A while back, DC announced a new line of reprints, called DC Finest, that packages about 500 pages of comics from various eras into a $40 softcover. From all appearances, it looks to be an attempt to mimic Marvel's successful Epic Collections line, in which complete runs of their books are reprinted in similar paperbacks, but often out of order. So you might get Fantastic Four volume 3 (The Coming of Galactus) before volume 1 (the early stuff), but the volumes have all been mapped out, and gaps get filled in as time goes on.
DC announced a bunch of collections, ranging from the Golden Age (All-Star Comics, Superman) to the 2000s (Wonder Woman), with plenty in between. In October's solicitations, they've finally nailed down the contents for most of the announced books. Here's what's been announced so far.
DC FINEST: WONDER WOMAN: ORIGINS & OMENS
ON SALE 10/8/24
DC Finest: Wonder Woman: Origins & Omens collects these Wonder Woman issues from October 2007 to 2009: Wonder Woman (vol. 3) #14-35, Outsiders: Five of a Kind – Wonder Woman/Grace #1, and The Brave and the Bold #7.
DC FINEST: SUPERMAN: THE FIRST SUPERHERO
ON SALE 11/5/24
The First Superhero covers Summer 1938 to Fall 1940 and reprints classic stories from Action Comics #1-25, Superman #1-5, and New York World’s Fair #1.
DC FINEST: BATMAN: BATMAN: YEAR ONE & TWO
$39.99 US | 592 pages | 6 5/8″ x 10 3/16″ | Softcover | ISBN: 978-1-77952-835-3
ON SALE 11/5/24
Collects Batman #404-414, Batman Annual #11, and Detective Comics #571-581.
DC FINEST: CATWOMAN: LIFE LINES
ON SALE 12/17/24
Collects Catwoman (vol. 1) #1-4, Catwoman (vol. 2) #1-12, Catwoman Annual #1, Batman/Catwoman: Defiant #1, and stories from Action Comics Weekly #611-614 and Showcase ’93 #1-4.
DC FINEST: JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA: THE BRIDGE BETWEEN EARTHS
ON SALE 11/19/24
Collects Justice League of America #45-72 from July 1966 to June 1969.
DC FINEST: GREEN LANTERN: THE DEFEAT OF GREEN LANTERN
ON SALE 12/3/24
Featuring works from revered comics writers and artists such as John Broome, Gardner Fox, and Gil Kane, this volume collects classic stories from Green Lantern #19-39, The Flash #143, and The Brave and the Bold #59.
DC FINEST: EVENTS: ZERO HOUR PART ONE
ON SALE 12/10/24
This first of two collections features Superman #93, The Flash #94, L.E.G.I.O.N. #70, Green Lantern #55, Super-man: The Man of Steel #37, Team Titans #24, The Darkstars #24, Valor #23, Batman #511, Batman: Shadow of the Bat #31, Detective Comics #678, Legionnaires #18, Hawkman #13, Showcase ‘94 #8-9, Steel #8, Superboy #8, Outsiders #11, and Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #3-4.
DC FINEST: LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES: ZAP GOES THE LEGION
ON SALE 12/10/24
This first collection starring the greatest heroes of the 30th century features stories pulled from the pages of Action Comics #378-387 and #389-392, Adventure Comics #374-380 and #403, and Superboy #172-173, #176, #183-184, #188, #190-191, #193, #195, and #197-203.
DC FINEST: THE FLASH: THE HUMAN THUNDERBOLT
ON SALE 11/26/24
Collects Showcase #4, #8, and #13-14, and The Flash #105-123.
DC FINEST: JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA: FOR AMERICA AND DEMOCRACY
ON SALE 12/3/24
Collects All-Star Comics #3-12.
DC has also announced three more for January, although the exact contents aren’t announced yet:
DC Finest: Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters – 21st of January, 2025
The most iconic stories starring Green Arrow! (From the cover, it looks like it’s the start of the Grell run, starting with The Longbow Hunters miniseries.)
DC Finest: Supergirl: The Girl of Steel – 14th of January, 2025
The earliest stories starring Supergirl! (Looks like Supergirl, from the beginning.)
DC Finest: Aquaman: The King of Atlantis – 7th of January, 2025
The earliest stories starring the King of the Seas: Aquaman! (Silver Age Aquaman, with Jack Miller, Robert Bernstein, and Ramona Fradon listed as creators.)
