New Comics & Collected Editions Releases: DC Comics – May 22 2024

It’s the 21st new comic book day of the new year! This post covers DC Comics May 22 2024 releases, which actually hit comic stores on Tuesday May 21 2024. Missed last week’s releases? Check out last week’s post covering DC Comics May 15 2024 new releases.

(DC is still releasing their comics on Tuesday until the start of July, but I think most folks think of Wednesday as release day, so that’s how I’m labelling my posts until then.)

This week in DC Comics: Waid’s World’s Finest, oversize Fables, House of Brainiac continues, JL vs Godzilla vs Kong concludes, Taylor’s final Nightwing arc begins, Joker’s best friend, Constantine’s road trip continues, many WebToons in physical format, and more!

This list includes every comic and digital comic out from DC this week, plus collected editions including omnibus, hardcover, paperback, and digest-sized formats. I recap and review every new single issue. Plus, for every new release, I’ll point you to the right guide within my Crushing Comics Guide to DC Comics to find out how to collect each character in full – and, if a guide is linked from this post, that means it is updated through the present day!

DC Comics May 22 2024 Collected Editions

Barkham Asylum
(2024 digest-size paperback, ISBN 978-1779505002 / digital)
This is a non-continuity OGN aimed at 8-12 year-old readers about Joker’s dog Jester being locked up in the pet equivalent of Arkham Asylum. Can this bad dog find a good streak, or is he doomed to heed the call of his villainous master? It sounds silly but super-cute! I might try to get it from the library for Kid Krisis.

Batman: Wayne Family Adventures Vol. 4
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1779526915)
Speaking of non-continuity Batman adventures, this volume continues to collect the hit non-continuity WebToon about the extended BatFamily. Y’all know it is an enduring mystery to me why anyone reads non-continuity stories, but I hear from many friends that this is a fun book!

Perhaps the popularity of this run is a part of why every single one of DC’s major heroes are currently leading their own families of characters of every age, gender, and sexual orientation (which is a big part of what I love about DC right now).

DC Pride: Love and Justice
(2024 hardcover, ISBN 978-1779525918 / digital)
This anthology of anthologies claims to collect all of DC Pride (2021) #1, plus selected (or all?) stories (presumably all from LGBTQA* characters) from Mysteries of Love in Space (2019) #1, New Year’s Evil (2019) #1, and Young Monsters in Love (2018) #1.

The real mystery in space is trying to figure how how and where DC collects all of these stories from single issue anthologies into collections, often years after the fact!

Batman: Black Mirror The Deluxe Edition
(2024 deluxe hardcover, ISBN 978-1779525895 / digital)
A brand new deluxe hardcover of Scott Snyder’s first major foray into Batman from just prior to Pre-Flashpoint with artists Jock and Francesco Francavilla, which is certainly a factor in what landed him his iconic New 52 Batman run!

Fables: The Deluxe Edition Book 16
(2024 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1779524027 / digital)
This collects the entirety of the return of the iconic fairytale book Fables for a 12-issue arc to celebrate its 20th anniversary – including a final in issue #162 that was released just two months ago!

Superman: Son of Kal-El Vol. 3: Battle for Gamorra
(2023 hardcover, ISBN 978-1779520074 / 2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1779524973 / digital)
This collects the concluding arc of the major storyarc of Tom Taylor’s initial run on Jon Kent (a final three issues nominally crossed over with Action Comics and are collected separately). This completes an arc of the story of Gamorra that Taylor began on his Suicide Squad back in 2019, as well as an arc about Jon’s relationship with pink-haired super-blogger Jay Nakamura.

This book got stronger as it went on for me, but I think the main story here is less the invasion of Gamorra and more Jon navigating his first adult relationship – so, if you haven’t been reading all along I’m not sure if it will resonate for you.

Vixen: NYC Vol. 5
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1779526939)
This collects more of the original, out-of-continuity WebToon focused on a young Vixen in college in New York.

World’s Finest: Teen Titans HC
(2024 hardcover, ISBN 978-1779525147 / digital)
See Guide to Titans, Teen Titans, & Young Justice. This Mark Waid & Emanuela Lupacchino mini-series capitalizes on the popularity of Waid writing the youthful cast of original Teen Titans in his second arc of his successful retcon comic, Batman / Superman: World’s Finest (2022).

Zatanna & The Ripper Vol. 3
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1779526953)
A third WebToons collection out this week! This out-of-continuity book follows a modern Zatanna as she’s sent back to late 1800s Landon in the time of Jack the Ripper.

Read on for a summary of all of the DC Comics May 22 2024 single issues.

