30 days of comics I love #11: It is as simple as that.

History of the DC Universe #2 

By Wolfman and Pérez 

There has been another four decades of DC lore since this was published, but it's still a fine thing to read, largely because it's just page after page of great Pérez art, and that is as timeless as it ever was.

But it's also still very readable, because it captures that absolute sliver of time when the unified DC universe still made some kind of sense. It had somehow been deemed that the multiverse was too confusing for DC's readers, and things needed to be simplified into one universe. And it worked, for a whole month or so. 

And then the immediate contradictions kicked in, and you couldn't say who was an original member of the Justice League anymore, and the Legion of Super-Heroes were bringing their pocket universe nonsense into Superman, and nobody knew what the fuck was going on with Hawkman, a superhero who can fly and hit bad guys with a mace, and somehow suddenly had the most complicated history of any comic character anywhere.

It was all much, much more confusing than the idea of Earth-S and all that, and DC never really recovered that simplicity it craved, as it immediately undercut its own worlds with unnecessary complexity.

But still, for one moment, around the month that this comic came out, that it all made a kind of sense. Without the need for things like plot and character development, Wolfman delivers a lively history of the universe, and Pérez's pencils, massively shored up by the solidity of Karl Kesel's inks, makes it all look so very exciting and pretty.

And it's just a quiet reminder of the very last time you could sum up the DC universe in two 48-page comics. Two prestige format books was enough to contain all the universe that you needed, you didn't have to be shackled to the Book of Destiny to get the full story.