So for the purposes of discussion... which ones of these interest you the most? And looking forward, where would you go for the second volumes of these titles?
Replies
I've gotten deeper into the Peacemaker trade -- past his original Charlton appearances, but still in his stint as a guest-star in Vigilante. And friends...these are not good comics.
That doesn't mean I'm sorry I'm reading them. They're a window into the 80s, not the candy-colored way it gets remembered in retro shows, but a different, darker window, of paranoid entertainment and tough-on-crime sloganeering. It's not a particularly different time than we're living in now, in that respect -- but seeing it from a distance of 40 years makes it particularly striking... and not in a flattering way.
Great insight, Rob! My feeble brain hit those '80s Peacemaker/Vigilante comics and just turned off. I read them the first time when they came out, and didn't like them. They're full of ultra-violence, self-righteous murder, right-wing sloganeering, gun fetishism and so forth. They fall somewhere between Judge Dredd and Dirty Harry, and it doesn't assuage me that the right-wing thugs are considered in-story to be bad guys, because who are they fooling? They're the stars! You can practically draw a straight line from '80s Peacemaker to 4CHAN and Stephen Miller.
Also, everybody was trying to draw like Denys Cowan, for some reason. Cowan is terrific; his imitators not so much.
Anyway: Didn't like them then, don't like them now. I got past the pointless death of one of the Vigilantes to where Adrian Chase was going off the rails again, and gave up. I bought the book for the Charlton material, which as it turns out, I had mostly read already. Once I was through that, I found myself in the appalling moral swamp described, and couldn't take it for long.
But there was interesting stuff to be mined there, as you have shown.
I remembered Peacemaker being in Vigilante but I didn't remember Peacemaker KILLING the second (?) Vigilante and getting away with it as he got his own miniseries then appearred in Suicide Squad and Checkmate!
I can't imagine Superman or Batman letting him run loose!
Whatever he was before, to DC, Peacemaker was their way of cashing in on the Punisher, and not doing a good job at it.
Well, Peacemaker and Vigilante were both attempts to cash in on the Punisher. Vigilante was more on-target in that regard, and more successful (though not for long).
I think Peacemaker turned out as crazy as he did in the 80s DCU because you couldn't play him as a straight Punisher copy -- Vigilante already had that spot, and he was first used as an antogonist to Vig. So they had to go crazier, and more extreme -- and that ultimately hurt the character at the time. (But it probably helped him in the present -- without the crazy "talking to souls in the helmet" schtick, I wonder if he'd have caught James Gunn's eye for The Suicide Squad?)
I'll be holding off on the Peacemaker miniseries until after I get back from camping this weekend, but when I do, I hope to see the character come into a little more focus as the protagist of a story for the first time since the 60s. Even if he remains an anti-hero, I figure Kupperberg would write him differently -- or emphasize different things about him -- as a protagonist than his time an antagonist. But seeing the portrayal of perpetual ancillary characters (a parade of officials from the military, the CIA, etc) is interesting. How were we prepared to see these people in the Reagan/Bush years? Pre-9-11, I'd expect things to be very different. But in pop culture, with its need for action, were they really?
After that, he'll be used in the Janus Directive, and it's loose cannon time again!
And Cap, yeah -- I'm not crazy about these comics, but the 80s ground-level action comics kick I've been on -- not just Peacemaker and Vigilante, but The Question and Grell's Green Arrow -- has really been eye-opening.
Peacemaker killed the third Vigilante (we are disregarding the Praerie Troubadors here), Dave Winston. The second had been killed by Adrian Chase himself a couple of years earlier.
The time from roughly 1985 to 1991 was a period of DC tapping quite a lot into dark heroes and dubious moralities. Captain Atom, who also participated in Janus Directive, had quite a quagmire of amoral and immoral supporting characters himself, starting with General Eiling and going all the way to his eventual wife, Plastique. His 1980s series by Cary Bates was a very depressing read.
Actually, Chase was still alive when Winston was killed, and resumed the Vigilante identity afterward. I think he took his own life in issue 50, though I've never read the issue.
Did I imply that Chase had died before #50? I must have miswritten somewhere.
I think Peacemaker turned out as crazy as he did in the 80s DCU because you couldn't play him as a straight Punisher copy -- Vigilante already had that spot.
This ties into a broader observation I’ve had over the years about DC acquiring characters, which is fine, but then blending them into the DCU, which usually doesn’t turn out so well.
