New History of the DC Universe - Comments and Questions (SPOILERS)

[The Baron]

Issue #1

1. Barry Allen describes himself as "retired". Is this some development that I missed, or is this meant to be "future" Barry?
2. Barry seems to have a large collections of "trophies" from various heroes and villlains. I wonder how he obtained all that stuff?
3. Who's the World Forger? Never heard of them. Also never heard that Perpetua was the Monitors' mother.
4. Never heard of the Spectre's real name being "Aztar".
5. "Ktar Deathbringer and Shrra served an ancient force of evil before being redeemed and reincarnated..." Do we know who this {force of evil" was?
6. "Merlin anointed a second Shining Knight"... This appears to be the Shining Knight from Morrison's Seven Soldiers, but if I'm recalling correctly, she was supposed to be from ancient, pre-Arthurian times, so this would appear to be an alteration of her backstory.
7. Never heard of these "Demon Knights".
8. No sign of the Trigger Twins on the "western Heroes" page.
9. No sign of the original Red Tornado, either.
10. So Hippolyta is still the Golden Age Wonder Woman?  Somehow, I thought that they'd re-written it so that Diana was back in nthe Golden Age again.
11. Why is the Invisible Hood being called "Invisible Justice" now?
12. Also never heard of this "Justice Alliance" consisting of Captain Comet, Prine Ra-Man, Automan, Tiger-Man and Congorilla.
13. Putting Niles Caulder, Will Magnus, Martin Stein and Simon Stagg together as "The Supermen Project" feels like they're trying to create a DC version of the guys who ended up creating Adam Warlock.

Otherwise, most of the rest of the stuff is as I remembered it.

[ClarkKent_DC]

Rob Staeger said:

It feels like the special gave the characters essentially the JSA's problem (characters being associated with a particular time period, increasingly in the past) -- and tried to solve it by creating Luthor's "deal." But I don't think the 90s/2000s are as essential to the Milestone characters as World War II is to the JSA. It seems like a solution to a problem that could have been solved by simply saying these characters have only existed for a few years, not decades, but out of sight most of the time. 

That wasn't (one of) the problem(s) I had with the story, but you're right. The only thing that anchors the Milestone characters to a specific era is the Black Lives Matter protests, and that wasn't a thing when Luthor was in office. So this is a double misstep.

 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

Mary Marvel put it best: "We deal with timey-wimey paradoxes constantly. Little reboots of reality. I pity anyone in my era writing a history book."

(Action Comics #1097).

[Captain Comics]

That's a great line.

Now I need to read the issue, because I have so many questions!

The people in the future wouldn't consider themselves to be living in the future -- they'd consider themselves to be living in the present. So she's looking backward to the "past" where things are changing her present. What make OUR era so special that all the time hi-jinks begin here? Is it the Crisis? Flashpoint? Should we take from Mary's comments that Crises will continue until her era, monkeying with time? I"m guessing time paradoxes haven't been happening since that big hand held a cosmos, or it wouldn't just be her period that was prone to "little reboots of reality," it would be all of them.

I wouldn't worry about history books, though. It's always been my understanding that when history resets, the books and movies and so forth all reset as well, to conform to the new history, just like everyone's memories. They would have to, wouldn't they?

Or maybe all the history books move into the fiction category after a Crisis. Maybe Harry Turtledove's books were once all history, and moved to the fiction category thanks to the pounding of Superboy's fists!

[Jeff of Earth-J]

In anticipation of the upcoming Swamp Thing 1989 series, I've been rereading my own Swamp Thing discussion (pp.35-36) to refresh #80-87 in my mind, and I was surprised by this comment that I myself wrote: "This month, Jenette Kahn's 'publishorial' hypes The Unauthorized Biography of Lex Luthor one-shot by James Hundall and Eduardo Barreto. In answer to the question why a biography of Lex Luthor, editor Mike Carlin replies, 'Why a biography of Donald Trump? Not to compare Trump to Luthor personality-wise, but they're characters similar in importance in the business world. They are also similar public figures, philanthropic in their public images, and the public cares about them.'"

So I guess I have heard Lex Luthor being compared to Trump in the past, but I still never made the connection that Luthor's post-Crisis persona was modeled on him.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

In Swamp Thing #87, Merlin says, "At some point during your era, a sort of convegence of the worlds seems to have occurred... and all the endless possibilities were boiled down into a single reality." In 1989, readers assumed he was referring to the Crisis on Infinite Earths, but in 2026 it seems clear he was referring to 2015's Convegence and the DCU of today, especially in light of what we now know about the post-Crisis DCU, regardless of what writer Rick Veitch may have intended. This factette will become a key piece of my cosmology of the DCU (if I ever get around to writing it down).