DC Comics has made a lot of headway in the last year. “DC All-In” introduced the Absolute DC Universe, which has been selling like hot cakes. Mainline DC comics are also doing better saleswise than they have been before, and DCU projects like Creature Commandos, Superman, and Peacemaker have made fans more likely to check out DC projects. It’s a great time to be a new DC fan and the publisher is going out of their way to give new readers an in to the DC Universe. This is where New History of the DC Universe comes in, as the four issue series has been establishing the canon of DC for new and old readers alike.
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New History of the DC Universe #3 brings reader to modern DC, going from the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths to right before Flashpoint. This is a very interesting place to end for several reasons. The first is that New History of the DC Universe is presented as a book being written by Barry Allen. Allen’s action are the catalyst behind Flashpoint and New History of the DC Universe #3 doesn’t shy from that. In fact, looking at the series so far, it appears that DC may be about to canonize its greatest failure — the New 52.
The New 52 Decimated the DC Fandom
So, from the beginning of New History of the DC Universe, fans have been wondering how DC was going to handle the New 52. The New 52 changed the DC Multiverse for five years, from 2011 to 2016. It was sold to readers as a new beginning for DC Comics, much like what happened after the DC classic Crisis on Infinite Earths. At first, the New 52 was pretty successful and new reader friendly, starting all the books from number one and doing away with decades of confusing DC Comics history. However, as time went on, fans who liked the old DC went away, and fans who liked the New 52 stopped buying the books as well.
New History of the DC Universe #1 established that concepts like the Demon Knights, based on a New 52 book of the same name, was canon. In New History of the DC Universe #2, the issue showed that the Justice League origin was the same one that readers got from the New 52’s Justice League #1-6, and then welding that to other Justice League origins from The Brave and the Bold #28 and the later JLA: Year One #1-12.
New History of the DC Universe #3 canonizes lots of stories from the post-Crisis era of DC Comics, and ends with Barry Allen talking about how his return from death in Final Crisis would end up destroying everything. This is heavily pointing towards the canonization of the New 52, which is an extremely interesting ideas on its own. The New 52 was almost entirely played as its own universe, with even the events brought over being slightly different (this is honestly pretty DC; the same thing happened with the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths; the in-universe event was very different from the one we read), so it’s interesting to think how all of this is going to work.
On top of that, it’s pretty surprising that DC is even going back to the New 52 well in general. The New 52 has been something that DC has been trying to move away from for a long time. While there are some good comics that came from the five years of the New 52, there a way more bad ones, which is what led to the end of the New 52 in 2016. Most fans figured they’d make things like the Snyder/Capullo Batman, Geoff Johns’s Green Lantern, and a few other great stories canon, with the rest of it left in the past. However, this issue teases that the New 52 happened and that leads to a variety of unique possibilities for the DC fans.
New History of the DC Universe Is Taking DC in Directions No One Expected
The New 52 has gone down as one of the biggest failures in DC history. DC dropped the universe it had been building since 1986 and restarted it with the least amount of planning they could do. Its early successes were overshadowed by just how bad everything got as it went on. Since the end of the New 52 in 2016, DC has been doing everything it can to get the taste of the New 52 out of readers’ mouths.
A big reason that New History of the DC Universe even exists is because of the New 52 and its failure. The New 52 was five years of stories that didn’t push the narrative of DC forward, a big boil in the middle of DC history. This is what makes them teasing the return of the New 52 so surprising and interesting. I think this idea can be taken in some interesting directions, especially in how they explain the way the whole thing worked in any detail. The New 52 is canon and that’s a huge move in DC history.
New History of the DC Universe #3 is on sale now.
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