Its been close to a decade since DC swept its current continuity under the rug with the Flashpoint event. And then Convergence happened, DC Rebirth brought the old continuity back and Doomsday Clock did… something. Comic books! I think the big point here with DC Comics is that everything matters. Everything. From Superman’s death to Hawkman’s multiple origins and even that one time when Aquaman ran an underwater fish hospital, all of those stories counted again.
So what’s the next big step for the DC Universe? A couple of months ago, it looked like the latest initiative would be 5G. Before your inner Karen goes ballistic, here’s what 5G was rumoured to be: The latest step in the timeline of DC Comics, representing a new fifth generation of heroes who would step into the fray and help save the day.
The initial idea was that every major milestone in DC, was part of a specific generation, but 5G would kick off a part of the timeline that had hopped forward in time by a fair number of years. Wonder Woman was going to be replaced by a new Amazonian warrior, Luke “Batwing” Fox would step in to replace Bruce Wayne as Batman, Jonathan Kent had become the new Superman and Captain Boomerang’s son had become the latest speedster to step into the lightning boots of the Flash.
Big changes for sure, but a reboot of sorts that didn’t require zapping the entire metaverse with reality-warping attacks. 5G was the brainchild of former DC Comics big cheese Dan Didio, but since his unexpected departure from the company, it looks like that plan has been put on ice. DC’s publisher and chief creative officer Jim Lee broke the news in a prerecorded ‘Jim Lee answers fan questions about comic books’ video during last weekend’s edition of DC FanDome, confirming that 5G wasn’t happening:
There won’t be a project called ‘5G’, or a big reboot, or whatever. We really want to focus on individual titles, and organically build up individual characters over the course of the next year. We had a lot of great ideas that we were floating around. And rather than dumping it all in one month and renumbering the line and going for that really short term spike in sales, we just naturally gravitated to the story ideas and concepts we love and building them into the mythology, the ongoing mythology, in a very organic way.
So while certain ideas and themes may happen at a more natural pace in the pages of DC Comics, 5G as an event is pretty much dead. “If you’re waiting for ‘5G,’ you’re going to have to wait for a long time because it’s not going to happen,” Lee said.
But if you’re waiting for big developments in the DC Universe … Pretty big ones in 2021 across the board, but again it’s spread out and approached organically when it makes sense within a particular title so not everything has to tie into a big epic event all at once.
And there you go. 5G is dead before it even began. A shame, because some of those ideas sounded interesting, and I would have loved to have seen them spun off into their own pocket universe outside of the main DC continuity. Think Marvel’s Ultimate line of comics, but with that DC flavour and a younger generation of heroes and creative staff instead. Dammit, we could have had the NXT of DC if things had gone according to plan.
Last Updated: September 15, 2020
