Convergence: Ten Series We Hope To See in April and May

With the announcement this week of DC Comics' Convergence event, the publisher acknowledged that there will be forty two-issue microseries accompanying a nine-issue (eight plus April's #0) miniseries serving as the event's focus.

It's not yet clear just what form those series will take: will they all tie directly into the Convergence mini or will they be fairly self-contained? Will they take place on the now-dead Earths belonging to the characters, or on the mysterious planet where Brainiac/Telos has gathered the bottle Earths? Will the stories follow single characters or groups/worlds?

Without having any kind of actual knowledge, it's hard to know what to expect...but before they give us any kind of information, it's a bit fun to think about what we might want. And, in the case of these well-worn universes we've been missing for years, what better than to think about which creative teams might come back to a property they've already tackled and get one last story with it before...well, whatever happens at the end of Convergence.

Based on the worlds that we've seen on the Multiverse map and ones that we know exist from interviews and such, here are our picks for a quarter of the Convergence tie-in titles, if we were in charge of making the assignments and writing the checks.

WildC.A.T.S. by Jim Lee

There's always a rumor that Jim Lee wants to, or is going to, go back to WildC.A.T.S. So far, it hasn't happened, and the last time the WildStorm founder actually worked on the title was nearly a decade ago, when he and Grant Morrison attempted to launch an ill-fated ongoing series featuring the characters.

Morrison probably isn't available for work on Convergence, given his recent focus on creator-owned or creator-driven projects, so it's likely Lee would have to find somebody else to script it for him...but tell us you wouldn't want to see forty or so pages of Jim Lee on WildC.A.T.S. this year.

Hourman by Tom Peyer and Rags Morales

I would be over the moon to see this.

DC One Million is one of the worlds we've seen in the teaser for Convergence (see top), and so is the pre-Flashpoint DC Universe. That means two separate possibilities to see Peyer's brilliant and wildly underrated Hourman again.

The series, which spun out of the DC One Million event, saw a sentient AI from the 853rd Century remain behind after his teammates returned to the future and act as a superhero in a small town, with former Justice League "mascot" Snapper Carr at his side, helping him to acclimate to the 21st Century.

Supergirl by Peter David

This one would be a long shot, as it seems like David has likely said everything he has to say about the character. After the "earthborne angel" interpretation of the character (long story) was ditched and David with it, the writer took many of the book's core concepts and did his own, creator-owned series with them, exploring the plans he'd had on Supergirl.

Still, a comic set on '90s Earth that dealt with Matrix Supergirl and/or the angelic stuff David introduced is one I'd buy.

Shazam by Jerry Ordway

A no-brainer. Since DC took over the Marvel family (Shazam family?) from the defunct Fawcett Comics, Jerry Ordway has not only been arguably the only guy to really "get" them, but he's become closely associated with the property -- so much so that when the Warner Archive released the old TV series on DVD, Ordway was tapped to paint a promotional poster for it.

Shazam has a movie coming soon; it's an important IP for the publisher, and one they'd probably like not to be a black eye by the time Dwayne Johnson becomes Black Adam for the first time. So...let's get on that, no?

We've already seen them on the teaser. Really, how do you not?!

Let's forget about that whole "hanging out with the Birds of Prey and Suicide Squad" thing and instead focus on the fact that this book had about thirty issues as good as any superhero comic since the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and has at least one story left to tell that would knock the socks off of any fan of the pre-Flashpoint DC Universe.

I can't say what -- but having spoken with Andreyko in the past...there is one.

Also, there's the story Andreyko teased about a supervillain who targets abortion clinics. It would be in keeping with the real-world tone of the series and the details of the story, while scarce, have always sounded good when they dripped out in interviews.

And if it were a closed-ended thing with minimal risk, we could get Andreyko and Jesus Saiz back together to make the story feel like a seamless continuation of their initial run.

If there's going to be a major time-travel story, Jurgens has typically been one of DC's go-to guys for almost 30 years. Part of that is that one of his more notable accomplishments at the company is creating Booster Gold, the time-traveling "greatest hero you've never heard of."

And while Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis have a version of the character appearing in Justice League 3000, it seems pretty clear they're from a different Earth than the one who was tooling around time and space in the Futures End: Booster Gold #1 story.

Going back to that Booster Gold one-shot? Ron Frenz killed it on Kamandi, a universe that we know for a fact will show up in Convergence. In fact, it may be worth going back and seeing which artists did the various worlds in that one-shot for clues as to who might tackle tie-in miniseries.

Vampire Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones

This one almost seems like a gimme, doesn't it? Provided Moench and Jones would be willing and able to return, it's hard to imagine that DC wouldn't want to revisit one of its most popular Elseworlds again...especially since this is one that they've gone back to a few times, that has popped up periodically places like the Multiverse Map and in Infinite Crisis (the game). 

They're also doing a deluxe hardcover slipcase edition showing off the black and white art, so...yeah. It's beloved around the office.

Flashpoint by Geoff Johns

Like the Jim Lee entry above, probably the thing that is more likely here is that Johns will take the two months "off" to work on his administrative responsibilities, get ahead on some other scripts, etc.

Still, he's been in Burbank for a long while now (as has Lee), and is a hugely in-demand talent. If there were a general feeling that these books "didn't count" or were being done by fill-in teams, having guys like Johns and Lee attached to it would dispel some of that pretty quickly.

And, if you remember, one of the big questions around the time of the New 52 was whether we might ever go back to the world of Flashpoint again. Lots of fans actually really enjoyed it.

Although if not Johns, maybe we can get Azzarello on Flashpoint Batman. That'd be fun.