The DC Comics Encyclopedia

You’ve got to love Amazon – 33% off the cover price, free delivery, half the shipping time they said later and one becomes the proud owner of the latest DK and DC Comics collaboration. I thought I’d post up a guide review of the new DC Comics Encyclopedia for people who were wondering how it compared to DC’s older Who’s Who. Click below to read the full review.

The DC Comics Encyclopedia – The Definitive Guide to the DC UniverseBy Scott Beatty, Bob Greenberger, Phil Jimenez and Dan WallaceFirst edition — ISBN 0-7566-0592-X — 350 pages — hardbound

I think the most important thing to point out about this book is its target audience. This book isn’t aimed solely at the hardcore comicbook audience; it is a populist coffee table tome aimed at the casual reader and squarely aims for breadth rather than depth. People expecting something equivalent to the current Marvel Handbook will be disappointed. This, however, should not detract from what is certainly the most comprehensive official survey of the DC Universe since the original 1980s Who’s Who.

The format of the Encycopedia is quite well laid out. Each character gets space according to their importance with the JLA icons receiving double page spreads while second tier characters (Lois Lane, Hawkman, etc) only get a single page. All other characters get fractions of a column or page depending on their perceived importance. Strangely the multiple incarnations of the superstars are relegated to shared entries, e.g. all three Flashes share a single double-page entry. The smallest entries are roughly equivalent to a typical Secret Filse profile while many are more similar to the length of the original Who’s Who entries. The differing length of entries means that a little alphabetical juggling is needed to accommodate them neatly on the page, but this isn’t a problem once you get used to it. The full index is a welcome addition.

The entry selection is skewed towards recent continuity with a cut-off prior to the recent reboots of the Doom Patrol, the LSH and Firestorm. I’d guess that this book has about twice the number of entries as the original Who’s Who, but there are still noticeable exclusions from this book as it squarely deals with the post-Crisis DC Universe and brushes aside pre-Crisis and Vertigo characters. I’m sure the authors could have easily filled up a second volume, but the package price would have been prohibitive for most readers.

If this book has a weakness then it has to be the lack of context given to the DC Universe. All these wonderful entries are presented without a real sense of how they fit together – would it really have been so hard to include a capsule History of the DC Universe or a few appendices of timelines and membership lists.

The illustrations are lifted from across much of the DC back catalogue and also show a definite bias towards modern material. The pages are not as glossy as previous DK books, but the art is reproduced cleanly and even looks to have been shot from the original artwork. One slight quibble I have is that individual artwork is not attributed; instead there is a single list of artists in the back of the book. Ironically the better half of Alex Ross’s serviceable wrap around cover is on the backside of the book.

Overall this is an amazing catalogue of the inhabitants of the DC Universe. It won’t satisfy the most stringent of continuity fans and there are some noticeable exclusions, but that doesn’t really matter. This is a coffee table book designed to introduce casual readers to DC Comics’s amazing Universe and to act as a guide to their more obscure characters — you’re going to be using this book to look up  Mainline or Genius Jones, not Superman or Batman.