John McCrea's Ragman in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins #1

As I happen to have read a few Ragman appearances lately and discussed the way the character was drawn by Kelley Jones and Michael Golden, I thought it might be worthwhile to linger on the way he appears in "The Destiny Dilemma", the lead story in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins special. The story was written by Scott Beatty and, more relevant to our discussion here, drawn by John McCrea (Andew Chiu shares the "inkers" credit with McCrea, and Tom McGraw handled the colors, although I should probably note here that I'm not sure they were reproduced 100% faithfully by the library scanner I used for this post). 

McCrea hails from Ireland, and his earliest work was in the British comics industry, including work on Judge Dredd and related characters in the early '90s. It was on one such story that he first collaborated with Irish writer Garth Ennis, with whom he would develop a long and fruitful partnership.

By the year this story was published, McCrea had collaborated with Ennis on 18 issues of the writer's 1993-1995 run on The Demon, and the pair were about four years into their five-year run on Hitman, which I still think is both one of the best comics DC has ever published and one of my favorite comics they have ever published. Ennis and McCrea had also published a four-issue mini-series from Caliber Press called Dicks. 

What all of those comics have in common, aside from McCrea and Ennis, was that they were all rather unique genre stories, ones that celebrated their genres while simultaneously taking the piss out of them. The DC work, at least, was delicately balanced, so that those comics were full of serious character work and parodic comedy elements. A single issue of, say, Hitman might have heart-wrenching drama, gut-busting gags and superior action telling, while also managing to riff on superhero comics tropes and one or more of Ennis' favorite oddball films. (Dicks, on the other hand...well, let's just say I wouldn't use the words "delicately balanced" to describe it.)

So, this story was interesting not just because it was an opportunity to get an extra 22 pages of McCrea's art, but also because it gave us American readers a then-rare opportunity to see McCrea drawing a script from someone other than Ennis (he would go on to do plenty of great work without Ennis in the 21st century, of course) and because here McCrea was drawing a DC super-comic that was completely straight, with no real humor elements to it.

He, of course, knocked it out of the park. 

As bad as that scan of two-page spread above is, what with the line down the middle of image, distorting Madame Xanadu's lovely face, you can see how good his art is here. We're going to concentrate on Ragman in this post, of course, but do note his massive, intimidating version of Blue Devil, and the menace and mystery of his Phantom Stranger, a single white dot on his shadowed face for an eye, and even the hint of menace about Zatanna's half-shaded face, a bit of visual foreshadowing for a twist I will soon spoil. (Oh, and while it's not quite apparent here, he also draws Sentinel, who by this time had lost his unnatural youth and vitality to resume something closer to his biological age of a man in his seventies, as an old man. Sure, this Alan is still handsome and stands up quite straight, but he also has a visible paunch and wrinkles, and his muscles weren't straining to break out of his costume.)

That double-page splash accounts for pages two and three of the story. Sentinel Alan Scott has awoken in a field and he soon stumbles upon the so-called Sentinels of Magic: Doctor Occult, Ragman, Madame Xanadu, Zatanna, Blue Devil, The Phantom Stranger, Faust and the new Doctor Fate, Hector Hall. It's a rather weird group, full of vastly different characters designed by different artists from comics throughout DC's history, but I think it's worth noting that even among a group of such unusual figures, McCrea's Ragman still stands out as particularly strange.

He certainly looks the scariest of the bunch, about as tall as Blue Devil, but thin and awkward looking, seemingly all hood and cloak, with only shadow where his face or much of his body might be. One thing I really like about McCrea's take on Ragman is that, in many of the images, it looks as if Ragman might be all suit and no body; that is, in many panels he looks like a living suit of rags, rather than a living person wearing a suit of living rags. You can see it here in his exaggerated thin-ness, the length of his limbs, and the way his gloves look far too big for his hands (Speaking of thin, check out Zatanna's legs; her ankles look like they belong to a bird rather than a woman. Certainly, McCrea's art has a cartooniness to it, even in this, a serious story). 

These heroes have been gathered for a mysterious purpose, but standing in their midst is the Spear of Destiny, the legendary weapon that once pierced the side of the dying, crucified Jesus, was passed down from conqueror to conqueror and, in the DC Universe, was used by Hitler to keep America's superheroes at bay during World War II and is now both cursed and the only weapon capable of hurting The Spectre.

