PocketCasts
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
iHeartRadio
Pandora
Podchaser
Spotify
Stitcher
YouTubeTape #11: The New History of the DC Universe
The Eleventh Tape: DC Dave and Doug Adamson play Tape #11, which looks at …
The New History of the DC Universe
Join us as we discuss the newly released New History of the DC Universe, and how the way Mark Waid approaches Crisis on Infinite Earths within the confines of the current DC Universe.
Timestamps:
- 7:15 – The New History of the DC Universe
- 1:11:49 – Promo: The Longbow Review
- 1:12:51 – Notes from the Multiverse
Leave comments for this episode and view episode related images at our website at: The Monitor Tapes.com / 11
Email us at themonitortapes@gmail.com
Follow us on social media:
Instagram, Facebook, Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon and YouTube: TheMonitorTapes
======================================
PROMO: The Longbox Review
Music: Achilles
Kevin MacLeod incompetech.com
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
Every old history is new again!
Fell off the Crisis wagon, but am happily rejoining the Omniversal chit-chat!
I heartily applaud your attempt to untangle the multiple / infinite reboots and their impact on reality. I, myself, am horribly confused by specific points that have impacted several of my favorite Teen Titans (Cyborg, Donna, and Wally) and the Legion of Super-Heroes. I wish someone could just stop messing around with reboots, give some writerly rationale about how the omniverse / multiverse naturally settles down to a unified though perhaps multi-timelined reality and just keep telling stories in those spaces.
…and what about the Magic Sphere on Paradise Island, which can observe from afar the goings on elsewhere on Earth. You don’t think that would be a valuable contribution, especially once the Monitor was killed? Oh wait– I already did my rant-send-no edit pass the other night. What’s this then? Yeah, yeah, frickin’ New History of the DC Universe. Fun art, nice try, dismal failure. Just straight up not a thing anyone would want to read, regardless of the continuity. The Wolfman and Perez History offered a sort of platonic ideal DC Universe, deftly summarizing a half century of publication history. It was beautiful and concise.
New History is an absolute train wreck from page 1. Why is Barry Allen the narrator? What gives him that authority, and why is his den the DC version of The Maestro’s trophy room. You could make an argument that the concept of a DC multiverse begins with The Flash, but I think the better argument is that this just reminds me of Gail Simone’s old “You’ll All Be Sorry” parody pieces where Mark Waid is a fanboy who conflates his life with the Flash’s. But also, and Todd Nauck should take no insult at this– George Perez drew the Maestro’s trophy room. As much as I’ve grown to like Todd Nauck, he’s never going to be George Perez. Jerry Ordway comes closer, but still, nah. Nor Walker, Allred, Jurgens, Mahnke, Porter, or… Sherman? I don’t even know who Sherman is. Phil Jimenez is about as close to Perez as you can get now, and he’s never had the impeccable design sense. Perez is pretty much irreplaceable, so we need a writer to excel here to not make the effort an embarrassment, and this is some of the worse work I’ve ever seen from Waid. It’s obviously been noted to death, but just “I’ll make Barry the narrator” faceplants from go. It’s like casting Nic Cage as Superman, or revealing Lex Luthor was a secret Kryptonian. No– you can stop now– you’re already cooked.
What is cool is getting right into Perpetua and The Endless. I researched a bunch of that Snyder Multiverse stuff for Who’s Editing, and yes, please boil all that down to a few sentences, please. They’re piss poor sentences that barely illuminate anything, but somebody should try that again sometime. And I like “smash cut to Vertigo” now that DC has erased the decades of partition. “This counts– here’s specifically Mike Carey’s Lucifer, and a reminder that we retconned Eclipso into the Old Testament Spectre. There’s been a ton of such tweaks in the nearly forty years since the last pass, so do thread that into a project that’s twice as long to accommodate. Yeah, it’s odd that we see the New 52 Demon Knights but not any Daemonites. I can still roll with that, given Wildstorm really never fully integrated into the DCU, and in fact was partially blamed for the New 52 that got Reberf’d. Major points for acknowledging Icon, and therefore Milestone’s now firm integration. They were an actual DC company with early DC crossovers and less contradictory backstory than Wildstorm. Hell yeah, give us Fawcett and Fox/Charlton stars like Spy Smasher and Blue Beetle properly acknowledged as first wave WWII super-heroes. Yeah, there’s terribly obvious seeding of recent/future material like Justice Society Dark, but the first volume was mostly settled history where this kind of laying out of the deets could be helpful to young and old alike.
