It’s good to be bad lately, especially if you’re in the DC Universe. With Lex Luthor having been reborn as an apex predator, the DCU’s greatest threats running amok and a danger from another multiverse looking to infect the world, the Year of the Villain isn’t messing around as it rewrites the status quo. It’s not the only event looking to make a name for itself, because while the Legion of Doom may be preparing for war against the Justice League, destruction may come from the most unexpected of sources.
Hell Arisen is the name of the story arc, and it’ll help tie together threads that began with Dark Nights Metal and continued through Year of the Villain as writer James Tynion IV and artist Steve Epting spearhead the end of Lex Luthor’s ambitious plan to bring chaos to the universe. “It is the culmination of both threads,” Tynion said to ScreenRant via Newsarama.
Taking a step back: when Scott Snyder, Josh Williamson and I were talking about what we wanted to build out on the other side of Dark Nights: Metal, the big event a couple of years ago, we built this whole big map. One part of the map was the Justice League side of the map. And more than anything, that story was the story of Lex Luthor.”
What Lex Luthor would build, and what he would become, in pursuit of making Doom arrive in the universe. Basically tipping the entire psychic energy of everything towards evil. This is what we’ve seen in the ‘Year of the Villain’ books and the tie-ins. This is the story that’s really coming to a head right now. Lex Luthor has never been more powerful or more dangerous in the DC Universe.
“Simultaneous to that we’ve had a thread that started off kind of secretly,” Tynion explained.
We had a couple of issues in Justice League where we would see the Batman Who Laughs in operation in the DC Universe. Then we got the Scott Snyder/Jock Batman Who Laughs miniseries where we start to see… What is the plan that he has had in motion since he was left in this world? Now we’re seeing that plan come to a head with the ‘Infected’ storyline in Batman/ Superman.
Long story short, Lex Luthor is ready to resurrect the mother of reality, who may be looking to wipe all of creation clean when she’s back. There’s only one way to stop the Multiverse from being annihilated, and that’s with a Batman who laughs as the Dark Multiverse’s most dangerous player readies his own team to take on Luthor. It’s two of the most dangerous minds in the DC Universe, locked on to a collision course that’ll spell the end of the Legion of Doom and the Infected that this grim shadow of the dark knight has assembled, with reality itself at stake come December.
Last Updated: September 12, 2019
