Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities DC Comics Year by Year

My kids really get me! I got this yesterday for Father's Day and am finding it an interesting read:

https://www.amazon.com/DC-Comics-Year-New-Chronicle/dp/1465485783

It goes through each year starting in 1935, and for each year has a two page spread that talks about interesting DC related comic releases or events that happened that year, as well as a small footnote area that mentions some important events of the year in general.

Lots of great art, a cool intro from Paul Levitz and lots of interesting content.

What I found extremely interesting was that the content and discussion has a lot of variety around the different characters and titles that DC publishes until the book gets to the 2010s, when the content very quickly sifts down to characters and books that are JL-character related (Supes, Bats, WW, Aquaman, Flash, and their respective family).

Also, in case anyone's wondering, the last mention of the LSH in the book is 2009 where they are mentioned in the article about the Superman Secret Origin title. The last mention of them as a published title are two quick mentions in 2008 - the Legion of Three Worlds related to the Final Crisis that July, and in the "also this year" column a mention of Shooter's return to the Threeboot in February.

That's a great book. I remember looking through a copy of the original edition a few years ago and admiring it. I hadn't known they had updated it.

That does look suoer-cool!

Awesome! thanks for sharing... and a late happy Fathers' Day!

Thanks, Ibby!

Yeah, it was fun paging through it with my kids as they had no idea how old some of the properties they watch on TV, for both DC and Marvel actually, are (Suicide Squad was what spurred the initial questions on that). And they knew a lot of the more recent (from the late 80s) history of Batman, as I'd talked about it when we would play the Arkham video games, but it was cool to talk about the Crisis, the Death of Superman craziness, the Batmania of 89, all that.

They were kind of confused when I told them about the pay-per-call voting for the fate of Jason Todd, which was kind of funny. My oldest was pretty astute, though; she asked if there was a version of the issue where Jason lived (there was), but then we got into a whole discussion about the Red Hood, and one could say there are many issues where Jason lived.

I got the older version of this one as a pressie a few years back. I enjoyed looking back at the Golden and Silver Ages as they were published, rather than with the weight of retcons and revisions on the history of the characters.

Yes, this tome tells a much simpler, straightforward story, doesn't it? It is interesting what they decide to focus on in any given timeframe - some of the comics I thought they would mention more out front, they would talk about in an aside or footnote.