Then Book Two happened, and it was off the rails. Who but Jim Lee were intractable about the New 52 Justice League? Is it that solid of a catalog title? Is there some cult of the post-Timmverse “DC Animated Movie Universe” (which I totally had to look up to define)? All that playing coy with Earth-2/The Multiverse? That’s some Dan Didio noncommittal crap right there. Then there’s me nitpicking stuff like Supergirl debuting after the Titans? For why? A huge one for me, as should come as no surprise, is the erasure of non-Barbara Minerva Cheetahs, not to mention her rogues being crammed into half of one page instead of the triple-layer double-spread of Bats/Supes/Flash eight pages earlier. Most of these characters predated J’Onn J’Onzz, but they’re embargoed until they have to share a page with a second round of World’s Finest villains? Who to spotlight when gets very wonky, like how the Charlton Action Heroes are with contemporaries, but only the Post-Crisis Captain Atom turns up pages later with Firestorm, Element Woman, and Lady Clayface? Decades of time travel were baked into Nathaniel Adam’s origin, and this feels like a grab bag selection of anachronous exclusion dropped in after the fact. Finally, the big finale, “The Great Crisis.” Some entries, some exits, a brief acknowledgement of a multiverse without parameters. This galls the familiar, and confuses the neophyte.
None of these periods are defined. You used to have the wartime heroes, the Red Scare, the new age in the ’60s that was more or less intact to the ’80s. Here, you have the Golden Age, and then nothing for at least 60 years. There’s a few years after the second World War, a cloud, and then what? Maybe the Justice Alliance in the 50s or 60s, then “decades later,” so much later that The Superman Project is staffed with full grown men of advanced degrees who will be active in the 21st century stories of the current heroic age. It’s way less romantic or noir for the paranoid era that J’Onn J’Onzz arrived into was The Bush Administration. Seriously, nothing of consequence requiring heroes occurred for three quarters of a century? The JSA just sat everything out? The Wildstorm exclusion is especially funny here, because they actually do have a short-lived heroic team in the 1960s, and the key progenitors of that line were members of the Vietnam-era Team 7. Hell, with the current gao, you could go ahead and let Stormwatch, WildC.A.T.s, and Gen13 play out there paramilitary dramas throughout the ’90s before aging out of relevance a decade-plus before Superman. I mean, if the Justice Alliance can predate the Man of Steel, why not?
And about the modern heroic age: what the hell? I’m not going to sit here and count, but how many dozens of characters show up in a span of a few years, divorced of any detail or context. It’s like treating the G.I. Joe Order of Battle as a narrative. Not so much “and then this happened,” as “and then this character appeared with brief flavor text, and then this character…” No new reader is going to get anything out of this book, because it’s not a history, but a product line roll-out. Only the olds are going to be tickled by a bunch of coin-sized images of Silver Age villains drawn in the mid-century retro style of Mike Allred. It’s just a bunch of crowded, jumbled, awkward pin-ups. Nothing is explained well enough to be inviting or educational, and everyone who knows better will argue against the validity of the material until the trade falls out of print. I’ll get the hardcover for posterity, but dismiss it to anyone who’ll listen, and what kids are beating down the door to read North American super-hero universes anyway? All the Dog Man and Captain Underpants readers graduated to Raina Telgemeier/YA fiction or manga. This book isn’t for nor fit for new readers. This is being done for us grayhairs to argue over before we all die out or can no longer afford modern comics on a fixed income.