As The Spectre had just gone on a rampage that threatened the world and the afterlife and then received a new, perhaps unreliable host, these heroes have to decide what they should do with the spear. 

During their discussion, Ragman's rags—which, remember, are each evil souls and their job is to seek out more evil souls to add to their number—are pulled towards the spear.

Our heroes decide on a course of action, and they begin to unite their magics to deal with the spear. Note Ragman's huge, melodramatic gesture there. 

There is a complication, though. That's not really Zatanna, but a villain who took her form to infiltrate the group. Alan Scott identifies the villain as The Wizard. There's an interesting bit where The Wizard essentially rips out the Zatanna shape, a rather weird bit of imagery, given that The Wizard is apparently a bit bigger than that super-skinny Zatanna McCrea had drawn. 

The villain uses the spear to battle the heroes for a bit, but ultimately Faust, whose lack of soul makes him immune to the spear's curse, snatches it from him, Blue Devil punches him out and then Ragman's rags go into action:

Here, Ragman's rags suck The Wizard bodily into his suit, as opposed to how this very process is shown playing out in the later Day of Vengeance, wherein Ragman sucks the soul out of a victim's body, leaving a desiccated corpse behind.

Now, how does this square with 2005 JLA arc "Crisis of Conscience", in which The Wizard is very much not a rag in Ragman's suit of souls? (And I think he had some JSA-related appearances between these this story and "Crisis of Conscience" as well?). Don't ask me; I am not a DC Comics editor. 

Anyway, with The Wizard finally dealt with, the heroes continue with their plan, using their magics to bind the spear and throw it into the sun, where it can only be retrieved if all seven of them gather again and agree to do so.

Then they all put their hands together like a high school sports team right before a game as Alan shouts "Sentinels of Magic!" (as seen in the previous post on Day of Judgment), and that's about the last we see of McCrea's Ragman, aside from his very distinct silhouette as he walks toward a glowing portal created by Doctor Fate. 

In the last four panels, we see The Spectre Hal Jordan debrief with The Phantom Stranger, and Hal explains that he had gathered the Sentinels here to give his friend Alan the means to destroy him, if need be, as a fail-safe. 

The first time Batman met Ragman (On 1978's Batman Family #20)

In my recent post about Batman and Ragman teaming-up in 1998's Batman #551 and #552, I briefly discussed the history of Ragman, particularly his post-Crisis iteration, as the character had far more appearances after DC's first big continuity reboot than in the relatively few years he was around before it. 

In a bit of synchronicity, the very next day I saw this post on Dave's Comic Heroes Blog, featuring the cover of Batman Family #20, the last issue in the series. As you can see, that cover featured Batman confronting Ragman. While I don't think DC ever released a collection of the 1975-1978 Batman Family series, that Batman/Ragman story happened to be drawn by Michael Golden, and thus it ended up in 2019 collection Legends of the Dark Knight: Michael Golden, an electronic copy of which I was able to borrow through my library.

And therefore, I got to read that Batman/Ragman comic just about as soon as I learned of its existence and can now write about it for your reading pleasure. 

After a few minutes of online research, it seems that this is the very first appearance of Ragman outside of his own short-lived series ("Short-lived" as in it only lasted five issues). It is also the first time he meets Batman, with whom he shares a city, although the pair would go on to cross paths repeatedly in the future, including in an issue of Brave and The Bold, in the 1991 Ragman miniseries, an issue of Legends of the Dark Knight and that 1998 Batman two-parter.

This story is by writer David V. Reed and, as mentioned above, artist Michael Golden. I have never heard of Reed and I know Golden's name primarily as a cover artist (There's a whole gallery of his covers for various Batman related covers in the back of the collection; that evocative image of a white-skinned Batman you see on the cover of Legends of the Dark Knight: Michael Golden is from one of those). It's entitled, perhaps unimaginatively, "Enter the Ragman."

It opens with Batman, "the matchless fighting machine", beating up a bunch of thugs armed only with sledgehammers and knives. Said thugs have apparently chased all the residents out of an apartment building in a poor neighborhood, part of a criminal enterprise that involves doing that, later razing the empty buildings and then developing the land for a huge profit.

