Geoff Johns Wasn't Totally Sold On DC Rebirth At First

07/31/2017 08:23 pm EDT

DC Comics pleased many fans and skeptics with their DC Rebirth Special. Many of the comic universe's most popular characters were sort of brought back to basics - while setting up new storylines for a slate-wide Rebirth launch. But as it turns out, the special's writer, DC Comics Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns, wasn't initially sold with the name Rebirth.

While at San Diego Comic-Con, Johns revealed that it took a little bit of convincing to get him on board with the name. Although DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan Didio endorsed the Rebirth title, Johns initially believed it was too similar to his past uses of the word on DC titles.

"The DC Rebirth Special… you know, my first reaction was, 'I don't want to call anything Rebirth. That's the name that's on Green Lantern: Rebirth and Flash: Rebirth, I don't want anything else to use it.'" Johns explained. "And [Dan DiDio] said, 'Yeah but it's such a great name and it means so much.' And I said, 'Well, let me tell you what it means.' And the more I talked about what 'rebirth' the word meant to me, the problem was... Well actually, it would really work."

Once Johns got on board with the idea, he still desired to make sure the Rebirth title was used in a similar way across DC Comics' growing slate - which largely inspired the creation of the DC Rebirth Special.

"I said, 'Dan if you want to do this, I feel some ownership over the word, and I know what it means to me. And I really want to communicate what it means to me to all the creators and artists that will be working on this stuff, so that we can have a cohesive universe.'" Johns revealed. "And to do that, I needed to write something to kick it off, and I thought a one-shot."

At the root of it, Johns believed that the DC Rebirth Special would capture a unique emotion in many of its readers.

"I said 'I'm going to write the BEST one-shot I could possibly write.'" Johns elaborated. "An issue that wouldn't just, for me, put the heart back in the DCU, but make people almost cry, or cry when Wally West gets pulled out of the Speed Force. Because to me, I was like, 'I need a personification of what I'm feeling is lost, and I need to feel like it's almost ripped away, then I need to feel like it's not because it's too strong and powerful to ever go away.' Once the story came to me, the story didn't change from the day I pitched to Dan."

More DC Comics News:

• Watch Jim Lee Explain What's Going On With the Legion of Super-Heroes
• Scott Snyder Says Batman is Not a Metahuman, Suicide Squad Writer Weighs In
• Exclusive DC Preview: Superman #28

Disclosure: ComicBook is owned by CBS Interactive, a division of Paramount. Sign up for Paramount+ by clicking here.