Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 3: DC Comics

Here's the third post in my series examining my reading habits over the past twenty years. This one tackles DC Comics. (That is to say, comics and other books set in the DC universe, and nonfiction about it; I'm not counting other comic books published by DC here.)

I almost did all comics in one post, but I decided my stats broke out enough different DC subseries into their own in order to justify a post just for DC. (My usual rule is to break out a series if I read three or more installments of it, in more than one batch.)

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
Crisis Crossovers	1	3	36½	11	0	51½	1.8%
Batman	1½	4	19⅓	17½	1	43	1.5%
The Sandman	0	27	9	4	1	41	1.4%
Superman	3½	17	5⅓	3½	½	29⅚	1.0%
Legion of Super-Heroes	0	0	8	13½	6	27½	0.9%
Green Arrow	0	21½	3	1	0	25½	0.9%
Birds of Prey	0	0	15	5	0	20	0.7%
Justice Society	0	1	3	0	10	14	0.5%
Manhunter	0	0	0	5	0	5	0.2%
Blue Beetle	0	0	0	3	0	3	0.1%
The Atom	0	0	0	3	0	3	0.1%
Supergirl	0	0	0	2	1	3	0.1%
Other DC Universe	4	20½	59⅓	34½	12½	129⅚	4.4%
TOTAL	10	94	159	102	31	395½	13.5%
PCT	1.8%	15.4%	23.6%	16.6%	6.4%	13.5%

Sorry for all the fractions. You can thank things like Superman/Batman, Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman, and Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes.

When I was in grad school, I used to request three comic book collections per month from interlibrary loan, like clockwork on the 1st, 11th, and 21st of each month. This was enough to keep me moving steadily, but not so much that it dominated my reading... too much, anyway. These were mostly, though not entirely, DC comics. This would have been something like 2009 to 2017, and indeed, those are the peak months for DC in my reading.

As you can see, I read a few different things in those days:

• Crisis Crossovers: I read all (as of then, anyway) DC's "Crisis" crossovers, including tie-ins: Crisis on Multiple Earths, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis. I also would have read some stuff not branded as "Crisis" specifically, but still universe-shattering crossovers; those would just be lumped into the "other DC universe" at the bottom.
• Batman: I read a bunch of "early days" of Batman stuff, working my way from Batman: Year One all the way to Batman: Year 100!
• The Sandman: I started with Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, but then moved on to many tie-ins and spin-offs, like Sandman Mystery Theatre and The Sandman Presents, as well as some of the pre-Gaiman Sandman stuff. Like with Crisis above, "The Sandman" statistic only counts stuff explicitly branded as Sandman; the spin-offs The Dreaming or Dead Boy Detectives, for example, would go under "other DC universe."
• Legion of Super-Heroes: I actually didn't get any Legion comics from ILL... because those I buy! Every six months I read one of my Legion collections. This makes the Legion the only one that really persists beyond when I left UConn in 2017.
• Green Arrow was actually the first superhero I read methodically via ILL. After my friend James loaned me the two Kevin Smith collections, I just kept going. At a certain point I had read every single post-Crisis pre-Flashpoint Green Arrow trade paperback, but I think they've collected some of Mike Grell's stuff since.
• Birds of Prey: Green Arrow introduced me to Black Canary and made me a fan for life, so after finishing with him, I moved on to her, including her co-starring role in this series.
• Justice Society is the DC series other than Legion I've read recently. I am mostly reading it in single issues, but I have picked up a few collections over the past few years.

These days, I read much less DC, and I am trying to buy much less, too, though there are some of their omnibus lines I try to keep up with. I do read an issue of some comic book every morning over breakfast, but since most of those aren't actually "books" per se, they don't get captured by my reading statistics. So having peaked at 2 DC comic collections per month, I'm now down to one every two months.