Book Three though is the worst. Post-Crisis material that’s been canvassed and re-canvassed ceaselessly since the ’90s, usually by Dan Jurgens, are recently as last years’ Zero Hour anniversary, once again by Dan Jurgens. The sheer tokenism of the entire Milestone line being reduced to two rather bland pages offering only eight characters (just three male members of Blood Syndicate, one of whom died in the second issue,) and they’re drawn like gentrification. They insist on including the New Doom Patrol, Will Payton Starman, Connor Hawke– for what? Second and third generations of mantles that were overwritten by the returns of the version introduced in Book Two? If you’re looking for a streamlined telling of history, maybe don’t even get into Parallax or Zero Hour? Why is Zero Hour more intact than the Crisis? Which of these stories is still making DC money, and doesn’t need to devote a quarter page to Damage so that he can be explain the resolution of an event? If I’m writing a New History of the DC Universe, I can assure you that War of the Gods is an early, easy chop, but not to make room for Armageddon 2001, DC One Million, and Final Night. Hell, Waid conveniently worked in “Tower of Babel,” a JLA arc written by Waid, that filled three-quarters of a page. I think it’s one of the better JLA stories, but not so much that Waid can seek additional royalties by acting like it carries this much weight.
Seriously, this book has too much “history,” or rather too many bulletpoints in place of the more necessary exploration of key points in history. It’s flooding the zone– drowning DC in sketchy events instead of keeping perspective and serving new/modern readers the core narrative they need to follow the universe. It’s badly told Who’s Who-drunk rambling that won’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t there the first time. Even if you could absorb it all, why would you care? It’s everything people hate about the sprawl and density of Legion of Super-Heroes writ large across the DCU, with none of the fun or sex appeal.
Speaking of which, I do agree with Doug that there is a single sin that will forever strain DC continuity until it is finally addressed– I just don’t think it’s the Legion of Super-Heroes. Hell, the Legion is one of the worst victims of Post-Crisis continuity. A thousand years in the future is setting your sites in the wrong damned direction.
Frank, step away from the hardcover. You hated this project, don’t give DC any more money for it.
I listened to episode. And you enjoyed.
I have something I’ve bin meaning to ask Doug.
Does he play bagpipes and more importantly if can has ever tried to play the Batman 66 theme or the Wonder Woman tv theme on them?
I’m being serious as I’m the few people I know that likes to here bagpipes when there played well .
I can confirm that I have absolutely ZERO musical talent and can barely shake a tambourine correctly. So unfortunately bagpipe playing is not something I can do and believe me if I was ever to try you would want to be at least 3 km away and up wind to avoid hearing the awful noise generated.
Thanks for answering Doug. .
My brother thinks you might want to check out the cartoon Rocco’s modern life . The episode road rash . As Rocco’s best friends idea of road music is disco music played by all bagpipe . Band . And my brother Jeremy wants to know if watch American pro wrestling and If a fan of Roddy piper or do have a favorite modern wrestler.or do not care . My brother has bin watching some old wrestling videos I thinks all Scott’s either hit people in the head with coconuts and pall round with Americans and put people in sleeper holds or are like scrooge mc duck and have three nephews and beat up there enemies with canes that have gimmicks in them .
By the way has Dave ever worn a black cowboy hat by chance.?
Oh, what a brilliant episode, from the documentary opening featuring the adventures of Dave and Doug to the attempts to understand and explain the ever-changing history of the DC Universe/Multiverse/Omniverse/Divine Continuum/AAAAARGH!
The big mistake DC makes is referring to the Crisis on Infinite Earths and its offspring in subsequent comics; once a crisis has finished, it should be ignored never referred to again in canon (Ambush Bug specials could be the exception). If we readers wish to revisit them we can read them in the comic books, but having the characters have knowledge of Crisis is just as confusing as heck. Only the Psycho Pirate should have retained his original memories, because that final scene was so powerful, and then he should have been forgotten.