The problem, as I see it, is that each publisher usually has its own cohesive line of characters, usually filled out with a similar cast: A central strongman, a no-powers tech-user, maybe a magician, etc. And when they’re blended into the DCU, those niches are already filled. So the incoming characters usually suffer some sort of fundamental alteration to distinguish themselves from the resident. That results in characters who are inferior to their original genesis. Witness:
And none of these characters are strong enough to carry a title. (Shazam currently has a title, but I don’t expect it to last much longer than the previous ones did.) Maybe they never were popular enough, but they certainly won’t be after becoming off-brand versions or parodies of their original concepts.
I’ll admit that sometimes it works. I liked the animated version of The Question, with his weird conspiracy theories and murder boards, which would sometimes turn out to be accurate. (“Even a blind dog …”) But, of course, they jettisoned him for a bland female version. I liked the conceit of Lady Blackhawk existing in the ‘40s and time traveling to the present to steal the show in Birds of Prey. Of course, she’s gone, too.
The sad thing is that I see an obvious fix that DC threw away with Crisis the instant they had it, when they introduced the Charlton characters in 1985. And that is: Parallel worlds. Let Captain Atom and Blue Beetle remain the Superman and Batman of Earth-4. Keep the Quality characters on a world where they aren’t utterly redundant (and drop the World War II schtick). Keep a comedy relief sidekick for Plastic Man, so we can continue to enjoy the central joke of the strip, which is Plas twisting into hilarious shapes while remaining deadpan. (That was redundant with Elongated Man and had to go.) Allow Captain Marvel to remain the Superman of his universe, with a super-powered family analogous to Superman’s, and superhero friends who aren’t redundant with the Justice League. Mr. Scarlet and Pinky don’t have to go into comic book limbo if there isn’t a Batman and Robin already extant in their world.
They wouldn’t even have to use the words “parallel worlds.” Just use separate publishing lines. If DC published a new Bulletman with “Fawcett” in the upper left corner, for example, you wouldn’t even have to know it was a DC comic book unless you looked at the indicia. Maybe Fawcett, Charlton and Quality characters still wouldn’t sell well enough to sustain eponymous titles, but at least they’d go down in their original iterations, not funhouse versions.
I understand that DC’s institutional memory believes this trick works. It worked gangbusters in 1945, when Detective Comics Inc. formally acquired All-American, and picked up some of its greatest characters: Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and Wonder Woman, along with Atom, Doctor Mid-Nite, Johnny Thunder, Mr. Terrific and Wildcat. But in those days, DC was already structured to allow for those characters (thanks to All-Star Comics) alongside Aquaman, Batman, Doctor Fate, Green Arrow, Hourman, Sandman, Spectre, Starman and Superman. There wasn’t much in the way of redundancies. (The obvious exception being Johnny Quick.)
It wasn’t a disaster when DC picked up Blackhawk and Plastic Man in 1957, although it wasn’t a roaring success.
And when they introduced Captain Marvel in 1973, they kept him separate on Earth-S (later Earth-5) until Crisis. That worked out fine, especially with C.C. Beck back for a while.
Post-Crisis? They went with “Billy’s brain in Captain Marvel’s body” to distinguish him from Superman, which flies in the face of Beck’s stated intent that they were two separate beings. Which is when the character reached its greatest success. It also carries with it a lot of dubious ethics for the Justice League.
Hmmm. I seem to have ranted for quite a while. I’ll call it quits here and let y’all have your say.
The main issue I have with DC acquiring characters is that they all have to play second fiddle to the DC heroes.
I just reread the Superman Vs SHAZAM! trade paperback and an underlying theme is that Superman is better than Captain Marvel. Despite the maketing behind SHAZAM! in the 70s, he is always a notch below Superman.
Look at the Quality/Freedom Fighters characters. Besides Plastic Man (who was never a major DC star though even they acknowledge his Golden Age greatness), the rest are written as weak copies of DC heroes: the Ray/Green Lantern, Black Condor/Hawkman, Doll Man/the Atom, etc.
There is a depth to the Fawcett/Quality heroes that DC has rarely tapped.
It was worse the two times DC got to use the MLJ/Archie heroes. They were supposed to be fully integrated into the DCU. Promo pictures had them with Batman and the Justice League in 2010. They had the Shield crossover with...Magog! The books didn't last a year.
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