Mark Waid Will Be Rewriting The Timelines For Classic Heroes With ‘New History Of The DC Universe’
“We’re constantly changing facts,” S.J. Watson writes in his novel, Before I Go To Sleep. “Rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.”
The wheels on the bus continue to go round and round over at DC Comics after it was announced that the 88-year-old pioneers of comic book publishing will once again try to fix their trademark continuity issues with the upcoming New History of the DC Universe. This four-issue limited series will depict a fresh look at the past and present from the point of view of none other than one of the Space-Time Continuum’s most hated disruptors, Barry Allen (aka The Flash).
Veteran comic book writer Mark Waid (DC’s Kingdom Come, Daredevil, The Flash) is on scripting duties with issue #1, covering the birth of the DC Universe, the arrival of the Justice Society of America, and the dawn of the Golden Age of Heroes. Being no stranger to timeline tinkering (or nostalgia stories), Waid appears to be confident about his vision (or rather revision) of a new yesterday.
“This is my dream project,” says Waid (per DC). “It’s a chance to realign all of DC’s sprawling continuity into one master timeline and to be joined by some of comics’ greatest artists to make it shine. With new information for even longtime fans, plus Easter eggs galore, this series will be an essential read for DC fans.”
Joining him are legendary artist, Jerry Ordway (Superman, Death of Superman, Tom Strong, and the soon-to-be mentioned Crisis on Infinite Earths), Todd Nauck (Wildguard, Teen Titans, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man), and a packed roster full of artistic talent ready to flood your LCS with more variant covers that can be counted.
With over 120 years of experience between the three of them, it’s obvious that they’re also not flinching at the daunting task of attempting to centralize a history repeatedly knocked over and spilled across the drawing board. “As one of the artists who was part of Crisis on Infinite Earths in the 1980’s,” Ordway stated, “I am thrilled to be involved in telling the story of this newest DC Universe with Mark and Todd.”
“I’m having an absolute blast with this project,” co-signs co-artist Nauck. “Mark has come up with something cool for me to draw on every page, and it’s been an honor to share art chores with a comics legend like Jerry Ordway. The DC editorial team has coordinated a wealth of deep-dive references for me to draw from, and I’m learning new aspects of DC history I hadn’t known before—and I’ve been reading DC comics for decades!”
Like anyone else who has been reading these books for decades, there is a collective sigh of wearied exasperation from longtime fans (and even normies, at this point) who have their fill of DC’s seemingly pathological need to refurbish their chronology, reiterate canon, retcon characters, and then making an incoherent, contradictory mess out of the whole thing before having to go back, and do a complete overhaul once again.
It all started over forty years ago when DC Comics aimed to consolidate their scattered, incomprehensible lore with the creation of continuity for their characters, along with separate universes for their parallel counterparts from independent stories throughout the Golden Age of comic books (1938-1956), Silver Age (1956-1970), and Bronze Age (1970-1985). One of the greatest events in the medium’s history came from this endeavor with the highly ambitious and seminal twelve-issue crossover series, Crisis On Infinite Earths (1985-1986).
This “hard reboot” gave every version of every character (or at least the ones who survived Crisis) their own respective universes, storylines, and book titles. Plus, it gave new readers a chance to enter the fandom with a clean slate. It also gave birth to the comic book’s Modern Age (1985-present). Things went smoothly for quite some time afterward. Until…
DC let their storytellers get a little too laissez-faire with continuity, and they had to start ironing out the folds of temporal instabilities and timeline inconsistencies that had accumulated. They tried resolving the issue with three “soft reboots” called Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! (1994), Infinite Crisis (2005–06), and Final Crisis (2008).
The events did little to clean up the mess, and the next hard reboot came with the five-issue event, Flashpoint (2011), which led to DC relaunching all of their titles and redefining several characters. The result would be an utter disaster that every comic book reader in every universe will never forget.
The New 52 era is one that had fans fleeing back to the peace and safety of the comparatively less confusing Golden Age. Except for a few decent story arcs from a handful of titles (Batman, Wonder Woman, Justice League: Dark, Swamp Thing, etc), it only made their already jumbled continuity much, much worse. In 2015, DC tried to fix things again with the eight-issue Convergence miniseries and Rebirth the following year.
Rebirth (2017-2020) wasn’t so much a reboot as it was them intending to reconnect continuities and bring back the characters/stories from before Flashpoint. Was it a success? Did they finally get everything back on a straight and sustainable course? What do you think?
Before their reborn characters ever had a chance to reestablish themselves on solid ground, they were crossing over into each other’s stories, and the shadows of the New 52 still lingered through the air, but this would get resolved in Doomsday Clock which is a sequel to the groundbreaking masterwork, Watchmen (1986-1987). The twelve-issue limited series eradicated the 2011-2016 continuity and ushered in the most recent soft reboot, Infinite Frontier (2021-present). A wonderous landscape where everything is canon, and the central characters have reverted to their Post-Crisis incarnations…for now.
This latest narrative facelift is an attempt to reorient and restructure something that continues to spiral out of control. Whether it’s a matter of neglect, indifference, ego, or the incessant need to fix what isn’t broken is anybody’s guess. In spite of the reasons, it seems as though DC is destined to keep changing their appearance until the end (and possible reboot) of time itself, and they won’t stop, even long after we get enough.
New History of the DC Universe will debut on June 25th of this year.
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