Investigating the scheme is Bette Berg, a freelance photographer and journalist...and girlfriend of Rory Regan, the proprietor of the Rags 'n' Tatters junk shop and, secretly, Ragman. The pair are followed back to the shop by two parties.

The first is Batman, who eavesdrops outside the window for a bit to see what the pair were doing at the scene of the crime. Here he (and we) learn that Bette is a crusading journalist (and Rory, apparently, helps). The other is a member of the crooked real estate racket, and, because of him, the scheme's boss sends a few hoods to Rags 'n' Tatters to slap Bette, wreck the joint and threaten her not to continue her investigation.

It is now time for Ragman to enter "Enter The Ragman."

Before Rory suits up in his very cozy looking costume—which really looks like something warm to wear around the house on a winter's day, doesn't it?—Reed and Golden recount his origin, which takes just 13 panels here. Here are a few of those panels:

Remember, this is his original, pre-Crisis origin, the one conceived by creator Robert Kanigher, not the post-Crisis one Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming came up with, involving Jewish mysticism, a suit of souls and a lineage of magical defenders of the downtrodden.

To recap that original origin briefly, rather than make you try to read the panels above, Rory, his father and three of his father's friends were caught in fallen power lines, and some freak twist of fate caused these to electrocute all of the older men, while transferring their special abilities to Rory, the only one to survive the incident. And, as chance/Kanigher would have it, those friends all had pretty useful abilities, being a former circus strongman, a heavyweight boxer and an acrobat.

I guess the idea was that the Ragman hero was something of a patchwork of the skills of various men, in the same way that his quilt-like costume was made up of various bits of fabric...? Personally, I like the later, post-Crisis origin better. The Jewish identity and mission to protect his people makes Regan a more distinct character than the mostly religious-free superheroes of the comic books, and the magical abilities of the "suit of souls" costume seem more, um, realistic to me than the freak electrical accident.

Of course, that may just be nostalgia speaking, as the Giffen and Fleming-written Ragman was my first exposure to the character. 

Anyway, Rory spends a panel doing research into the real estate scheme at the library—that's where he was when Bette was attacked in his shop—and he finds out who is ultimately responsible for it: Bruce Wayne!

And so Ragman scales the side of a downtown Gotham skyscraper to reach the penthouse apartment of Wayne—I guess that this is the point in the seventies where Batman had moved out of the manor and into his penthouse?—only to be confronted by a superhero who claims to be a "close friend" of Wayne's, the Batman. 

The pair argue for a bit, with Batman saying that the Wayne Foundation has an outside agency handling their properties, and, when they come to blows, Batman basically takes a pair of very powerful punches from Ragman before the Tattered Tatterdemalion leaves, having learned that Wayne's not actually there anyway. 

Instead, Ragman attacks the boss of the scheme and his strongmen, a fight Batman eventually joins.

There's a pretty cool sequence where the two caped heroes corner the fleeing boss, in which Reed let's Golden's evocative imagery do all the talking:

Golden doesn't get too many panels in which to draw Ragman in this relatively short outing, and thus it's hard to fairly judge his Ragman versus those of other artists, like co-creator Joe Kubert or Pat Broderick or Kelley Jones, but he certainly does a fantastic job highlighting the creepiness of the cape and hood in this sequence.

On the one-page epilogue, a very seventies-looking Bruce Wayne himself shows up at Rags 'n' Tatters to show Bette and Rory that he's really a nice guy, congratulating them on their front-page expose in the Gotham Blade, offering to pay for the damages to the shop caused by the bad guys and underwriting a grant so they can continue their work, by which I assume he means the freelance reporting.

The two Gotham City heroes would next cross paths in 1983's Brave and the Bold #196 (written by Kanigher and drawn by Jim Aparo), after which they wouldn't meet again until Crisis on Infinite Earths scrambled DC's history and continuity, leading to a very different version of Ragman. 

Between the original Ragman series, the two '90s miniseries, and these various team-ups with Batman, there's probably enough Ragman comics to fill a DC Finest collection, although I wonder if such a relatively niche character would be deemed popular enough to sell such a book, and if the Batman connection would be enough for DC to greenlight one...

On 1998's Batman #551-552, guest-starring Ragman

In 1991, DC published a limited series by Keith Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming and Pat Broderick, starring the relatively obscure character Ragman. Though it was not the first appearance by the character—he was introduced in an extremely short-lived "ongoing" series in 1976 by creators Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert—it was a pretty good place to start.

