Big Hopes

This week DC released an image of the redesigned Darkseid, which has led us at Ret-Conned HQ to have big hopes for the future.

I really like the design of The New 52’s Darkseid, mainly other than putting him in armor he’s very much the same Darkseid that we’ve had for forty years. Justice League #3 comes out this week, but the above image is from next month’s Justice League #4, which makes me wonder what will transpire in issue 3 that warranted releasing this image early. It’s also interesting that this image was used as a placeholder to the cover of Justice League #6 from the February solicitations. Clearly, there’s something even bigger than Darkseid that would be revealed on the February cover, but the Lord of Apokolips will have to appease us for now.

Speaking of the February Solicitations, if Kris and my hypothesis is correct, this will be the last set of solicitations of the “old guard” of The New 52. February will be issue 6 of the fifty-two issues of the reboot marks the end of the first story arc for most of the books. We suspect that if any books will get cancelled or major creative team changes occur, it will be in the March books. There have been some changes for creative teams already, but for relatively few books all things considered. If there’s a big overhaul of books that “just aren’t working”, it’ll be issue 7. How big of a change there will be remains to be seen.

As part of the February solicitations, DC has announced that the Beyond universe will be coming back in a new monthly book called Batman Beyond Unlimited. Both Batman Beyond and Justice League Beyond will be starting in February released weekly as digital chapters. At the end of the month, those digital-first chapters will be printed in the Batman Beyond Unlimited book. It’s an interesting concept that allows DC to experiment with the digital publishing medium while still allowing print die-hards access to the same stories. Testing this concept with the Beyond line is a nice idea. The Beyond books are set in the future so why not publish them first in the medium of the future?