The folks at Newsarama revealed the nature of DC Comics’ September event for 2014: each of their ongoing series will flash forward 5 years into the future and correspond with the “New 52 – Future’s End” weekly ongoing title. DC Comics has been using a September event to celebrate the anniversary of the ‘New 52’ which began in August/September of 2011. 2012 was a month with all “#0” issues, while 2013 was the Multiversity-maligned, but financially successful ‘Villains Month’.
It was also revealed that DC Comics would be launching an additional weekly series in October 2014. At present, this third weekly is untitled, but the concept is that it will be a DCU-spanning event that will seed events that we’ll end up seeing in the ‘Five Years Later’ timeline. Or won’t see, if you decide not to invest in such a wallet-busting undertaking.
The third weekly will sit alongside the weekly “Batman Eternal” and “New 52 – Future’s End” titles that will already have been running. The 3 weekly series will run concurrently for an unspecified length of time.
As much as we’ve questioned DC Comics over the past couple years, I continue to be intrigued by the idea of a series of weekly events to follow. First of all, it’s tough to argue against 4 low-selling titles vs. 4 monthly books from a weekly series each month. You’d have to think that fans would be more likely to go all-in on a weekly, than to pick from the scraps of to-be-canceled titles. On the other hand, that requires a decision to invest in a lot of books or to ignore it completely.
Also, whether they’ll do it or not, weekly titles could be a faster road to fixing or undoing the mistakes they’ve made in the past few years. The weekly series ’52’ informed a lot of the direction for the DCU and had a big effect on the tone of the other books being released around it. Or this could all just be a giant clustercuss. Stay tuned to Multiversity Comics to find out which.
