The next age of DC begins this week with the publication of the hotly-anticipated DC All In Special – a 64-page flipbook-style comic that tells two connected stories that set up the future of both the core DCU and the newly-revealed Absolute Universe. In a recent roundtable discussion with writer Scott Snyder and artist Wes Craig, the former revealed that one of the motivations for the high profile relaunch was to confront the notion of superhero fatigue that has been the subject of much media and online chatter over the last couple of years by personifying it in one of the publisher's most infamous villains.
Asked how the creative team approached the special, Snyder said, "We were trying to make like a thesis statement about what the whole initiative stood for... We began with 'what do we want to say?' What is this moment about for us? And it really felt like in the cultural zeitgeist, there was this whole conversation about how superheroes were over, or how superheroes were in a malaise because the cinematic universes had peaked or were going to start over soon. There were all these kind of autopsies in the Times and in the Wall Street Journal and all these places. So for us what we wanted to do was an initiative that reminded people that not only are these heroes alive and well in comics, but they're living some of their most epic stories, and the comics is where they can also be reborn."
Key to this approach was how the special reinvents perennial DC baddy Darkseid.
"We wanted to tell a story that would create a villain, or elevate one of our villains to a degree where he could stand in for that voice that we all hear sometimes, about how these stories are finished, how these stories should have ended a long time ago, how the whole medium is done," explained Snyder. "And then the other side [of the flipbook] we wanted to tell a story where we create a challenge for the heroes to think bigger, and to expand not just their physical roster, but to expand the way that they approach their own mission to include worlds and heroes that they might not otherwise in order to face this new challenge. And so it came from that. It came from this kind of idea that we wanted to say something through the initiative that was about the conversation being had in comics."
In the 'Alpha' half of the comic the newly reformed Justice League unite in the wake of the events of the recent Absolute Power crossover. In the 'Omega' half (which you can see a preview of in the gallery below) Darkseid goes on a mindbending journey that will change the villain seemingly forever.
"Darkseid has had some awesome stories and events and moments in the last 15 years, but we thought maybe with this we'd be able to elevate him even further and create a scenario where he discovers that there's a role for him he didn't even recognize in the DCU, a variation on what he's been doing all these years, but something far more frightening," Snyder continues. "With this book that was the part that Wes and I really got to dig into. It's all about Darkseid discovering that he's not just a New God, he's not just sort of the Omega in in the context of stories where he plays these roles, like in Darkseid War or in Final Crisis. Instead, in this moment when the multiverse has kind of broken away in Absolute Power, he discovers that he has a role in the universe to end everything. That aspects of him have existed in all of these different worlds across the multiverse. Now that the multiverse is locked away, he has the opportunity to gather all those into himself and become something almost like a Darkseid Prime or kind of a huge Darkseid Omega, a Galactus-level villain."
DC All In Special #1 is published on October 2.
Earlier this year we talked with Kingdom Come writer Mark Waid about giving Darkseid his most badass comics moment in years.
