DC Announces All In, New Absolute Universe From Scott Snyder and Josh Williamson

During a livestream on DC’s YouTube page today, writers Scott Snyder and Joshua Williamson confirmed one of the worst-kept secrets in comics: DC is launching a new publishing initiative, titled “All In.” Snyder says that the purpose of a publishing initiative i to bring everybody together with a shared goal, and that for All In, the goal is to celebrate comics. Williamson said that the entire plan is to introduce all-new contents, but elevates rather than ignoring classic elements of DC’s history.

As part of the initiative, Snyder is helping DC spearhead a new universe, “Absolute DC,” which will feature modernized takes on many of the publisher’s most beloved characters. DC wants to create a new universe — one that can coexist alongside the current DC Universe, rather than replacing it (as they tried with 2011’s The New 52 publishing initiative). While DC has been resisting any inquiries about the rumors, new images have popped up online showing off first looks at Absolute Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman.

“This is something we’ve been working on forever,” Snyder said. “We’ve been working on it for about two years behind the scenes.”

He later added, “The idea is to create the greatest jumping-on point for you guys in many, many, many years.”

DC’s All In #1 will kick off the event in September, and then every book at DC will be coming together in October. All-In, written by Snyder and Williamson, will be a flipbook, with one side drawn by Daniel Sampere and the other drawn by Wes Craig. In it, half the story will be told from Superman’s perspective, and some from Darkseid’s.

DC have attempted similar small-scale reboots over the years, most notably their All-Star and Earth-One lines of miniseries and original graphic novels. Each of those lines created a small number of titles, which have done fairly well in the bookstore market, but none of them existed in a shared universe. All-Star Batman couldn’t hang out with All-Star Superman, for instance.

The idea is that Absolute DC will allow star creators a ton of creative freedom on their books, but it will all be playing into a story that pays off over the course of two years.

“What we came up with, along with a bunch of great creators — Mark Waid and everybody else working on the lead up to it — is that, during the events of AP, unbeknownst to the superheroes, Darkseid starts to realize that something has always been missing. He senses something in a special moment during Absolute Power that we don’t want to spoil. He senses something has changed, and once he realizes this, it sets him off on a quest that’s going to bring him into direct conflict with this new Justice League taht Superman is setting up — this more robust Justice League. The collision between those two forces will reshape the DC cosmology.”

That’s what creates “a dangerous, wild new planet” — the Absolute DC Universe — where Snyder said they have brought in some of the biggest names in comics as well as some rising stars to kick off an epic story that will drive DC for years to come. If the main universe is “founded on Superman energy,” then the Absolute universe is “founded on Darkseid energy.” In it, the heroes are underdogs, and the world is darker, so “They have to be tougher, they’ve got to be more resourceful, they have to shine brighter.”

The New 52, which was a true reboot of DC’s publishing line, including renumbering all of their comics with new #1 issues, was a massive sales success in its early days, but lagged as it wore on — in part because there were major creative defections and stories of editorial meddling almost from the beginning. The All-Star line, while it only managed to publish a tiny number of actual comics, gave big-name creators broad leeway to tell the stories they wanted with DC’s biggest characters.

The idea, then, seems to be that a companion line like Marvel’s (recently resurrected) Ultimate universe could be a success if the creators involved are allowed freedom to work their magic.

Early reports indicated the Absolute universe will be part of an editorial program called DC All-In, which will attempt to take a more holistic approach to overhauling the publishing line, while leaving alone the pieces that seem to be working. That seems to be borne out by one leak already online.

It seems likely that this will spin out of the events of DC’s Free Comic Book Day one-shot, Absolute Power, and the event series that spins out of it from Mark Waid and Mikel Janin. Bleeding Cool speculates the Absolute and All-In initiatives may be announced at Comic Con International in San Diego this summer, although that seems to be little more than an educated guess. The timing makes sense, given that the Absolute Power event is likely to wrap in October or November, meaning that anything announced at Comic Con and solicited soon thereafter would line up almost perfectly with the end of that story. Waid previously had a multiverse-altering event in the form of The Kingdom, which established the quasi-multiverse concept of Hypertime, but that idea never really took off.