DC Round-Up: The DC PRIDE 2025 #1 one-shot tells an excellent complete story

4 days ago 7

THIS WEEK: The DC Pride 2025 #1 one-shot is the best Pride Month issue yet, using a mosaic of short pieces to tell one large story. Plus, Batgirl #8 is another great issue of a series you should absolutely be reading.

Note: the review below contains spoilers. If you want a quick, spoiler-free buy/pass recommendation on the comics in question, check out the bottom of the article for our final verdict.

DC Pride 2025 #1

Writers: Vita Ayala, Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Maya Houston, Sam Maggs, Tim Sheridan, Josh Trujillo, and Jenny Blake
Artists: Don Aguillo, Vincent Cecil, Derek Charm, A.L. Kaplan, Guilio Macaione, Alex Moore, Skylar Patridge, Emilio Pilliu, Max Sarin, Phillip Sevy, and Sara Soler
Colorists: Don Aguillo, Eren Angiolini, Jordie Bellaire, Vincent Cecil, Derek Charm, Triona Farrell, A.L. Kaplan, Marissa Louise, Giulio Macaione, and Alex Moore
Letterers: Aditya Bidikar, Frank Cvetkovic, Lucas Gattoni, Ariana Maher, Morgan Martinez, and Jodie Troutman

DC Comics’ annual Pride anthology has been excellent for years now. No shade against other Big 2 comics anthologies, but many of them tend to be a patchwork of short stories around a loose shared theme, a holiday, or a season, or some kind of shared colors. But a few years back DC started to make the stories in their Pride issue matter toward shared universe continuity.

Essentially, stories that were in the Pride issue started to consistently have ramifications for the wider DC Comics superhero line moving forward. Plot threads in the Pride book would be picked up in other series. Or a new character might debut. These things sound small, but to dedicated superhero comics fans, they are the things that give individual issues weight. And it was a nice way to make the Pride issue essential reading for those of us who do our best to keep up with all of the DC Universe. It also felt to me like the publisher was making a larger commitment to the characters in their Pride issue as well as the creators who worked on it and the wider LGBTQ+ community. The anthology would celebrate the month, sure, but the then the stories that began there would continue throughout the year. It wasn’t just limited to June.

Well, this year’s DC Pride 2025 #1 has evolved past that. The 90+ page book does feature a large set of creators telling stories with different LGBTQ+ characters from throughout DC Comics, both old and new. And it still factors into shared continuity, but in addition, every story in this one-shot advances a cohesive larger shared narrative. It’s not just a collection of stories. It’s a mosaic that paints a bigger whole, using a mystery to develop a nice flow before the stories and a reason to keep going immediately after an individual piece ends.

That central mystery is around a wall (see above) in a speakeasy-turned-bar-turned community space in Gotham City. The wall is a great connector between new characters and old, between generations of DC heroes, and it lets the story of the issue fold in plot threads from other books, perhaps most prominently Alan Scott: Green Lantern. But it’s not all recent plot points either. There’s a Renee Montoya story, for example, that grapples with some of the emotional fallout of the now classic ’00s series, Gotham Central. As a reader of a certain age, I certainly appreciated that.

But in addition to having that compelling overarching narrative, the individual stories in this book find ways to have their own personalities, which creates nice variety. Some of them have jokes for true DC Comics sickos who read every series (what was wrong with Titans Academy? too much Red X, or maybe not enough — depends who you ask), and there’s some really poignant character beats around real world issues, including trans military service members.

As an independent reading experience, I found the DC Pride 2025 #1 anthology to be the most engrossing entry in this annual series yet, drawing me in as it did with the larger mystery that spanned so many years. And off the page, it’s just amazing to watch this annual anthology series grow and develop and evolve. This issue does not silo off its stories like so many other anthologies do, and it feels like a true feat of editorial leadership and planning. I think the end effect is that DC Pride 2025 #1 feels like an important and organic part of the ongoing DCU narrative, and it’s nice to see the publisher committing to Pride in this way.

Verdict: BUY

The Round-Up

Are you all reading Batgirl? You really ought to be reading Batgirl. This week’s Batgirl #8 is essentially a flashback issue, but the art and scripting are both so well-done. It’s the type of flashback where you might get so into the story, that you forget it’s not the main narrative. I know I did. But overall, I just feel like this Batgirl book has been such a great set of superhero comics, from the action-heavy debut to the larger threads it’s started to explore ever since. As I said at the top…if you’re not reading Batgirl, it bears repeating — you really ought to be reading Batgirl. Batgirl #8 is from the creative team of writer Tate Brombal, artist Isaac Goodhart, colorist Mike Spicer, and letterer Tom Napolitano.
Finally, I don’t think I’ve had a chance to talk about Justice League: The Atom Project in this space before, but it wraps up this week with its sixth issue. For my money, this book is the exact type of thing a superhero publisher should be doing when they work as hard as DC has to create a new shared universe status quo, with the return of the satellite and the giant Justice League United Team. It uses that status quo — as well as the fallout from the publisher’s most recent mega event, Absolute Power — to spotlight oft-neglected characters in interesting ways. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and, of course, it doesn’t hurt that the series featured one of my favorite artists, Mike Perkins, who was colored throughout by Adriano Lucas. The series was written by the team of Ryan Parrott and John Ridley, with letters by Wes Abbott.