For the past several months, it was believed Jeff Lemire’s beloved Black Hammer series would come to a close in 2023 with Black Hammer: The End. First released in 2016, the primary title within the comics universe has run for 36 issues and was set to conclude with an additional 12 issues in The End. According to Lemire, however, that no longer seems to be the case. In the creator’s latest newsletter, he confirmed that while The End would be the culmination of the Black Hammer Universe to date, more stories would be released after the next maxi-series.
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“I can’t leave these characters and this world behind. Not completely,” Lemire wrote. Earlier this year, Lemire and Stefano Simeone released The Last Days of Black Hammer digitally through the creator’s Substack, and that will be released in print format through Dark Horse Comics next Fall.
Beyond that, two more stories are planned—a long-gestating Madame Dragonfly series being drawn by Black Hammer co-creator Dean Ormston and a mystery story Lemire didn’t reveal.
That means that as of now, there are at least four stories within the Black Hammer Universe still set for released between 2023 and 2024, with more likely set for beyond.
Lemire also teased “major” film and television news regarding the series, though he wouldn’t expand on that. The property was previously optioned by Legendary, which hoped to build its own live-action cinematic universe. At the time, Lemire confirmed it was being planned to tell one single story across film and television, similar to how the Marvel Cinematic Universe operates. Lemire was hired to write the script for a potential television pilot.
“Legendary has optioned the entire universe, not just the one story,” Lemire told ComicBook.com “It’s a very ambitious adaptation and I’m currently working on the first piece of that, writing the screenplay for the first project within what we hope could be a shared universe for film and television.”
“That’s been cool, too, because you’re going back and looking at the earlier Black Hammer stories, and then finding ways to translate them to screen opens up new ideas that way,” the writer added. “There’s been a couple of things we’ve developed or I’ve developed for the film and television stuff now, that I’ve gone back and started working on comic projects based on some of those ideas. One is feeding into the other and back again in an interesting way that I didn’t expect.”
