The Justice League is Dead! It’s time now for the next generation to take up the mantle and continue the legacy set upon by the Earth’s Greatest Heroes…but what is the truth behind this latest mystery leading to the DC Universe’s newest crisis-level event?
The DC multiverse is about to get shaken to its core yet again! Once again the heroic pantheon and the most dangerous and dastardly villains, face a new “crisis” that will likely have serious repercussions that will be felt throughout the multiverse and beyond. Written by Joshua Williamson the lead-up to Dark Crisis an event 30 years in the making, begins in Justice League #75 with “Death of the Justice League”. In that arc, the planet’s most powerful heroes will meet their untimely end, forcing the heroes that remain behind to take up their mantle.
The 7-issue event will chronicle the aftermath of the passing of the League. The remaining heroes are left behind to pick up the pieces, but even as Nightwing, The Flash, the Son of Superman, and the rest of the legacy heroes decide how to proceed next, a far more ominous darkness is waiting in the wings — the perfect opportunity to destroy the multiverse. DC takes every decade or so, to pull out the “crisis’ card, especially after the success of the 12-part “Crisis on Infinite Earths” from the 80s that remade the then 50-year history of the publishing imprint and started a new trend.
The success of that crossover spectacular led to a sequel “Infinite Crisis”, a “Final Crisis” that eventually introduced an entire reboot of the existing pantheon with “The New 52” and then the inevitably “Rebirth” that attempted to put things all right and introduced the Omniverse into the lexicon and the discovery of the “Dark Universe”. Dark Crisis is promising to pull apart the fragile tapestry of the multiverse once again, but at what cost? How will the DC universe emerge from this latest earth-shattering event? Who will live and who will die? Nothing will ever be the same again.
Crisis Calling
DC has depended on the “Crisis” event branding largely to the success of the initial 12-issue series that started it all. Sequels were an inevitability as the imprint looked to match the impact across the genre of Marv Wolfman and George Pérez brainchild which became a best-selling book. DC avoided making a straight-out sequel until “Infinite Crisis” was released in 2005 written by Geoff Johns with art by Phil Jimenez. Since then a “crisis event” has been made the anchor of the summer selling season, and “Crisis on Infinite Earths” was even adapted into a live-action 5-part crossover in prime time.
Recently, the DC heroes have faced off against threats generated from the Dark Universe, an entire flip-side version of the DC Multiverse, but one that is diseased and cancerous. A doppelgänger of The Batman from that universe escaped into the Prime-Universe and wreaked havoc on the heroes; inciting an epic confrontation against the omnipotent Perpetua, the mother of the multiverse. Since the conclusion of that event, the multiverse has been not entirely stable, so the timing for another “Crisis” couldn’t have proven more advantageous.
Launching in May Dark Crisis is being billed as the “event of the summer” and plenty relies on the mini-series being a hit. Comic book collecting has taken a serious decline especially with the popularized advent of the medium moving into the digital realm. Reading single books digitally has some very popular advantages, most notably that it is great for the environment, and currently released books are becoming more rapidly available on subscription services like DC’s own DC Infinite. The app replaced DC Universe when most of the DC library of live-action movies and television moved into the HBO Max app, giving DC fans a destination for reading from a digital library that runs the length of the publishing empire’s more than 80-year history, chronicling every “crisis” and then some!
Stay Tuned as we bring you more about this exciting new title from DC.
DARK CRISIS #1 | 7-issue limited series | written by Joshua Williamson with art by Daniel Sampere hits newsstands on 6/7/2022. $5.99