DC Universe Legacies by Len Wein (DC Comics hardcover)

DC Comics decided to revise its entire 80-year superhero mythology. They needed this reprioiritizing and revisioning to be be anything but a boring history text.

Any number of young whippersnappers would’ve loved this assignment. But it would have turned out very differently than it did under this old whippersnapper, the legendary Len Wein, original writer of The Swamp Thing and expert resuscitator of The X-Men.

Wein frames the new DC scriptures as an exercise in nostalgia, as witnessed by a cop who’s spent his whole life scrapbooking superhero articles. The sheer mass of information that needs to be divulged is daunting—Brad Meltzer’s entire world-changing Identity Crisis series is shortened to about two panels here. There’s little about heroes’ personal struggles. It’s the DC story as written in public—the relationships, the feuds, the organizations, the sidekicks, the supervillains. Wein adds a human subplot about the cop’s gangster brother-in-law.

The artwork, by a slew of artists working in the classic muscled-hero style, adds buoyancy and color to a narrative that can’t help but bog down occasionally. Stories with their own arcs and climaxes and folded into the middle ground of a much larger tale, so naturally it’s jumpy and disorienting.

Yet for such an outrageous exercise in condensation—millions of comic stories boiled down to their essence—Wein actually builds a momentum, a plot and even a moral—people can change. Even superpeople.