Final Crisis Primer [part 1]

Dan DiDio on DC Universe #0:

This is the launching pad for everything that is to come.

Originally, we were going to do Countdown to Final Crisis #0 - that’s what Countdown has been counting down to: 51 to 0 – 52 issues in total, a year’s worth of work. Ultimately though, what happened was that when we were looking at how #0 was being created, we realized that in collecting Countdown to Final Crisis, it would be hard to collect the #0 issue, because it would leave us on a cliffhanger at the end of the book. We felt that probably wasn’t the best way to end a book, so we decided to end all the Countdown stories with #1, and therefore make the #0 issue separate. That’s when it became Final Crisis #0.

Then, Grant was involved in the writing of Final Crisis #0 of course, and Grant wanted Geoff to co-write it with him. But as we were building the book, we realized that the story wasn’t contained to the stories that were flowing into Final Crisis, involving New Gods and Monitors, but really touched upon so many major events going on throughout the DCU including: more hints to the Black Lanterns story, what’s coming up in the Batman storylines, Superman’s upcoming stories and Wonder Woman as well. Because it started to expand outside of Final Crisis, we repositioned the book one more time, and now it’s called DC Universe #0

And since this is becoming more of a springboard to all of the DC Universe in 2008, we wanted to make this much more accessible to all of our fans and separate it out from Final Crisis and Countdown so it can really stand alone on its own feet. As such, it’s going to sell for 50 cents – 24 pages by Grant and Geoff, with art by a wide variety of folks including Ivan Reis, Carlos Pacheco, Tony Daniel, George Perez and Aaron Lopresti.

you’ve got Final Crisis running, you’ll have “Batman: R.I.P. in Batman, along with another major and separate storyline in Detective. There will be a major storyline building off of the Brainiac image that we’ve been showcasing around, feeding into the Superman stories which will feed into an important turning point in Superman’s life before the year is out. There’s also a big, epic-style Wonder Woman storyline coming from Gail this summer as well - along with the two miniseries, Rann-Thanagar: Holy War and Reign in Hell, and of course Trinity.

As we’ve set it up, all of our key franchises are involved in major storylines in their own series, and for the bigger picture, we’ve got Final Crisis and the miniseries. We don’t want anything lost in the shuffle, so every book has to stand on its own, and feel as important as the biggest book we have.



Final Crisis is seven issues over eight months. It has a natural break built in between two of the issues. During that natural break, there will be a series of specials dealing with Final Crisis and the events of that natural break in the story.

There will also be two other supporting series for Final Crisis, one of them is a five part story, one of them is a six part story. That is the full extent of Final Crisis. So we will not see Final Crisis crossing over in any appreciable manner with the rest of the line. All of the other monthly books will continue on the stories they’re telling, with their established creative teams for those series.

If we go any further or any wider…wait – you know what? I don’t want to be called a liar seven months from now when we add one more special or something, let me couch that – at this point, there are no plans to extend Final Crisis past that initial conceit, because we feel that what we have planned covers all the major story elements for that storyline. If we have to go any wider, when we will create a special, but we will not incorporate any of the Final Crisis storyline beats in any of the monthly series.

Plans for the 50th Anniversary of the Legion of Super-Heroes? "You will see the Legion of Super-Heroes, you will see the Legion of Super-Heroes, and you will see the Legion of Super-Heroes in the DC Universe #0" Bob Wayne said "it was as if there were two or three Legions operating."

Dan DiDio has commented that George Perez will be involved with the Legion in the near future. No clues about whether this means interior or cover art. I'm betting Geoff Johns will be launching a new Legion book (he's also been treading lightly about some mystery project).

All I have to say... those shadow things look like the Anti-Monitor's Shadow Demons... more on this soon!