Review by Frank Plowright

Considerable amounts of technobabble are used to explain, but the foundation of Generations is that time is disintegrating, and the pair of unlikely saviours gathering a team to prevent it are Kamandi and Skeets, Booster Gold’s former flying AI, now a glove unit.

As an event, Generations isn’t as interesting as it should be, part of which is because only a few pages are ever spent in any single place, and part of which is that the greatest appeal will be to those whose affinity for DC’s superheroes stretches back decades. Over the first half writers Dan Jurgens, Andy Schmidt and Robert Venditti gather the characters to whom it will fall to put things right. While there’s a novelty at seeing Kamandi, it’s his environment that provides his appeal, and removing him from it results in an anonymous innocent. He’s guided to assorted times to recruit the saviours, and there’s a joy in seeing some people as they once were, if only for a few pages. Batman is involved barely days after beginning his career, for instance, and because Doctor Light is almost criminally under-used any appearance from her is welcome.

A second joy is the high quality artistic line-up. The sample pages are from Ivan Reis and Paul Pelletier, both of whom draw slightly more than the remaining sixteen artists*, but while most pages broadly fall within the superhero spectrum all are by artists with years of experience behind them.

Once the heroes are gathered, they’re split into pairs and thrown into different eras, which, again, isn’t as interesting as it ought to be, with a great wasted opportunity being that Batman in Omac’s future is largely ordinary. By two-thirds of the way through the most interesting moments are the interludes showing the villain of the piece and his 1950s family. That feeds into an ending that briefly sparks before a cheesy epilogue returning everyone home.

Overall, it’s the lack of imagination that does for Generations. Spending less time gathering the assorted heroes would leave more space for other environments to be explored more fully, and would have possibly resulted in a better story. As it is, though, this is resolutely ordinary, with almost all the highlights artistic.

*Doug Braithwaite, Bernard Chang, Colleen Doran, Bryan Hitch, Dan Jurgens, Aaron Lopresti, Emanuela Lupacchino, Rags Morales, Kevin Nowlan, Yanick Paquette, Fernando Pasarin, Mike Perkins, Joe Prado, John Romita Jr and Marco Santucci.