DC Comics

Collect The Complete DC Comics Reading Order Through DC Finest Collections

November 13, 2024 by Dave 5 Comments

Take it from someone who’s tried: If you want to read the complete history of Batman in comics, and you don’t want to do it digitally, you have your work cut out for you! Take a look at Comic Book Herald’s complete Batman reading order and you’ll see an (expertly curated) list of a wide variety of collected editions, many of which have long since gone out of print and are no longer available at an affordable retail price. The journey through the history of the Bat in print collections hasn’t felt especially achievable – all that may be changing soon.

DC’s 2024 has focused on a number of tangible efforts to make their comics more available and affordable, starting with this year’s earlier Compact Classics, which took all-time great stories like Watchmen and All-Star Superman and packaged them into Manga sized digests (5.51 x 0.75 x 8.46 inches) for $9.99 a pop in the U.S. The collected efforts continue in late 2024 with DC Finest. [Read more…] about Collect The Complete DC Comics Reading Order Through DC Finest Collections

Doom Patrol by Rachel Pollack: They Liked My Powers But Couldn’t Handle Me

April 8, 2023 by Hunter Felt 1 Comment

“The ones who return are the ones who suffer. Live as if you’ve never lived before.” – Niles Caulder receiving a message from his subconscious. Doom Patrol #73. “The Dream Patrol: Return of the Windowmen,” written by Rachel Pollack.

In his introduction to The Vertigo Tarot, Sandman creator Neil Gaiman mentions the surreal experience of accompanying author Rachel Pollack on a visit to an esoteric shop in Camden to pick up a Tarot deck. This resulted in Gaiman, “feeling like I’d just gone into a record show with someone who, to my surprise, turned out to be one of the Beatles, as Rachel modestly admitted her identity to the lady behind the counter, and signed autographs.”

Last month, Gaiman wrote again about Pollack, but this time under heavier circumstances. “I am writing this at the request of her wife Zoe,” he wrote on his Mastodon account, “to let her friends know that the end is soon, and to let the obituarists know too.” [Read more…] about Doom Patrol by Rachel Pollack: They Liked My Powers But Couldn’t Handle Me

DC and The Matter Of Crisis, Part V

February 18, 2023 by Ritesh Babu Leave a Comment

You’ve heard the word. You know the story.

Crisis.

The iconic, defining, definitive word of DC stories.

The word Crisis feels inseparable from the fabric of DC. It holds sway over its past, it informs its present, and it will certainly influence the future. You can’t think of DC and not think of Crisis at some point. The very idea of it has been bound to the very idea of DC that tightly.

And the response to the word and its invocation is intense as well. It comes with a lot of assumptions and baggage. Given that is the case, given it has become ubiquitous, inevitable, and all-pervading with DC itself, it’s worth discussing what has become of it. What has emerged from this focusing and this obsession over Crisis in DC? What has it led to?

The matter of Crisis must be unpacked, and that’s what we’re here to do.

Picking up where we left off…