Who's Who Omnibus Vol. 2 Hardcover – December 13, 2022

I enjoyed Who’s Who in all its forms back in the day. I also enjoy the omnibus collections. I was pleased to hear that Who’s Who was getting the omnibus treatment. I bought the first volume which is great except for the cover…This review is for the second volume which has a wonderful cover. However, I have to echo a couple of things another reviewer has pointed to. Printing the omnibus in the same order that the packets came in makes for a very hard reference book to find what your looking for in. The original point was to make each packet more alluring by having a marquee character, team, etc. You were expected to take the packets apart and rearrange them in a binder alphabetically or in any other order that made sense to you. It’s just a big jumbled mess when reprinted like it is. Also, I think the Legion Who’s Who should have been placed in the second half of the omnibus and not the first.As to the criticism of the artwork, I have to agree with another reviewer. It simply isn’t as good as the original Who’s Who series. I thought the same when these leaflets were released in the 90s. I feel like the latter series was not handled with the same thought and care as the former and being able to literally have them side by side only confirms my original impression. DC would have been better off simply pulling images from their long history of comic books except…the 90s Who’s Who series felt like a strong attempt to push retconned characters and revisions of revisions down our throats. Each time DC has tried rebooting its universe since the original Crisis on Infinite Earths it’s gotten worse. That’s a review for another collection though. I bought this, it’s on my shelf beside the much superior volume 1. Except for the cover. The second collection’s cover is truly stunning.On a (somewhat) related note, I’d love to see DC give the omnibus treatment to Secret Origins and Legends of the Dark Knight. Maybe even combine the 80s Blue Beetle series with the Booster Gold run from the same time frame. Booster got a two volume HB treatment a while ago but I’d spend the money for the omnibus treatment of both series. Get Kevin Maguire to do a spiffy combo cover. Just a thought.

It's more than nostalgia, more than sentimental reasons... and I will grant you that the art, with the exception of this fine, fine cover and grand binding, despite the "order" of the texts inside, is slightly inferior to the very George Perez, Curt Swan, Jim Aparo, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez-driven first volume. And still we see the glory of Blue Beetle, Bronze Tiger, and Booster Gold during their golden era, and that is such a fine distinctly "DC" distilled reality. My Flash is Wally West, and Superman wore his Swanness and his Byrne recreation now strikes me as so appropriate to the period. Then there is the grandeur of Jerry Ordway. Ordway, Byrne, Kevin Maguire... a Grant Morrison in genesis... before comics jumped the shark and Buseik and Waid and company had to rein this enterprise back in... ah, the lack of a thoroughgoing darkness is so nice as well. Darkness is cheap. Nothing dates faster than that which imagines itself as cold, hard realism only to end on the tedious nothingness of "grim and gritty." I can only imagine Chris Hemsworth playing Blue Devil. A DC/Warners that had appropriately mined itself and its greatness.

Best for DC fans

Great collection! Nice cover! Terrific reproduction!The complaint I’ve seen about it not being alphabetical is unrealistic. This is an omnibus that does a great job of reproducing each issue. The individual issues are alphabetized.Buy it!

The omnibus came in excellent condition, wrapped in plastic & not one thing wrong with this delivery.

Great book, tons of information, learning a lot.

Unlike volume 1, this book is not arranged alphabetically. The later Who's Who was originally released with the pages hole-punched so that as each issue came out you could arrange the contents alphabetically yourself in a binder. When they reproduced the contents here instead of taking the time to arrange the pages alphabetically, they simply reprinted the books as they were. So to find anything you have to look in the index in the back. It's very inconvenient instead of being able to simply skim through to find what you want. It's really very poor planning and execution, especially for such an expensive item. Edit: Meant to mention how awful most of the artwork is, too. A lot of it borders on cartoonish and is just not very good.