This week Wednesday DC Comics will relaunch its entire universe, relatively speaking, with the release of Justice League #01, which will give us the first real glimpse of the new DCNU.

But what about the current and old DC Universe? How do we say good bye to that? Well, with some of these books…painfully.

Lets start with the worst cause some of these titles aren’t pretty.

Superman #714

The infamous “Grounded” storyline. I actually had some hopes for this. As a fan of Straczynski I thought he might be able to pull off a story of Superman traveling the country of a bit of a journey within himself at the same time. Fans and DC editors did not and he got yanked off a month or two into it. And it kept going anyway.

It wraps up painfully. Its been a total waste of pages and money the last few months and this is one book that will be better for the reboot/relaunch. Just forget this one existed.

Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors #13

Inherently there is nothing wrong with this book. We get a team up with Batman and Guy Gardner. Remember them? How Batman once punched out Guy with one punch and Guy kinda thinks Batman is a pain in the ass?

Yeah its a fine throw away issue, nothing great nothing horrible, but definitely a weird note to end a book which won’t exist after this issue. If you like Green Lantern and have been saying to yourself you should pick up this title while you can still find it, skip it. You didn’t miss anything unless you wanted the War of The Green Lantern tie in books. Its a forgettable foot note at this point.

The Flashpoint Tie Ins:

I’m not gonna bash these too hard. Tie ins are always throw away books. They have no real consequences. And in the case of alternate reality tie ins these usually especially don’t count or have consequences.

For the most part all the books work in that they give you more back story for the universe, let you understand the surrounding players actions and motivations outside of the main Flashpoint story, and fill in any significant blanks you may have on this current world. But unless DC plans to return to it, or bring some of these characters over, its all gonna change and be wiped from the records so to speak.

The Lois Lane Resistance series is good, even though it goes for the juglar by killing off the title character to show that even in an alternate reality the Lois and Clark relationship is still special.

The Hal Jordan series goes out of its way, once again like some many Green Lantern books, to paint Hal as this ultimate hero even though many times we still get a depiction of Hal as a total ass.

The Kid Flash series suffers the same problem as its main job is to paint Impulse’s sacrifice in this universe as the way to make Barry Allen the ultimate Flash and bring him the power he needs to fix everything, although now I wonder if the new Impulse/Kid Flash in the Teen Titans series coming couldn’t be a newly de-aged, unmarried Wally West and not Bart Allen but time will tell.

While I feel like I bashed some of these without going into a lot of specifics my main point is this. If your interested in the DCNU, read that, skip these books. You didn’t miss anything you need to know to enjoy it and you probably won’t have to refer back to it ever again. And if you were already collecting these books, what did you think? I’d love to hear it. I was fairly disappointed and hope that the new DCNU definitely ups the ante more than these finales did.