I don’t necessarily want to be the person who says “Mark Waid’s New History of the DC Universe is great and all, but he totally left out Eclipso, The Darkness Within,” but, well, y’know.

And so, having once upon a time pored over Marv Wolfman and George Perez' History of the DC Universe, believing it to be a real seminal piece of DC historica, and then coming to New History, where certain sections read like an interminable biblical genealogy (“Zero Hour begat Starman and Connor Hawke and Birds of Prey, and then No Man’s Land begat Batgirl and Harvey Bullock and Harley Quinn”), I thought maybe the difference was just myself as a fan. I was a new comics reader and I didn’t know much when I read History, and then I was an experienced fan and well versed when I read New History, and knowing a little made the first wondrous and knowing a lot made the second often vexing.

But I actually dug out my old copies of History in starting to write this review, wanting to make sure nostalgia wasn’t clouding my memories in comparing one against the other. What struck me is that History versus New History might have less to do with my own progression as a fan than I thought, and more to do with the load each book is asked to carry.

Wolfman notes in his introduction to Waid’s New History that the first History covered 50 years of DC continuity and the New History covers 90. But those extra four decades don’t convey the whole scope of difference. Rather what I realized is that Wolfman’s History told the history of the DC Universe when it was fresh. At best, Wolfman’s History nods to Crisis on Infinite Earths and Legends, obliquely, but there is not there “Zatanna’s search” or the JLA/JSA team-ups or “Trial of the Flash.” It is a “history of the DC Universe” that details the past, yes, but only dips its toe in the present before abandoning the here and now completely, reflecting the fact that at that point, contemporaneous with the beginning of John Byrne’s Superman and “Batman: Year One,” the present had only just begun.

[Review contains spoilers]

In contrast, not only 40 more years of history by also all the various continuity resets along the way nettle New History of the DC Universe mightily. That’s not to say the changes are bad; as the old saying goes (startlingly appropriate), the only thing better than one Shining Knight is two Shining Knights. But we swiftly see Waid’s narrator Barry Allen tying himself in knots talking about how the Justice League formed but oh, wait, then it really formed. In the Flashpoint era, Barry mentions a mysterious force manipulating things behind the scenes so many times that it goes from repetitive to ridiculous.

Waid is essentially trying to reconcile things never meant to be reconciled. Had DC’s New 52 total reboot of their publishing line kept on selling gangbusters, no small amount of this history wouldn’t be here. Only the New 52’s demise — and, cynically, we might theorize, DC’s desire to see no title get left behind on their backlist — causes Waid to have to square stories that weren’t written with the intention of matching up. And that's even letting alone slotting in books like Doomsday Clock that were ignored during the time they were published.

It leads to an awkwardness that pervades much of the book. The Multiverse is certainly acknowledged — the Wildstorm characters live on another Earth, for instance, and Dark Crisis unleashed a new “Omniverse,” including the Absolute “Elseworld.” But at the same time narrator Barry doesn’t recognize the multiversal foundations of his own timeline, noting that Jay Garrick “reappeared” after a long absence in “Flash of Two Worlds,” though from where can’t be stated. We’re told that the Justice Society “came out of retirement,” but that’s superimposed on a Michael Allred rendition of Justice League of America #21, where the Justice League calls over to Earth-2 with the help of Merlin’s crystal ball, an instance among others of the book’s cognitive dissonance.

For a casual reader coming to New History, maybe setting the original and New 52 origins of the Justice League side by side is clearer. Though, at the point that reader moves on from Justice League Vol. 1: Origin to Villain’s Journey and Throne of Atlantis, I wonder if the benefit of that clarity is eroded, versus acknowledging continuity was like this, then it was like that, now it’s kind of both.

That was the tack of Tom Peyer’s 1998 JLA in Crisis Secret Files and Origins,¹ telling a “straight line” history of the DC Universe where the Justice League lived on Earth-1 and the Justice Society lived on Earth-2 until the Crisis combined them together. Peyer’s approach seemed sensible to me because it hewed with relative accuracy to both the true in-story continuity and also the meta-truth of DC’s publishing schemas over the years.

A beneficiary of all of this, as is his fiat, is Waid himself. That an undivided “prime Earth” existed before and after Crisis allows for one of Waid’s most startling assertions, that the Supergirl Kara Zor-El who died during Crisis was “resurrected” during the events of Superman/Batman: Supergirl. That makes for a hefty exercise in retroactive continuity over almost 20 years of post-Crisis Superman titles — but, at the same time, it immediately makes Supergirl being contemporaneous with Robin Dick Grayson in Waid’s ongoing World’s Finest make a lot more sense.

No doubt a book like this is a gargantuan undertaking, certainly as evidenced by Waid and Dave Wielgosz' great chronology included here. Though arguably to undertake a project like this is to commit to catching every error, it hardly seems worth nitpicking that an unfortunate typo only muddies Hawkman’s history further, or that even New History can’t keep straight whether the Great Darkness was or wasn’t involved in Dark Crisis, or that the summary of Wonder Woman and Artemis' “Contest” is wrong. At the same time, such 1980s-1990s minutiae as Gangbuster, Maxima, Agent Liberty, “War of the Gods,” and Black Condor Ryan Kendall all get mentions, so I’m hardly in a position to complain. (Also a surprising amount of Heckler, which is to say any, really.)

Who is New History of the DC Universe for? For Mark Waid, for one, as mentioned; we see new-to-continuity bits like Captain Comet’s super-team, factoring into Waid’s Action Comics. Will creators be able to use it to keep continuity straight? Waid puts Batman’s first meeting with the Joker ahead of his first meeting with Catwoman, blowing Batman: Year One clear out of the Omniverse — or do we not consider the encounter outside Falcone’s pool to be a “meeting”?

More than that? Does establishing that Supergirl was always adopted by DEO agents help shore that up? And why does Krypto still remain unexplained? Still, there’s a markedly detailed paragraph about Arion here, and I admit I always thought he was just a side character; I never realized he’d starred in multiple series of his own — though that’s not new history, that’s old history. But we’ve got an updated history of the DC Universe, finally, at long last. Let’s see how DC sticks to it.

[Includes introduction, back matter, covers and references, variant covers]