After all, this was the first post-Crisis appearance by the character, and writers Giffen and Fleming has revised his origin, giving him a new, mystical nature, and one tied directly to Jewish legend. The eight-issue series wrapped in 1992, and I probably read it sometime that year, as I had bought it in back issues from my local comics shop.

I was still quite new to comic books back then, but I was attracted to the character's name, the book's logo and, especially, the character design (All of which you can see on the cover of the first issue). I'm sure the Gotham City setting and the appearance of Batman late in the series didn't hurt, either. 

That series made me a fan of the character, although there weren't many other Ragman comics to track down at the time (I eventually found 1976's Ragman #1, but none of the four issues that followed it). Still, the character stayed in my head, and he was a character I delighted in drawing sketches of; like the Tim Sale version of The Scarecrow from 1993's Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special, Ragman would often appear in the corners or along the edges of various spiral ring notebooks and class handouts in high school and college.

The Giffen/Fleming/Broderick limited series lead to another mini-series by a different creative team, Elaine Lee and Gabriel Morrrissette's 1993-1994 Ragman: Cry of the Dead, probably most notable for featuring gorgeous covers by Joe Kubert, after which point the character re-entered limbo again. 

I kept wishing for a return, though, thinking the fact that he lived in Gotham City meant he had to turn up in one of the Bat-books eventually. I mean, what he was doing during "Knighftall", for example, or "Contagion"? Did Eclipso not try to eclipse him in The Darkness Within? Did history going crazy during Zero Hour or the sun going out in Final Night not affect his neighborhood?

You can imagine my delight, then, when he finally turned up in 1998's Batman #551. Sure, that was just a few years after the last issue of Cry of the Dead, but it's forever in teenager years, and do you have any idea how many different Batman books and comics set in Gotham City that DC had published during those years?

Better still, here Ragman was appearing in a comic drawn by the art team of Kelley Jones and John Beatty, who had already done such an amazing job of drawing whatever guest-stars witer Doug Moench was able to work into the series by this point, like Swamp Thing, Deadman, The Spectre and The Demon. (For the purposes of this review, by the way, I'm rereading Batman #551-552 via digital copy of Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones Vol. 2 borrowed through the library. Same place I found the two-parter featuring The Spectre, which I covered here).

First, it should be noted that, as always, the art is great—if over-the-top in every conceivable way, as is Jones' wont—starting right there on the cover of the first issue (at the top of the post), in which we see Ragman's rags attacking Batman, bending one of his rabbit-like ears in the process. 

Spooky, dramatic and wearing a living costume that is like half billowing cape, Ragman is a character that seems almost as if he was specifically created for Kelley Jones to draw. 

Let's look at a few of Jones and Beatty's renderings of Ragman, shall we...?

While it's of course hard to compete with the images of Ragman terrorizing a Nazi, or that badass image of him as a ragged, living green cape flying through the air, I think I like that last image the best, the way his cape is drawn so large that it seems to fill the room, draping itself over crates.

I like how Jones draws capes, usually Batman's, as gigantic, a bit of artistic flair. I like it even more though when he draws them in such a way to suggest that No, it's not just artistic license, the cape I'm drawing is literally thirty-feet long and twenty-feet wide, see? 

Because Ragman's costume has a life of its own, it makes a certain sense that his cape's size might vary from image to image and move in dramatic, unnatural ways that real fabric might not in real life. In that respect, I think Ragman, like Spawn, is a perfect character for Jones to draw (Sadly though, he he's never drawn Spawn, not even on a variant cover). 

Jones doesn't draw his Ragman with the same prominent "bow" that Broderick did at the front of his cape. You can see some cords dangling from beneath his hood in a few of those panels, but they are not as big and prominent as Broderick drew them; Broderick's bow is a bit more like tentacles crossed with a ribbon on a Christmas gift.

Now Ragman's origin, at least the revised Giffen/Fleming one from 1991, was that each of the rags that comprise his costume is actually a human soul, that of an evildoer that the Ragman has punished and absorbed (Broderick actually depicted this occurring on the actually kinda scary cover to that series' second issue). 

