious, Woods' cover for #25 homages Frank Quitely's for 1999's JLA: Earth 2, which reintroduced the Crime Syndicate after a long absence, and includes the words "dark reflections", even though none of the members of this Crime Syndicate are dark reflections of any Titans in any way, shape or form).

My hope then is that Layman will now do something a little more interesting and original than the 41st Titans vs. Deathstroke story, but it looks like the next volume will be devoted to DC K.O. tie-ins, as the last pages of this volume's last issues have Beast Boy and Cyborg returning to their HQ to find some grim-looking Justice Leaguers with Donna Troy and then telling them that the end of the world is night, while there's a "To Be Continued in DC K.O.!" tag at the bottom of the page.

He does do a few interesting things in these issues, though. The first four issues are devoted to the Crime Syndicate plot, a conflict at least partially solved by the Titans' compassion towards their enemies (in addition to Beast Boy's reading of the bad guys' team as a herd of animals). The last two feature Beast Boy and Cyborg visiting the current Doom Patrol, which the former was of course once a member of and, while the latter doesn't have any real connection in the comics, he was a part of the team in their recent-ish live-action TV show. 

The book opens with Deathstroke in a bacta tank from Star Wars, healing from having died or whatever in the pages of Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths, a story I've decided to just skip entirely, having read too damn many DC crises about the goddam multiverse and continuity tweaks over the course of the last 20 years. Terra, who is wearing a new-to-me costume and is evil again I guess, rescues him, and then the plot just picks up as if Deathstroke hadn't died between volumes. (I forget what's up with Terra at this point; is she the original, back to life? The one from Team Titans, gone bad? Or was it revealed at some point that those two Terras were the same Terra...?)

There are two real battles between the teams, with the Titans losing round one (which seemed rather unlikely to me, given their numbers and powers, but Layman tells us this is because the presence of Terra being a surprise, and distracting Beast Boy at a critical moment) and then winning round two. Much of the focus is on the Amazo-based android character Vanadia introduced in Taylor's run, who was created as a Titans killer, defeated, but then rebuilt by Cyborg. Proving much more powerful than any of them expected, the Titans are trying to make her a member, but are leery of her in the field (In the end, she decides to forsake humanity completely, and travel the universe; she mentions perhaps visiting "a race of sentient computer beings known as The Technis" that she discovered in Cyborg's memory files." Given how contact with the Technis ultimately turned out for Cyborg in the late '90s, I'm surprised he didn't say anything about it to her. 

This section also features an unlikely appearance by Orca, playing the role of generic threat that occupies the heroes briefly. Woods draws her much taller and less round than her co-creator Scott McDaniel designed her (while also locating her dorsal fin from her back to the top of her head, giving her a mark shark-like appearance), but I guess this is consistent with her appearances in the Nightwing title. 

I found the two-issue Doom Patrol team-up much more interesting. A smaller, "breather" story of the sort that often appear in super-team books between bigger, higher-stakes arcs, as mentioned, this one is about Beast Boy and Cyborg and the Doom Patrol. They are sent away for some r-and-r by Donna and Raven while the rest of the team (and Wonder Woman and The Flash Wally West) repair their damaged base, as the encounter with Terra and the loss of Vanadia seemed like things that might take emotional tolls on the pair.

Well that, and Beast Boy says he wants to check in with Beast Girl, whose animal powers have grown more like his during the weird power scramble that followed Absolute Power. They find Beast Girl and Negative Man are MIA, though, apparently trapped on an island full of big, weird purple monsters, and so they join Robotman and Elasti-Woman on a rescue mission, where they ultimately fight lots of monsters and encounter what I guess is the closest thing to an archenemy Beast Boy has, The Zookeeper. 

Guest artist Max Raynor handles the art on these issue, and Chris Burnham provides the covers, making the book look appropriately Doom Patrol-y. During the adventure, Robotman and Cyborg have a little heart-to-heart about being men who are now mostly mechanical, and Cliff offers some compelling advice, and a new way to look at their dual nature. 

I thought this story was fun and engaging enough that it made up for my relative disinterest in the Deathstroke story. 

REVIEWED:

I got a real Lumberjanes vibe from John Claude Bemis and Nicole Mills' Rodeo Hawkins and the Daughter of Mayhem, the title characters of which are something between a female version of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys and a multiversal girl gang, their number including a character named Bug Bear who, for all intents and purposes, seems to be Chewbacca wearing all-pink and a pair of sensible boots. They are trying to save the last Sidney Poblocki in the multiverse from The Paladins, well-meaning but overly ruthless heroes who want to kill him in order to save the multiverse from a terrible threat. It's quite fun. More here.