I’ve really enjoyed this series. Each issue shoots to the top of my reading stack every week one ships. What I’ve enjoyed mostly is the look back at the major milestones of the DCU and the back-up features, though, not so much the human interest story and framing sequence tying it all together. This final issue moves into recent territory with Identity Crisis and the events of the Infinite Crisis lead-in series. It seems like only yesterday (well, maybe last week) we were in the midst of discussion and debate over Identity Crisis which raged for 100 pages! Villains United, OMAC and the Rann-Thanagar War (and was there a fourth one? I forget) were my very first experiment in “tradewaiting,” an unsuccessful one, I must admit. By the time the collections were released I found I had completely lost interest. I still have not read those stories to this day. But I digress…
The back-up story deals with the Blue Beetle, from Dan Garret through the Ditko era and beyond, into Ted Kord’s solo series his time with the Justice League, his “fat” phase, and his later rise and redemption, right up to the events of the Countdown to Infinite Crisis one-shot. I generally like the kind of stories which weave together stories by “D. Hands” into a narrative which looks as if it had been plotted that way all along, but in this case, unfortunately, the end of that story depends on knowledge of what happened in that 2005 one-shot, and Douglas Wolk’s book Reading Comics pretty much spoiled that kind of storytelling for me.
Given that much of the main story dealt with tying up the loose ends of the human interest framing device, I’d have to say this series went out with more of a whimper than a bang.
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I was actually happy that the series spent more time wrapping up the human-interest story. The last few issues didn't address it enough, IMO; I'd already read the crossovers, so revisiting them didn't appeal to me as much as the earlier issues had.
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Parts of Gail SImone's Villains United was excellent, Jeff, and I credit it with bringing me back to the DCU in the run up to Infinite Crisis.
The follow-up, Secret Six, is being enjoyed by discerning readers too, if not a huge audience.