SDCC Day 1 News: DC Universe, Morrison on Green Lantern, Johns on Joker/Shazam, & More!

Day one SDCC News is up! We’ll be keeping you posted here on all the announcements and goings-on. 

Biggest announcement: Grant Morrison & Liam Sharp on Green Lantern. This book has been rumored for quite a bit now, but knowing the exact team will bring the excitement to a fever pitch. Morrison has a cult following esp. w DC fans and will give this title a real shot in the arm. A crime procedural in space sounds pretty compelling. Sharp is just off of his solo creating the Batman/WW Brave & The Bold and his run on WW w Rucka was well liked. This book should sell well & be high quality. 

Runner up: two Geoff Johns titles, Shazam w Dale Eaglesham & 3 Jokers w Jason Fabok. Johns recently announced he was stepping down from his VP position w DC to rejoin the creative team & he’s hitting the ground running. Shazam seems like a stretch for a guy of his talent. But they’ve got a movie coming out & his vision will help sell it to the comic book faithful. Eaglesham is a talented artist who should realize Johns plots well. 3 Jokers should be a top-selling book & a creative success. Recent stories hinted that the Joker has not always been one man but is rather a spirit of chaos/murder. This tale will resolve that thread w a fan favorite villain & a very hot artist. Should be a solid book. UPDATE: Johns also dropped some info on his new imprint at DC. It’s called The Killing Zone, it’s politically motivated, & it deals with characters from the Golden Age (1940’s) to the 2040’s (Legion?). It’ll hit the stands in May 2019. No details yet on what will be released at that time but it’ll be multiple characters & properties under one banner telling a semi-unified narrative. 

Also, Kelly Sue DeConnick & Robson Rocha (recently of Deathstroke & Supergirl) are taking over Aquaman ahead of a the movie’s release. This should be a vote of confidence in a team that will see interest in this cast of characters at an all-time high. DeConnick has a solid fan base & the recent success of their Mera solo title bodes well for interest in this book. 

Clone Wars returns for a new season on the Disney streaming service. Not a lot of detail to this announcement, but it’ll be red hot given that the next Star Wars film isn’t for over a year & the intense polarization over The Last Jedi & Solo. The Clone Wars is nearly universally well received by fans & should be a notch in the belt of the Star Wars universe Disney envisions. 

Wolverine returns! Logan will be back in his solo title this Fall with Charles Soule (architect of the character’s death) & fan favorite artist Steve McNiven at the helm. Word has it that Wolvie has a new power set that heats up his claws to ridiculous temperatures, which I don’t know — sounds dumb — but maybe it’ll be cool? Soule is a talented writer & I’ve liked all of his work including Daredevil, Vader, & the series returning Wolverine to the MU. We’ll have to see the reasoning behind it. 

DC Universe streaming service: it’ll be 74.95 annually. You’ll get to watch Titans & (another Geoff Johns production — and his creation). Dick Grayson says fuck and kills people, apparently. Raven looks cool. Starfire is portrayed by a black actress. Beast Boy looks like Beast Boy. Stargirl will feature the JSA, which is way more interesting than Stargirl is. At any rate, no one is subscribing to this & everyone will stream it, right? Right. Hard to know if these will be any good or just more of the Arrowverse type garbage we’ve gotten from DC tv. The extra dark version of Titans seems to hint that they still think everyone should be Batman or more dark/grim than even that.

Mark Silvestri Batman/Joker team-up was announced during the Black Label panel. Some story details including the kidnapping of Jim Gordon & a new villain, but no release date or format details at the moment. 

There should be a bevy of additional announcements from Marvel coming up, including FF, Gaiman & Miracleman, & at least one, maybe more, X-book. HBO, MCU, & Star Wars are all OUT on SDCC this year, so it’ll be nearly all comics, TV, & DCU films. I’d expect Fox to show us more Venom & maybe some Phoenix, Netflix may have some Millarverse material for us, & BBC will definitely be getting folks hyped for the new (and first female) Doctor. I’ll be around tomorrow with more news.