The Ragman costume then, is a sortof  living "suit of souls." It was originally created in 16th century Europe by the same Jewish mystics who had created the legendary Golem of Prague. They eventually deemed the golem a defective defender of the Jewish people, as it lacked a human soul to guide it, so they then created the suit of souls, which could be worn by a human defender. The costume and mantle were thus passed on from champion to champion, ultimately going to Gerry Reganiewicz. 

After World War II, Gerry emigrated to the U.S., where he opened the Rags 'n' Tatters junk shop. But when he was killed by gangsters, his adult son Rory Regan found the suit, becoming the new Ragman, now the sort of spirit of vengeance type of character that populate "universe" comics, not unlike DC's own Spectre or Marvel's '90s iteration of Ghost Rider.

Don't worry; you don't need to know any of this before picking up these comics, as Moench recaps it all elegantly enough in the space of a page or two.

In the two-part Batman story, entitled "Suit of Evil Souls", Regan returns to Gotham City, having apparently been in New Orleans ever since the Cry of the Dead minieseries. The reason for his return is a rather unhappy one: Benjamin Mizrahi, a man who used to visit his junk shop, has just been murdered in his synagogue by a member of the Aryan Reich, a racist prison gang-turned-street gang now terrorizing Regan's old Jewish neighborhood.

Both Batman and Regan-as-Ragman pursue the killers. In fact, the first issue opens with an image of Batman swooping down on one of them:

Batman brings the skinhead he was chasing in. 

While Regan talks to his late friend's rabbi about the Reich and how they have been terrorizing Jews and others in the neighborhood, one of their number throws a brick through the window. Regan and his rags give chase. The rags wrap tightly around the evil man they were pursuing, seeking to smother him, but Regan calls them off, and they form his Ragman costume around him.

After he's dealt with the threat though, some of the rags detach again, rebelling against his control, and they then smother the man to death. To his horror, Regan learns he can no longer control the rags. And, what's worse, the soul of the man they killed turns into another rag in Ragman's suit of souls, adding to their evil, and thus making it still harder for him to control them.

The rest of the story then, will revolve around Regan and his rebellious rags. Apparently, the new hate crimes in the neighborhood are exacerbating the evil in the suit, and Regan's own hatred—his hate of the hatred of others—further affects his control of the suit. 

He asks for help from the rabbi (with whom he shares the story of Ragman, from the suit's creation to his own inheritance of it) and, later, from Batman. 

Meanwhile, Vesper Fairchild, the late-night radio host that Bruce Wayne is falling in love with, has a guest on to talk about the rash of hate crimes, and the Aryan Reich prepare to escalate their murder campaign, opening a new crate of weapons in their headquarters. The guns are, of course, lugers. 

Ultimately, the rabbi's lessons about the power of God's love are enough to help Regan regain his control of the rags, and Batman helps him round up the rest of the gang—without allowing the rags to smother them all to death or let them burn up in a warehouse fire that accidentally starts during the confrontation. 

Luckily, there are less than a half dozen members of the Aryan Reich, so the heroes are able to defeat this particular threat once and for all by the end of the second issue. 

Jones does a great job of depicting the rags themselves as a threat. When they go after their victims, they don't do so in the form of the suit, but as a swarm of individual rags, seemingly growing rigid and flying as if by an agency of their own. 

Not only do they attack their victims by clinging to them, wrapping them up like mummies and suffocating them, but they also hold Regan captive at one point, some binding him at his wrists and ankles, while the others swirl menacingly above him. 

They fly through the air, shattering a window to escape and, in one panel, they form a little tornado shape. 

Obviously, antisemitism and racism aren't so easily defeated in the real world, and so we are obviously still dealing with it today. In fact, it seems worse now than at any other point in my life, with the mainstreaming of various racist conspiracy theories and masks-off appreciation of Nazis (often in the form of nihilistic, irony-soaked "jokes" that give those who espouse them a degree of deniability) being mainstreamed by the right. 

Given that, it was interesting to re-read this 27-year-old story today. That the skinhead gang that plays the villains are Nazis is never in doubt. The first one we meet has a swastika and the words "Hitler Youth" tattooed on his arm. Another has the double-lightning bolt "SS" tattooed on his arm. While one of them holds the rabbi at gunpoint and raves about how Jews always cheat, and how they had apparently "tricked" America into joining the "wrong side" of World War II, Jones super-imposes a realistic image of Adolf Hitler in the panel's background.

