Book Report: Who’s Who Omnibus Vol 2

Here is a book report for Who’s Who Omnibus Volume 2. I bought this 2022 book on sale for nearly half off the original $150 retail price during the Prime Day sale.

Just a personal back story. In 1990, after scraping together $59, I had asked my parents to write a check for a subscription to Who’s Who in the DC Universe. You have to understand that I was around 14 years old and had no means of income, other than saving what little cash allowance I got. So, $59 was a small fortunate for me.

As part of paying up front, I was rewarded with a free George Perez binder (which, by the way, was not big enough to store all the Who’s Who pages) and the first four issues.

I was already a big fan of the original Who’s Who comic book, so I was expecting more or less the same… but, because of the nature of the loose-leaf format each character now has two pages. One side had a pinup of the character, and the back has a full page of the character’s data. Unfortunately, not every character deserves a full page of text… so it often felt like the writers had to leave a lot of empty spaces or was just writing fluff. I think the worst entry was for Death, where the entire page just had something like “Wait until you meet her.”

The oversized gloss-ish paper does look good in print, but you can easily tear the pages (especially near the three-holes when you tug it in the binder).

After my subscription ended, I bought the two additional updates. I never knew about the second binder, featuring Brian Bolland’s art, and by that time, it was nearly impossible to find the second binder for a decent price.

I love my Who’s Who, but after getting Who’s Who Omnibus Volume 2, I realized it was really not an upgrade to the original loose-leaf format. Despite the fact that the Omnibus format is slightly larger than standard comic book size, it was still smaller than loose-leaf… and the colors and print does not look as good as the original. The other problem is that you must use the index in the Omnibus to look up any character. With loose-leaf, you can arrange your binder however you like… by alphabetical order, or by color-coding… it’s up to you.

Not all is lost, however. Who’s Who Omnibus Volume 2 reprints the entire Who’s Who in the Legion of Super-Heroes seven issues. My personal original copies look terrible as the printing press smeared ink and the very cheap newsprint paper – you can see ink bleed through from the back of the page. I’m no fan of newsprint paper, so it was a joy to finally see HD and remastered art and colors of the Legion pages. It’s the Legion pages that made purchasing the Omnibus worth it for me.

I think $150 is way too much money, even though it’s justified for being one of my largest books, clocking in at 1,216 pages. To me, they could have split up the Legion and sold that separately… maybe combine that with Who’s Who in Star Trek (but I suspect due to licensing they couldn’t reprint that).

I think the other thing is that these Who’s Who books may probably never be reprinted again, due to the enormous artist royalties and licensing agreements. DC tried to reprint Who’s Who in 2007, but cancelled it due to art licensing. I was surprised they were able to pull this off with the two Omnibuses that they did eventually release in 2021 and 2022.

NOTE: Due to licensing, Who’s Who in the Impact! Universe are not reprinted in this volume.

Bonus – here is a review of the original Who’s Who Omnibus Volume 1:

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