52 is, as you might know, an 52-part series filling in a year in the DC universe where Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are all gone. It draws on DC's vast tapestry of characters and concepts. 52: The Companion helps illuminate those backstories, making it useful preparatory reading for 52: here we see Steel's relationship with his daughter, Elongated Man solving a mystery, Booster Gold telling Blue Beetle his origin, Rip Hunter on a mission through time, Renee Montoya dealing with the death of her partner, the Question standing up for his principles, Animal Man on a trip to Paris with his wife, Adam Strange battling a threat to the planet Rann, the deaths of the Metal Men and the breakdown of their creator, and Captain Marvel learning the tragic history of Black Adam.

I'm about halfway through 52 now, and I can tell that some are directly relevant to it (Will Magnus's breakdown, Black Adam's past, Renee's emotional state, Booster's origin), while others are more general, just letting us see those heroes in action in younger days (Steel, Elongated Man, Rip Hunter, Adam Strange, the Question, Animal Man). But I find myself making note of things I learned from them frequently, so the time reading them was well spent. Also appreciated is the commentary from Mark Waid on why the characters were picked for 52, their place in DC history, and why the stories were picked for this volume. (Isn't Mark the greatest at continuity? It always feels like a useful foundation in his hands, never a prison.)

They're not all great stories, but most of them are good, and they reveal the breadth of what the DC universe has to offer at its best.

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This companion book offers the back stories of 10 characters featured in the 52 series – Steel, Ralph Dibny, Booster Gold, Rip Hunter, Renee Montoya, Vic Savage/The Question, Animal Man, Adam Strange, Dr. Will Magnus, and Black Adam. I had initially picked up this book when I picked up the 52 series, thinking that these would be further continuations of these characters’ stories after 52 ended - a sort of where-are-they-now type collection. Instead, this book simply recycles old comics ranging from 1962 to 2006 that featured these characters before. It's good to have them all in one place, but it makes me think it would have made more sense for me to read this before reading the 52 series instead of after, and I wish I had realized that earlier.

Of particular interest to 52 readers is that this companion begins each chapter with an introduction by Mark Waid (one of 52’s authors) describing a bit of background or context about the character and occasionally some rationale why that character fit into the world of 52. The introductions also feature a side-by-side look of the character in 52 versus the look they had in the comic included in this book (often from several decades earlier).

Most of the stories collected in this book were just so-so to me, with a fair amount of cheesiness to the older stories by the way of exclamations like “golly!” and “jeepers!” as well as far too much exposition from the characters in the midst of battle or other tricky situations. The choice for the story included about John Henry Irons (aka Steel) was a particularly odd one as it did not shed much light on his background and it ended on an unresolved cliffhanger. But, there were a handful of particular good stories in this collection – namely, the ones concerning Booster Gold’s background and how he ended up in the present day from the 25th century, Vic Savage as the Question with his unmovable morals despite attacks on his character, and the story of Dr. Will Magnus’s mental breakdown and his subsequent annihilation of his own creations, the Metal Men.

Overall, the collection was interesting to someone like me who doesn’t have the entire history of the DC universe memorized and could use the background on some of the 52 characters, but as it does not actually add anything new to the world of comics, I doubt many comics readers would have much use for it. ( )