DC Comics is the oldest producer of superhero comics, having brought generations of readers some of the best stories of all time. One of the most fun parts of DC’s history are the major event stories of the publisher. In a lot of ways, DC created the first event comics with their “Crisis” stories in the Silver Age, teaming the Justice League up with their multiversal counterparts several times a year. Since then, the publisher has created some of the coolest event books ever, and some of them have gone down as legendary. They are the stories that many people read years ago, thought they were great, and then never really read them again.
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Nostalgia plays a huge role in the way that fans look at them. However, when you go back and look at these stories, they aren’t as great as we once thought. These five DC events don’t stand up, wistful nostalgia making us remember they’re better than they are.
5) Blackest Night
Blackest Night has a great reputation. The book by Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis paid off the War of Light story introduced in “The Sinestro Corps War”, and did so by giving readers a compelling story full of ups and downs, amazing battles, and some of the coolest pencils of Reis’s career. Blackest Night is definitely a good comic, but it’s not as great as a lot of people seem to think it is. A lot of the story revolves around the shock of who is going to die, who is going to come back as a Black Lantern, and how the heroes are going to win. However, once you know all of this, what you’re getting is a pretty standard event comic, except a little bloodier because Johns loved writing really, really violent event stories.
4) The Flash: Rebirth
Barry Allen came back to life in Final Crisis, outrunning the Black Racer with Wally West, using the embodiment of death against Darkseid in the final battle. Soon after, readers got The Flash: Rebirth, from Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver, which brought Barry back to the Flash family, and brought Reverse Flash back as his greatest villain. Let’s be frank — this is actually kind of a bad comic. It’s purpose was to make Barry Allen a more important Flash than Wally West, and it did that in the weirdest, most antithetical ways you can imagine. Barry is made into the engine of the Speed Force, the Negative Speed Force is invented and basically never used again so Reverse Flash seems important, and the book kind of follows the example of Green Lantern: Rebirth when it comes to the way it’s structured. On top of that, Van Sciver’s art is often terrible, over-rendered and suffering from bad proportions and details. Some fans think this book is good, but it’s just not.
3) “Knightfall”
“Knightfall” is one of the defining events of the ’90s for DC Comics, but it’s not the amazing blockbuster that it’s often made out to be. In fact, it’s honestly a pretty standard Batman story. Bane’s plan to defeat Batman by overwhelming him by busting everyone out of Arkham is smart, but then you sit down to read the (very, very long) book for the first time in years and you see that it’s basically just repeating itself over and over again. You honestly can just read the first issue, the issue were Bane breaks Bruce’s back, and then read the issue were Azrael became Batman, and you don’t need to read any of the rest of it. A lot of people like to pretend that this era of Batman was actually good, but it was mostly just a lot of cliche stories and “Knightfall” is that writ large.
2) “Death of Superman”
A lot of fans love “Death of Superman”, but I think that’s because most of them like the idea of the story more than story itself. Honestly, it suffers from the same problems as “Knightfall”. It keeps repeating itself; each issue has the same basic formula: Superman and his allies fight Doomsday, the monster overpowers them, and the issue ends with Superman getting back into the fight as the living engine of destruction gets closer to Metropolis. It’s not some amazing groundbreaking story, it’s a multi-part fist fight that echoes through every issue. It’s hard to even call it a story in a lot of ways, since there’s so little to it.
1) Infinite Crisis
Infinite Crisis is the best event book of the ’00s, from DC or Marvel, but once you get past your nostalgia for it, it’s not the flawless event that it seems like from the outside. The problem with the book is mostly what it did rather than what it it was. Basically, this was the first story were writer Geoff Johns (working with artists Phil Jimenez, George Perez, Jerry Ordway, and Ivan Reis) did his whole “the universe is too dark and this story is going to bring back hope” thing, somehow bringing back hope with some of the most brutal violence in comics. I’ll still praise the book for numerous reasons, but nostalgia makes the book seem way more perfect than it was.
What nostalgic DC stories do you think don’t stand up? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
