DC Studios' James Gunn Confirms the Comics Inspiring DCU Chapter One Movies

DC Studios co-head James Gunn has sent out a tweet revealing some of the comic book inspirations for the movies in DC Universe Chapter One. In his tweet, Gunn posted a picture of four comic books: Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman, the collect omnibuses for The Authority and Grant Morrison's Batman, and vol. 1 of Alan Moore's Absolute Swamp Thing. Those four books join Tom King's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow miniseries, which was the obvious inspiration for the DCU movie of the same name. 

"We're talked a lot about Woman of Tomorrow, but these are more of the comics inspiring #DCStudios and the new #DCU in these early days," Gunn said in his tweet. "That doesn't mean we're adapting all these comics, but that the feel, the look, or the tone of them are touchstones for our team. Check 'em out!"

All of the books Gunn mentioned are ones we picked up on in our feature about "The Comics That Inspired the New DC Studios Movies and TV Series." Suffice it to say that we (and many other) DC fans consider pretty much all of those books to be amongst the best story arcs that DC has put out – interestingly enough, almost all of them are from 21st-century DC comic book runs (with the exception of Moore's Swamp Thing, and the beginnings of The Authority team). If our comic references hold true on the TV side, then most of DCU Chapter One will indeed reflect newer ideas from more recent creators – picked by a "brain trust" of great TV, film, and/or comic creators Gunn and Peter Safan put together. It's an interesting choice of approach – and the results will be equally interesting to measure. 

It didn't take long after Gunn's post for some of the more trollish DC fans to appear, with one commenter attempting to explain to Gunn what he needs to do to get the next Batman movie right – basically, by making something different tonally than The Batman, that "can't just be 'It's got the Bat Family, we haven't seen that in a movie.'" 

That's when Gunn made it clear: while there will be comic book influences on these DCU Chapter One films, he doesn't believe any adaptation should be too beholden to one piece of source material: 

"I don't think a vision for any good film starts with being "not" something," Gunn tweeted in response. "It must be fully its own thing, not the shadow (nor the copy) of another work."

What do you think of the comics that are inspiring DCU Chapter One? Have you read them all?