I just did something I haven’t done in over forty years:
I bought a comic book at an actual newsstand.
As mentioned previously, my reading and collecting of comics began by picking up a DC Blue Ribbon Digest from the gift shop at the hospital where my father worked and my grandparents were patients.
Then one day while at a 7/11 down the block there was a magazine rack of all sorts (including ones I shouldn’t see), as well as some comic books. I remember very clearly the cover of an issue of Justice League of America on the rack there. It had a very unique cover, at least to my young eyes, of a group of super villains looking victorious as pictures of various super heroes were being ‘X’ed out by Killer Frost. I didn’t know at the time how important this storyline would be to another would have a great impacted on my young life in the issues of All-Star Squadron and Infinity Inc.
From there I would find my comics on a spinner rack at Walden Books and B. Dalton Booksellers at the mall.
I rarely got the opportunity to visit an actual on the side of the street newsstand, but there was something magical about those visits that didn’t exist in the book stores. I did buy a comic book or two at newsstands when visiting Ireland and Great Britain. Pence instead of Cents.
I even subscribed to a few books directly from DC Comics. Which was cool to have something waiting for me in the mail box when I came home from school. But not cool when the brown paper mailing package got stuck and the glue ripped the actual cover of the comic.
Another embarrassing moment was when I went to my very first comic book convention and bought several books. Forgetting that I had subscribed to one of them and so ended up with two copies of the same issue.
It wouldn’t be long after that I discovered my local comic book shop. Wow, an entire store devoted to comic books (next door was a shop that only had baseball cards, but I never went in there). From then on, all my comic book purchases were made in comic shops.
Because of budgetary reasons I had to recently cancel my ‘pull list’ and only go in when there is something I’ve heard about and it is a must have.
The current must have is the NEW HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE #1
I was planning on heading into the comic shop sometime soon to see if they had it, but that changed today.
After taking my wife to a doctor’s appointment, we stopped for lunch at Los Angele’s Original Farmer’s Market at Third and Fairfax. (A mythic intersection for us, for the Writers Guild of America is cattycorner from the market, and CBS Studio City is next to it.)
After finishing our lunch, we headed towards our car, but that’s when I had a thought. The Farmer’s Market has always had a Newsstand, and I knew that I had seen comics on the racks there. Would they have the one I was looking for?
Entering the newsstand, I saw a few comics that were more like quick grab and reads with puzzles and coloring books, so I went further down the racks. On one were all the entertainment magazines (heck, this is Hollywood after all), and there was a Superman comic, and a Fantastic Four comic; both for the purpose of promoting the upcoming movies (I am looking forward to both.)
Passing those I went even further into a corner where everything on the shelves were comic books. I felt the joy that I used to feel as a kid discovering someplace else that held such great four-color treasures, and…
Sure, enough there was Issue #1 of NEW HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE. With two different variant covers. I absolutely had to have the one that had dozens and dozens (if not hundreds) of heroes (and villains) filling up the double page spread.
Not only was this comic there, along with several current books, graphic novels and trade collections, there were also some larger reprint books of some major classic stories from the past. If it wasn’t for that money thing, I would have left with an arm load of comics. I showed restraint and only got the one I was after.
So, what is it about NEW HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE that was so important that I had to make this special quest?
After the CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS in the mid 1980s, writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Perez wrote the original HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE as it then existed after the CRISIS. It was a fantastic read for the young me who loved the DC Universe and wanted to know everything about it. I wanted to know the concreate foundation of the new Universe that existed for these stories.
I’ve also mentioned that over the years since the Crisis writers and artist have written so much more about the heroes that lived in this world that a lot of it started to contradicted not only my concrete history, but each other’s stories. Sometimes they were great stories, and sometimes not so great. Time and again, they tried to reset the world with more crossovers and crisis’, sometimes it added great new parts of the universe, sometimes not so, and sometimes forgetting what had come before.
(I’ll be writing again about my thoughts on this later.)
So, it is time for a NEW HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE to be written, this time by the great Mark Waid. Known for many great stories in this universe, from the Flash, to Superman, and many others, to the great mega-story KINGDOM COME with artist Alex Ross.
It became Waid’s duty to write this NEW HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE with artists Todd Nauck and my favorite above all others Jerry Ordway. (I still dream of working with both Waid and Ordway someday.)
This book takes so many of the ‘creation’ stories that were added since the 1980s and combines them showing how one influences the other and then begins to introduced all the cosmic characters we may or may not know (just at the kid all those years ago didn’t know them all but wanted to), and then focused on the history of Earth and all the characters that existed through history right up to my favorite heroes of the Justice Society and the All-Star Squadron of the 1940s and then moves forward into the 50s and giving hints of what is to come in the next issue and the modern and future worlds of the DC Universe.
Along with Mark Waid’s writing of the history in story form, a big THANK YOU must also go to Dave Wielgosz who helped with Waid’s research and assembled into a chronological order referencing all the original comic books that the information came from. Tying everything together, even info we haven’t heard about in many years. The younger me would have loved having this, and I would have wanted to find every one of those referenced comics (of course I couldn’t afford many of them, but I did search out reprints when I could.) I can’t help but think of all the research people like Greg Weisman put into the original WHO’S WHO IN THE DC UNIVERSE, and what he would later do in creating a version of the DC Universe for his animated series YOUNG JUSTICE.
I know that after this series is finished (and there are ads in here for upcoming major stories), it might all be destroyed in future stories or left entirely forgotten, but for me I love all this told not as “Secret Origins” but chronicled as history. I am truly intrigued by the one who is doing the chronicling.
And so today at the Farmers Market Newsstand I was brought back to being that child who first discovered the DC Universe, and I’m looking forward to traveling its highways and byways into the future.
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