If you want to understand DC Comics — really understand it — you need to go back to a time before cinematic universes, before billion-dollar box office numbers, before Batfleck and Bat-Nipples, even before Adam West did the Batusi.
If Chapter 1 was all about DC inventing superheroes and shaping the cultural imagination of the 1930s and 40s, then Chapter 2 is about something far less glamorous
If the Golden Age was DC’s birth…
And the Silver Age was DC’s reinvention…
Then the corporate era is DC’s long adulthood
If Marvel is the studio of messy human flaws,
DC is the studio of cosmic housekeeping.
If the comics are where DC discovered mythology,
and the crises are where DC learned the fine art of rebooting reality,
then the movies are where DC discovered…
If DC’s cinematic journey were a comic book storyline, we’d be at the issue where the narrator solemnly intones:
“Previously… in the DC Universe.”