Everything you ever wanted to know about the aborted 5G publishing plan from DC Comics and Dan DiDio, but no one wanted to tell you. Until now.
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Tomorrow Bleeding Cool will begin a series of articles looking at what were originally plans for DC Comics‘ 5G or Generation Five, a line-wide relaunch of DC Comics titles planned by former DC publisher Dan DiDio, for 2020. Three years on, the 5G plan was junked overnight – literally in the case of the Generation Zero Free Comic Book Day title that would have begun the publishing initiative, with over a million copies being destroyed and only one copy known to have survived. No copies have been sold in any public marketplace.
Bleeding Cool first broke the news of 5G’s existence in 2019, as we built up what it was meant to be. Generation Five, the fifth generation of DC Comics as seen in the new planned DC Timeline. This timeline would assign major DC Comics stories a year in which they happened, how old characters were, and in the process aging up Superman and Batman to their sixties, Wonder Woman even older, with new characters like Jonathan Kent, Luke Fox and Yara Flor taking over the principal roles. Alfred’s death would set up the new status quo, and we heard that Damian Wayne would be the Big Bad of the Universe. That a child of Captain Boomerang would be the new Flash, Jo Mullein would be the new Green Lantern,
James Tynion IV was in the middle of this, he had taken over writing Batman as a last-minute fill-in replacement on Batman when then-EIC Bob Harras had found an opportunity to fire Tom King off the book. Tynion IV was to write the series until Batman #100, when 5G would kick in and the series would relaunch by John Ridley and Olivier Coipel with Luke Fox as the new Batman. And James Tynion wanted nothing to do with 5G and was all set to leave.
That all changed when a) publisher Dan DiDio was fired and b) the pandemic saw DC Comics shut down production for a short while. 5G was repurposed in some ways for Future State and Infinite Frontier but much of it, including the Generation Zero Free Comic Book Day comic and the Generations series were pulped or dumped.
Bleeding Cool gave you the most detailed ins and outs of that particular time of publishing and pandemic chaos. But starting tomorrow, I am writing a new series with a lot more information that I’ve gathered over the last few years over what else was planned for 5G and never was. So come by tomorrow morning for the first of what could be a large number of chapters of The 5G Files, with a brand new tag for itself. Bookmark that tag now…
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