As you've no doubt seen by now, DC released their first teaser image for next year's Final Crisis event yesterday. The tagline -- "Heroes Die, Legends Live Forever" -- certainly implies to me some kind of large-scale DCU reboot might be coming at the end of what I sincerely hope is the least line-wide crossover for awhile. It's obviously too early to know what could be coming up in Final Crisis, but I've got some half-assed speculation going on in my head already. To wit:- I think we can all agree that those Sinestro Corps villains will play into the story in a big way. It's obviously not a coincidental conglomeration of characters, since it just happens to feature the Big Bads of the last twenty years worth of major DC "reboot events." Clearly putting all of them together in one massive batch of evil will mean some bad, bad things for the DCU. In fact, I'm thinking that...
- The result of all of that combined evil will be a sort of Ragnarok for the DCU. DC has always seemed to work much more in a cyclical fashion than Marvel has, and I think twenty (or so) years since the last universal shakeup probably means it's about time for the cycle to end and begin again. My hunch is that most or all of the DCU heroes (and probably villains, too) will die, most in a valiantly manner, showing why they're heroes. (Another hunch: most of this will be kicked off with the death of a character that would seem to be on the "but you can't kill HIM/HER!" scale, showing that nobody will be above the Crisis.) Only Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman will be left standing at the end to face what's left of the Sinestro Corps; having lost everyone and everything, we'll see their true heroism rise as they manage to defeat the bad guys in one final universe-ending gesture, paving the way for...
- A new Earth, possibly a new Earth-1 in the newly-created multiverse. [1] This Earth will differ radically from the current one, rather than simply tweaking a couple of relatively minor points of history. You know how different the new Earth-2 looks from the original (from the one small image we've seen of it in 52 #52)? We're talking that kind of different, at least in some ways. Anything that they want to fix/change will be fair game, creating a "DC Universe for a new generation" or some such. This might be the long-rumored "Ultimization" of the DCU, or this might just be an opportunity for a massive continuity cleanup (hey, Kurt Busiek is the rumored writer for Final Crisis, and he's already proven he can straighten out mucked-up continuity with Avengers Forever). And this new Earth-1-or-Whatever -- that's where we'll get this new brighter, more heroic Earth we were promised we'd get as the result of Infinite Crisis (which we clearly don't have right now). The final heroic sacrifice of the Big Three will somehow imprint on the very nature of the newly-created Earth, and heroism will be brought more to the forefront of the new universe.
When all is said and done, you'll have a nicely refreshed Earth-1-or-Whatever (one which will hopefully focus more on heroism and less on the darkness which has pervaded the DCU for so long), with a newly-defined single history (one which will hopefully be explained to us, unlike those minor changes to the current history mentioned above), and a newly-created multiverse where all kinds of other stories can be told. And this will be the last time DC does this kind of thing... at least until someone else is in power in DC editorial 20 years from now and has 20 years worth of continuity cleanups to do.
[1] I'm assuming the multiverse is going to stick around, since DC went to a lot of trouble to set it back up and haven't even played with it properly yet. Plus, they're spending a lot of time during thisCountdown era exploring how it works and what's out there. So the multiverse stays.
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