The New History Of The DC Universe #4: Barry Allen’s History Of The DC Universe From A Certain Point Of View

The New History Of The DC Universe #4 concludes the last history of the DC Universe covering most events from The Blackest Night / Brightest Day  (Not Flashpoint as the solicit says ) through the present with the events of the All-In Era teasing the events of K.O. and The Absolute Universe.

Throughout the series, which has been a “top of the stack” read, Barry Allen at times especially when dealing with Flash family events, tends to skew towards that of of an unreliable narrator. It is unclear if Waid does this on purpose or simply because he, through Barry is attempting to group events thematically,  breaking the flow of the story as events seem out of sync at times with the established publishing timeline of the events.

Some examples include:

• The first appearance of Jackson Hyde, who appeared in Brightest Day, retconned to appearing post-New 52.
• The understatement of the entire series that his triggering Flashpoint was the “most horrific mistake imaginable”
• The positioning of the events of “The Button” and Superman Reborn  which take place in the issue after the events of Dark Nights: Metal but were in fact the focus of the post- DC Rebirth series relaunches.

Barry ( and Waid),again,  at least outside of the backup material also omit some of the definitive arcs of this time such as Heroes In Crisis, events of Convergence, Five Years Later, Milk Wars,  New Krypton, and Justice League Vs Suicide Squad which would set the stage for Absolute Power, which leads in to the current era.

The above being said, Waid and the art teams did an excellent job over the four-issue event and it will be interesting to see how long this particular telling remains canon. Having the final sequence with Barry going into a comic story that has an Action Comics #1 poster in the window and a kid grabbing a copy of Crisis On Infinite Earths #1 is a nice callback to Flash Of Two Worlds and seems to imply that Barry has “retired”  to Earth-Prime or the new equivalent there of.

Waid also seems to hedge his bets as too how long this history will hold, especially spinning out of the events of K.O. which has already floated the idea of restarting the universe in order to defeat Darkseid, because history is always written by the winners (which could be the characters of the DCU or DC Comics editorial)