Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsLots of typos, information could be more detailed
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 16, 2022
There were a lot of typos and errors in the text, considering that this is currently DC Comic's official encyclopedia. It felt a bit unprofessional, and honestly kind of like they were saying "f u" to the readers. A bit disappointed, as I haven't noticed this kind of thing happening in Marvel products.
In addition, I felt like there could be more information about each character, especially in the full page characters. Older encyclopedias have a lot more information than this one, although that may be due to restructuring/removing a lot of previous events due the most recent reboot (since the authors probably have no idea what is canon anymore).
There is some repetitive information in the encyclopedia. It may have been better to organize the encyclopedia differently by character associations (like batman and all his villains together) rather than alphabetical order to decrease the amount of repetition.
Conversely, you'll notice that some characters don't have information that should have been under their sections, like the Spectre entry doesn't list his "trying to eradicate all magic" event, even though it is referenced through other characters randomly in this book. This situation tends to occur frequently.
I also feel like they could have skipped adding information from previous iterations and reboots, since they are generally irrelevant to the new continuity, and tend to create confusion. It honestly isn't useful to know what a character was like in comics 80 years ago, and is barely considered a "fun" fact. At most, it would be helpful to point out the immediate changes due to the most recent reboot. If people want to know about the characters from previous versions, they can always purchase the previous encyclopedias from earlier years.
It would have been best to provide the most up-to-date and full biography of the characters. Instead, it only provides a brief origin story and some of the most recent events of the character since the last reboot. The book does do this properly for many minor characters but not as much for major characters. Instead, it feels like Wikipedia and other fan sites did it better. Rather than an encyclopedia, it feels like an intro to random characters.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I would have preferred it if they made this into 3 or 4 encyclopedia volumes (or however many needed) and expanded on all of the characters with photos and story line information, rather than 1 volume with the generic tidbits. This would have allowed more space for lots of the characters, and allowed room to expand on the roll call characters as well.
When you read the encyclopedia and see all of the timelines, reboots, teams, and characters that were forced to join the main world instead of having their own separate comic worlds (or discarded like some should have been), it shows how convoluted DC Comics has really become. I can't tell if the information is the most recent in the newest era, or if this information is from a previous era like the new 52, but didn't change in the reality altering events. Maybe the company needs to rethink their strategy here because piecing how everything and everyone fits together is truly difficult and headache inducing.
Other than all of these criticisms, the encyclopedia isn't bad and a decent read.
