Mark Waid’s Justice League Unlimited/World’s Finest: We Are Yesterday crossover takes a minute to get started, but once it does, it is nicely time-tossed in ways that had me flipping back and forth to remember who was where and why. That’s not a negative; I appreciate a time-travel tale with a bit of shenanigans, something more complicated than the mainstream.

There are certain things I might pick on, but then we have to acknowledge We Are Yesterday is really only part of a story, “crossover” notwithstanding. My sense is that World’s Finest continues as if nothing happened, but the events of We Are Yesterday most certainly continue into Waid’s Justice League Unlimited (if not the DC Universe as a whole). In that way, as a comparison to Dawn of DC’s first big event — call it Lazarus Planet or Knight Terrors — Yesterday is smaller in scope and less self-contained. Probably going into it as “Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1.5” rather than an “event” might help temper expectations.

[Review contains spoilers]

In the first chapter of the six-part Yesterday, the past-set Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #38, a handful of Justice Leaguers handle Gorilla Grodd’s latest scheme; short of the last two pages, it is wholly Yesterday-unrelated. The second chapter, Justice League Unlimited #6, is more tied in, but only in the sense that it details Grodd’s machinations behind the scenes of Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno. Following that is the Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Annual 2025, largely about Grodd recruiting his Legion of Doom villains and, too, how they all got to where they are at the end of Inferno. So, again perhaps counter to expectations, the first half of Yesterday has a profoundly tick-tock vibe, and is also focused on Grodd maybe even moreso than the heroes.

Without diving deep into 40 years of modern DC crossovers, I’m reminded of Superman: Panic in the Sky (as I often am) where the first issue “prologue” took place entirely off-planet, away from Superman, and the first official chapter was solely devoted to Superman and his friends, before more of the DCU got involved in the second chapter. Or Superman: The Man of Steel #18, first part of the “Death of Superman,” which had cut-scenes of Doomsday rampaging while Superman had an adventure entirely elsewhere.¹ Which is to say, Yesterday’s slow start struck me as off-putting as a 2020s trade-reader, but maybe isn’t so unusual in the pantheon of inter-title crossovers as a whole.

Yesterday picks up significantly, however, in the fourth part, when past-Robin Dick Grayson is shunted to the present. That kicks off a variety of things; ultimately the past Superman, Batman, and Robin all end up in the present, while the present Superman, Batman, and Nightwing go to the past; meanwhile Grodd has traveled from the present to the past to recruit the villains of the past to return to the future (confused yet?), so essentially the past World’s Finest are fighting the past Legion of Doom in the present. It gets cloudy given that we’ve got Supermen and Batmen from two eras wearing relatively the same costumes, but too I didn’t mind flipping back and forth for time travel to be used with a bit more gusto.

Within a certain canon, Yesterday is actually a very good Gorilla Grodd story by Waid, insofar as I’m not sure anyone would go into this thinking Grodd would be the main antagonist (though, when possessed by omega energy, rather than “Gorilla God,” I’d have called him “Groddseid”). Shoutout to a positively Will Eisner-esque panel by Waid and Clayton Henry where Superman throws the Scarecrow into a police car so fast that Superman’s still moving and Scarecrow’s already there, and also to a fantastic sequence of Elongated Man using his ingenuity against the villains as drawn by Travis Moore (before poor Ralph gets tortured mercilessly).

All of that said — and here we arrive at items that might be solved in the very next collection of Justice League United or even a bevy of specials that spin out of all of this — I wished there was more interaction between the heroes of different eras. Part of the fun of a crossover is, y’know, the crossing over, but in We Are Yesterday it’s very mild — past Superman encounters present Superwoman Lois Lane for a page (she doesn’t know he’s from the past) and present Batman encounters past Alfred, who doesn’t know Batman’s from the “future.”

But there are moments in the end where we have a 1990s and present Wally West on the page, plus a Flash: Year One Barry Allen, and they don’t talk to each other, nor does anyone comment on the futuristic Batman Beyond or let the 1990s Aquaman know he won’t be sporting a harpoon forever. Whole lot of heroes on the page (some fascinatingly inexplicable, like a New 52 Harley Quinn only a relative few years removed from our own), but surprisingly little interaction, though given that all these heroes are stuck in the present, I grant that might be to come.

I am less certain what happens to the past villains in the present once defeated, though chatter online is that they apparently disappear (artist Dan Mora makes a triumphant return in the last chapter, but the panels are at times uncharacteristically rough and unclear). To a certain extent one could read We Are Yesterday as a criticism of modern villainy in the DC Universe; amidst images of the current, amnesic Lex Luthor and other villains in chains, Grodd chastises the present villains for “appeasing” the League, whereas the past Legion of Doom has a “singular purity of aggression.”

I can’t argue, really; I have adored recent nuanced portraits of Black Manta and Geoff Johns' work with Captain Cold, but there’s something about Green Lantern Hal Jordan fighting the blue-and-black-suited Sinestro, too. (Notably Waid had not-so-dissimilar villain-refurbishment aims in his Underworld Unleashed.) Again, though, the real downer is the lack of substantive interaction; we don’t see green armor Lex encounter Supercorp Superman (or Electric Blue Superman), nor does past Sinestro learn from Hal how often he’s worked on the side of angels, and so on.

Notably Wonder Woman is largely absent from this DC All In tentpole event. That’s perhaps due to the fact that Cheetah is only briefly involved before she takes the fall for the other villains in the past, though that’s odd and unfortunate in and of itself (as well as the scene where Superman dismisses Diana, the only one to suspect something larger is amiss). Waid replaces Cheetah with Pythoness, seemingly a new sorceress villain (no relation to Kobra or etc.). That Waid uses the Legion of Doom plus an original character also surprised me; I guess there’s not a magic user among the original cartoon version of the Legion of Doom, though Felix Faust or someone would’ve felt less indulgent than creating a new character. My hope is that the reason is Waid plans to use Pythoness elsewhere in Unlimited.

In the main, Mark Waid’s Justice League Unlimited/World’s Finest: We Are Yesterday is interesting and kicky, maybe an altogether better adventure if, again, we unhook it from the larger ongoing DC All In story. The final judgment, as is often with these things, is how well these events are eventually used in whatever event they’re leading up to.

[Includes original and variant covers. The variant cover gallery absolutely botches the presentation of the connecting covers, unfortunately.]