New Comics & Collected Editions Releases: DC Comics – May 29 2024

It’s the 22nd new comic book day of the new year! This post covers DC Comics May 29 2024 releases, which actually hit comic stores on Tuesday May 28 2024. Missed last week’s releases? Check out last week’s post covering DC Comics May 22 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: The Knight and Danger street collected, DC Pride, Brave Nightwing & Bold Deadman, Ram V’s Detective Comics crescendo, Spurrier’s deeply weird Flash, Power Girl and Crush, Green Arrow’s archer-off, 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 29 2024 Collected Editions

Batman: The Knight
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1779525079 / digital)
See Guide to Batman (Post-Crisis, 1987 – Present). This collects all 10 issues of Chip Zdarsky’s “Year One” style of prelude story that set up many of themes of his ongoing run on the Batman flagship title.

Danger Street Vol. 2
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1779524959 / digital)
This is the first I’m hearing of this Black Label prestige book from Tom King, Jorge Fornés, Dave Stewart, and Clayton Cowles, which exists out of continuity and focuses on the journeys of several unlikely characters towards joining the Justice League.

Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1779525185 / digital)
The paperback collection of DC’s 2022 mega-event, Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths. Much of the Dawn of DC status quo emerges from this event, although you don’t need to read it to understand what is currently happening in the DC Universe. This paperback professes to collect only issued #1-7, but a previous hardcover also included issue #0 and Justice League (2018) #75.

DC Pride: Better Together [AKA “Brave and Bold”]
(2024 hardcover, ISBN 978-1779525062 / digital)
This hardcover collects Collects the DC Pride (2023) #1 Pride month special along with exclusively collecting the Alan Scott story from DC Pride: Through the Years (2023) #1 – which was mostly reprints. It also add the first appearance of of Circuit Breaker from In Lazarus Planet: Dark Fate (2023) #1, which has been collected elsewhere).

Read on for a summary of all of the DC Comics May 29 2024 single issues.

DC Comics May 29 2024 Physical Comic Releases

Batman: Dark Age (2024) #3 – I’ve read nothing but rapturous reception for this Mark Russell, Michael Allred, and Laura Allred non-continuity series exploring an alternate history of Batman.

(Unfortunately, there is no force on this planet compelling enough to get me to prioritize reading an out-of-continuity Batman book, and that goes double for one written by Russell 😂)

Batman: The Brave and the Bold (2023) #13 – Y’all, I am high-key OBSESSED with this massive monthly anthology book now that caught up with it!

I shouldn’t be surprised. I was a big fan of its predecessor, Batman: Urban Legends (2021). I can take or leave the fuzzy-continuity Batman stories that tend to lead these books, but I love the space they give to the rest of Gotham to enjoy mini-series-length stories in a book that will sell more copies purely because it is fronted with Batman.

At 70 pages per issue, we usually get a pair of stories that are as long as standalone single issues, plus a pair of additional substantial back-ups. The past year of this title has included blockbuster stories for Stormwatch, Wild Dog, Emilia Harcourt, Artemis, and even Superman! Plus, the Batman A-stories have been top-notch, including a Year One story from Tom King & Mitch Gerads, an all-time-great story by Guillem March, and a recently wrapped Gotham Academy tale from Karl Kerschl.

The great thing about the rotating creators and cast on this title is also its weak spot: I can’t promise you this issue will be great. It will be the first issue not fronted by Batman, as Nightwing and Deadman take the A-story, backed with Booster Gold and the resolution of the Artemis tale by Delilah Dawson that ties into Tom King’s Wonder Woman. However, I highly recommend checking out some past issues, especially the start of the Tom King and Stormwatch stories in issues #1-2 and the March three-parter in the lead of issues #6-8.

DC Pride 2024 (2024) #1 – DC has really earned this celebratory Pride one-shot by keeping their LGBTQA* characters front-and-center throughout the entire year of publishing (unlike Marvel; see yesterday’s post for more on that).

This 100+ page anthology issue includes stories from Dreamer, Poison Ivy, Jon Kent & The Ray, Natasha Irons, Jackson Hyde, plus excerpts from an upcoming YA Harley/Ivy book plus an autobiographic story from legendary creator Phil Jimenez.

Detective Comics (1937) #1085 – See Guide to Detective Comics (Post-Crisis, 1987 – Present). We’re in the endgame now – Act III of Ram V’s multi-year mega arc about the soul of the city of Gotham.

I finally caught all the way up on this book over the past two weeks of DC poll-making and Batman omni-reading. Now that I’m up to present, I have mixed feelings on the run.

Ram V’s prelude material at the start of his run was brilliant. He set up so many interesting themes about the power of music, the nature of reality, and the established network of power in Gotham (and beneath it). He deftly created a whole new faction of players that related deeply to existing continuity without fundamentally breaking anything that came before.

It really felt as though we were building up to an all-time great run that would echo some of the best themes of Bane in Knightfall and No Man’s Land while doing something operatically huge. The point would not to be to break Batman, but break Gotham by removing Batman and then heal the wound entirely in his absense so that he no longer had a place there.

(Also, intriguingly, it tied in to a number of old-school WildStorm themes from WildCats and The Authority, though that might be by coincidence.)

Some people say they found it too slow. I never found it slow, so much as I tired of the same themes getting repeated. To me it felt like this potentially operatic run got caught up in a fugue – both in the musical sense and the the psychiatric meaning. It feels like the entire book as centered on the same internal and external fights for Batman over and over again for the past year.

Now, we’re in an endgame that fast forwarded past all of the potentially juicy material of Batman realizing that Gotham moved on without him. We only briefly dealt with the dystopian paradise that would result. Instead, we had a arc-long dream sequence in the desert and now Batman is back to kick some ass.