The victims are here all Jewish, and the interview scene discusses antisemitism, but the rabbi tells us that it isn't just Jews who are the focus of the gang's predation.

And as for the obviously white Batman, well, as the man he pursues in the first issue's opening scene tells him, "And if you're siding with them-- --It's time you were stomped too!"

I don't think Moench ever uses the word "white" though, nor "white supremacy" to describe the Aryan Reich, which is too bad, I think, as I would prefer "white supremacy" be as directly linked to racism and Nazism as much and as often as possible, personally. I wonder if there's a space here in America where people stake out their own thinking as pro-white (rather than anti-Black or anti-Jewish, etc) and, in their minds at least, wall it off from racism or Nazism, despite how close those thoughts might be, or how the former might lead to the latter.

At any rate, Moench has the Aryan Reich refer several times to the "pure" man, as opposed to the white man. 

Moench obviously paints with a very broad brush here—this is mainstream superhero comics, after all, and from a time when a lot of kids were still reading them—and some of the story might seem a bit preachy. Especially the radio interview section, which is essentially a little lecture in the form of a scene.

In fact, in 1998, I might have thought that villains were a little bit too cartoonish to be realistic, but, well, here it is 2025, and in the news the week I am writing this post? The Secretary of Defense, who prefers to refer to himself as the "Secretary of War" and has several controversial tattoos associated with the Crusades and white supremacy, has been accused of ordering the illegal killing of survivors of illegal military operations to kill presumably innocent Venezuelan men accused of drug-trafficking. And the President of the United States has been publicly calling African immigrants "garbage" that he doesn't want in this country. 

At this point, our cartoons aren't even as cartoonish as our real-life villains. 

But back to the comics. These two issues comprise a pretty good superhero morality tale, one about the power of God's love to conquer hate...and, as ever, how strong, good men can and should overcome the work of weak, evil men. And the art is great, as Jones and company make great use of two extremely potent comic book character designs. 

The final of these issues, Batman #552, would ultimately prove a significant one. It is actually the final issue of the Moench/Jones/Beatty team, which had begun their run on the title in 1994's #515. The issue's last page has Batman in the Batcave, remarking on strange balls of light drifting through the cave, "some sort of geomagnetic anomaly...the phenomenon known as earthlights? Or something else...?"

No, they were earthlights, of the sort that some people believe sometimes presage earthquakes. The very next issue of Batman would be part of the "Cataclysm" Bat-books crossover about a massive earthquake striking the city, followed by stories bearing an "Aftershocks" logo, followed by a couple of those with a "Road to No Man's Land" logo, and then the start of the "No Man's Land" mega-story/status quo.

And what became of Ragman? 

Well, if he had anything to do with "No Man's Land", DC never showed us what it was. (I presume he continued to defend his own Jewish neighborhood of Gotham throughout that state of affairs just as Tommy Monaghan and his friends defended their neighborhood The Cauldron. In Regan's case, he must have done so completely off-panel, while Hitman at least devoted a single story arc to its cast during "No Man's Land"...that's 1999's #37 and #38 "Dead Man's Land," in which vampires try to move into Gotham City, if you're interested. It's great!).

The next place I remember seeing Ragman was a short story in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins #1, wherein he is part of a group of magical superheroes deciding where to put the Spear of Destiny (There he was drawn by another of my favorite artists, Hitman's John McCrea). He would later appear in 2005's Infinite Crisis lead-in Day of Vengeance, chronicling The Spectre's war against magic, and the 2006-2008, 25-issue Shadowpact series (the magical superhero team book that DC seemed to have been flirting with launching for years), and he seems to have appeared in the final issues of the New 52 Batwoman for a bit, although I didn't read that. 

As a headliner, this version of Ragman's last appearance was in the 2010 one-shot Ragman: Suit of Souls by Christos Gage and Stephen Segovia. In 2017, writer Ray Fawkes and artist Inaki Miranda were responsible for a six-issue Ragman series that gave the hero a new origin and new, much blander look. As that last series fell between the New 52 reboot and the Death Metal de-reboot, whether it's now meant to be canonical or not, I can't say.

Personally, I liked it better when DC rebooted their continuity only once every generation or so.