DC Comics May 22 2024 Physical Comic Releases

Alan Scott: The Green Lantern (2023) #6 – Alas, I have not yet had a chance to dig into this mini-line of Golden Age heroes (along with Jay Garrick & Wesley Dodds), and Alan Scott is one of the Green Lantern Guides I have left to complete – so I have no intel to offer on this one!

Batman / Superman: World’s Finest (2022) #27 – The acclaimed, Eisner-nominated Mark Waid retcon series with hyper-clean art continues. This series offers one-shots and brief arcs set far enough in the past that you don’t need to know anything about DC to enjoy them.

I caught up with another two arcs of this book, taking me through the mid-teens. I… think it’s pretty bad? Like, not even in the “Krisis hates retcon stories” kind of way. I genuinely find a lot of it to be hard to read, which is wild to me because this is a book that I have not seen a single negative word about across all of social media for two years running.

The bit with Thunder Boy started out strong! But, Mark Waid’s scripts on this series feel increasingly jumbled to me. They feel like a litany of deep-cut references and action scenes that don’t quite track no matter how many times I go back through the panels to try to figure them out. I’m a fan of Dan Mora’s art, but the pages have felt cluttered and like there is no main thrust of action to follow.

It could be that I’m simply breaking up with Mark Waid as a fan. None of his DC books are working for me at a plot level. Sometimes a certain creator hones in on some specific narrative devices that don’t especially work for me, and then they’re lost to me as a reader while everyone else keeps on digging them.

I’ll continue catching up on this book as new issues come out, because I don’t want to dislike a widely acclaimed Mark Waid comic. But, so far it’s not clicking for me.

Catwoman (2018) #65 – See Guide to Catwoman. There’s something very curious about this Tini Howard run on a Selina Kyle as a thief who has nine lives to spend on her most-daring, never-before-attempted heists.

Whenever Howard is writing Selina’s interior monologue, I love it. I think she has the best internal voice we’ve had for Catwoman in over a decade. It just flows.

Yet, whenever Howard scripts conflict between Catwoman and another character, things start to fall apart. And then, at the end of the issue when we get to the question of if Selina has burned off another one of her nine lives, the issues get stuck in a loop of repetitive captions about dying or not dying or maybe dying twice. I feel like they’ve been copy and pasted for five issues now.

It’s strikes me as such an odd problem because Tini Howard was general excellent at keeping her plots rolling along while she wrote in the X-Office, even if they could sometimes feel decompressed.

I can’t tell if this is simply a style switchup from her, or an editorial mismatch, or some other problem. However, this Catwoman arc doesn’t feel like it’s by the same person as the one I trumpeted as one of the best new writers in the industry back in 2018.

I hope other people are enjoying this, and that it gets tighter as it rolls onward to another arc.

Green Lantern: War Journal (2023) #9 – This title stars John Stewart, and I still don’t have a Guide to John Stewart! It’s written by Phillip K. Johnson with a revelatory turn on artwork from Montos colored by Adriano Lucas, with lettering by Dave Sharpe.

I just binged this book over the course of the last week to catch up for this post. I loved the hell out of the first few issues. They felt like a revealing deep dive into the man John Stewart is in the present day, and why he remains potentially the most-fearsome of Earth’s Green Lanterns. However, I feel like PKJ turned this into the same story he’s written a few times now at DC. It got decompressed for a few issues as we built up a big enemy from across the universe. We brought back a woman’s years-old trauma of abuse to move the plot forward. And, then our hero has to go it alone against faceless hordes of dehumanized beasts.

If you haven’t read every single Big Two comic by Phillip K. Johnson, that probably isn’t going to bother you in the slightest. Hell, even if you have read them it might not bother you. This is a solid, intriguing Green Lantern title with a great supporting cast.

I simply get very weary of writers who lean on the same schtick for every ongoing. Part of why I loved the end run of PKJ’s work on Action Comics (1938) so much is that he leaned out of these repetitive themes and into simply writing about the joy of family. That’s where we began here, but now I feel like I’m reading something from PKD I already read before.

John Constantine, Hellblazer: Dead in America (2024) #5 – See Guide to Hellblazer. Y’all. Y’ALL. The first issue of this series is so fucking magnificent. I am at a loss for words.

This is an utterly perfect follow-up to the prior series by this same creative team – Simon Spurrier, Aaron Campbell, Jordie Bellaire, & Aditya Bidikar – which was one of my favorite comics of 2019 and 2010. You can easily pick this up cold without having read that series, because it is playing with different themes. However, it’s also paying off some major early Vertigo connections (like, 80s early) that might make it a slightly less impactful if you don’t know Hellblazer’s early history.

I was so shaken by the quality of the first two issues when I read them earlier today that I literally decided I cannot possibly binge this book just to catch-up for this post. It’s just too good. Those two issues are perfect 5-out-of-5 comics for me, which I don’t say all that often – and hardly ever about two consecutive issues from the same book.

Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong (2023) #7 (of 7) – See Guide to Justice League. I enjoy that DC took the Justice League off the board in their main continuity specifically to make use of them in these inter-company multi-IP crossovers. The League just doesn’t make sense in the DC Universe right now, and for them to exist there would require some write to make up League-calibre problems. Godzilla fits the bill, so they’re put to better use here than they would be in continuity.

Nightwing (2016) #114 – See Guide to Nightwing. We’re in the endgame now when it comes to Taylor’s Nightwing. This issue kicks off what professes to be a final five-issue arc to wrap up his incredible, Eisner-winning run with Bruno Redondo, Adriano Lucas, & Wes Abbott.

That means this isn’t exactly the best place to hop on board. Taylor has spent most of the past year tidying up his lingering plot threads. If you go back one arc you’ll get a Batman team-up that’s about resolving trauma, and if you go back two arcs it’s a fluffy story about pirates (given more context in last month’s incredibly clever retcon story in the 2024 Annual by Travis Moore).

While Taylor is an adept enough author to make it easy to pick up any of that cold, you’ll be lacking the joy of a big payoff if you don’t start earlier in his run – and, it’a delicious run of comics, so I highly recommend that you do.

Superman (2023) #14 – See Guide to Superman (Post-Crisis, 1987 to Present). This is chapter 4 of the “House of Brainiac” crossover through both Superman (2023) and Action Comics (1938) written entirely by Joshua Williamson. We’ve also seen some very lightweight tie-ins, but they are absolutely not required to understand this story! They happen very, very far off to the side of the main plot.

This is not only a major Brainiac story, but also a major Lobo story and yet another connection to the big Amanda Waller meta-story crossing through almost all of DC’s titles.

The prior chapter in Action Comics (1938) #1065 was a middle chapter focused on moving a lot of pieces around on the board. I’m interested to see what some of the new conflicts and character pairings produce here. I want to see Williamson keep up the amazing momentum he has created on Superman (2023) while also not letting up on the level of quality in Action Comics (1937) over the past year.

The Bat-Man: First Knight (2024) #3 (of 3) – The final issue of a Dan Jurgens & Mike Perkins Black Label series telling an early adventure of the “Bat-Man,” which doesn’t vibrate too badly against existing continuity despite standing on its own except for the fact that it’s set quite firmly in 1939!

Titans (2023) #11 – See Guide to Titans, Teen Titans, & Young Justice. I am now all caught up on Titans! Over the past week I read all of their Beast World event, which was phenomenal fun that looked extraordinary. Tom Taylor nailed all of his material, and the supporting books focusing on the hometowns of DC’s major heroes were surprisingly charming and well-coordinated for a series of one-shot event tie-ins.

However, the arc since the final twist of Beast World has been a slight letdown. Tom Taylor is doing a thing he does frustratingly well, which is slowing things down to string things along by putting just one tiny decompressed piece of plot into each issue.

In issue #10, Raven’s demon brother Trilogy tries to interfere with the Titans. They evacuate a crowd and Raven easily disposes him. That’s it. That’s the story. Yes, there are some longer-term subplots there about Beast Boy’s new mental health, Raven’s longer term plans, and Amanda Waller’s wheeling and dealing in the background. But, mostly it’s just about setting up and knocking down this inconsequential fight.

The thing that bugs me about Taylor in this mode is that he’s capable of writing incredibly dense plots, as he was doing in the issues before Beast World. I preferred those.

Luckily, Taylor continues to be paired with stellar art team’s on this book that help to smooth over the decompression with beautifully clean artwork. Lucas Meyer is a close match to Taylor’s partner on Nightwing, Bruno Redondo, especially with the same colorist on both books – the amazing Adriano Lucas!

There’s not a thing wrong with this book, but I think it was slightly stronger before the event. I’d definitely endorse starting from issue #1 and enjoying every single Beast World tie-in (except Waller Rising, that one sucked).

Wonder Woman (2023) #9 – See Guide to Wonder Woman. Last month, Tom King leaned hard into his villain forcing Diana into a traditional homemaker fantasy  to dominate and degrade her while reciting bible verses to her.

I mean, we really lingered on those scenes.

These “Diana trapped as a housewife” riffs have been done recently and done better (in both Milk Wars and Sensational Wonder Woman (2021) #1). It’s not this shockingly subversive thing to write Diana being stuck inside a subjugation fantasy again. Maybe if there was a single non-male creator working on this book that might come up at some point.

I never understand when writers are eager to pen Wonder Woman and then will do everything in their power to avoid writing her being Wonder Woman, instead preferring to define her by the men that surround her.