In a way, that makes last issue a great place to jump onto this run – because all of that build-up just doesn’t feel all that essential. Yet, even if this rallies to a thrilling crescendo, it’s disappointing to see such a lengthy run with such an audaciously great start flub the entire middle section.

Flash (2023) #9 – See Guide to Flash. Simon Spurrier continues to do a bang-up job of keeping the entire Flash family in play on this book as he balances two very separate stories for Barry Allen and Wally West that introduce just as much internal conflict as external conflict.

For Barry, this is a story about feeling disconnected from heroism – both in terms of the Speed Force and in terms of his personal connections to the Flash family. People thought they were just giving him space, but it has made him feel like an outsider who has been relegated to an “old man” role because he’s not quite as fast as Wally. Even though he’s a strategic genius, his solutions seem to be making everything else.

On the other hand, Wally is too connected to his heroism – and to the Speed Force. It’s causing fractures both with his loved ones and with reality!

In between those two narratives sit the many members of the Flash family, specially Iris, Linda, and Wally’s kids. They all feel like they have agency in how they’re responding to the personal troubles of their two patriarchs. For me, that’s a big part of what gives this book life.

Early on in my catchup on this title I said I was thankful that Spurrier had dreamt up something so weird that wasn’t about the Speed Force. Well, the joke is on me, because this is so very much about the Speed Force. I tend to tune out from those stories because it feels so recursive. Is speed the only thing Flash comics can be about now? However, Spurrier is keeping me engaged because this isn’t just about one man messing with physics that are far beyond his knowledge or control – it’s about how an entire extended family is affected by that.

Green Arrow (2023) #12 – See Guide to Green Arrow. Last month, this title braided together all of its major plot lines by having the entire Arrow family come together on a mission that connected Ollie to Amanda Waller, which subsequently send him after the villain directly responsible for the dram of the opening arc of this title.

I think if you’re looking to jump on board this book it’s best to start from issue #1, not because that early story continuity is so important but because the opening arc was stronger than the second one.

Joshua Williamson has a tendency to really lean into decompression to slow his stories down once they get rolling. I’m definitely feeling that over the course of the last three issues, compared to what came before. It’s still a good book, but I’m starting to ask, “What actually happened in that?” when I finish an issue.

Harley Quinn (2021) #40 – See Guide to Harley Quinn. Last issue kicked off Harley’s new gig as a professional consultant to other villains, with some decent hijinks with minor league villain Maximillian Zeus. However, I had much more a fun withlast month’s annual by Squirrel Girl artist Erica Henderson

I’m a fan of Howard as a writer, but I’m not sure she’s ever shown off irreverence and joke density that she’s attempting on this Harley title on any other run. That’s not to say that writers shouldn’t try new and different things, but based on both my read and overall fan reaction I’m not sure this new thing is 100% working. That’s especially true in comparison to Henderson’s annual (and her back-up stories), which were full of more absurdity and jokes than the main run.

For me, part of the issue is that this book is having trouble deciding what kind of funny it should be. Conner & Palmiotti thrived on quick, often off-color jokes. Sam Humphries had more of a sitcom vibe, with Harley’s fourth-wall breaking helping to mock the silly setups with the audience. Stephanie Phillips leans more into baking absurdity into the stories and situations themselves, though she also kept up Harley’s non-stop commentary.

I can’t quite figure out where Howard’s take exists on that spectrum. Howard is much more talent at slightly-transgressive, slightly-of-kilter darkness than outright silliness. That vibe would actually be pretty fitting for Harley, but instead we’re getting a bubblegum book full of easy jokes that often feels insubstantial.

This is an easy book to pick up and read with no foreknowledge of continuity, and maybe that’s Tini Howard’s biggest goal for it. If so: mission accomplished. I’ve loved a lot of Tini Howard comics in the past, so I’m curious to see if this resolves to something funnier or more engaging.

Power Girl (2023) #9 – I know long-time Power Girl fans have felt like this book isn’t the hero they know and love, but as a reader who has never encountered her before I was on board with this simplification of her as the Super-Family’s somewhat-sassy, somewhat self-depricating prodigal sister. However, I don’t think Leah Williams has found the right plot to show that off – certainly, it wasn’t the silly fairytale arc that wrapped up in issue #7.

Last month’s issue #8 steered out of that into something more grounded with Power Girl crossing paths with Lobo’s daughter Crush on the sidelines of the “House of Brainiac” event. I looooove Crush from Adam Glass’s run on Teen Titans (2016) as well as Mariko Tamaki’s mini-series with her, so I was very excited for the issue!

It was… fine. It feels like we haven’t gotten anyway in eight issues of Power Girl’s characterization beyond her being a sadsack obsessed with the Super-Family. A skating scene with her roommate slash partner in supeheroism Omen was funny but it felt like filler.

Now that issue #8 set up the Crush plot, I’m really hoping Williams can score a solid hit in this issue. She’s got a tie-in to a popular Superman crossover event and absolutely stunning art from Eduardo Pansica with inks by Júlio Ferreira and colors from Romulo Fajardo Jr. Plus, Crush is exactly the sort of teenage dirtbag character Williams excels at writing! If she can’t find a way to light a fire this week I think I might be ready to call this title a failure for being too mild.

The Penguin (2023) #10 (of 12) – See Guide to Batman (Post-Crisis, 1987 – Present) – I’ll explain why in a moment!.

Tom King’s series continues. This is very much in-continuity, as it follows up on a change to Penguin’s status quo early in Chip Zdarsky’s run in Batman (2016) #125-127. King doesn’t often write these maxi-series explicitly in-continuity in a way that ties in with other titles, so that makes this one particularly interesting!

Primer (2024) #3 – DC continues the serialization of a 2020 graphic novel about a young girl with colorful painting superpowers.