Jim Lee offers reassurances about DC Comics' future, teases new Batman book by John Ridley

For starters, and this may sound less optimistic than Lee intended, he says that DC Comics is “still in the business of publishing comics” and that no work on that front has been halted because of the layoffs (no previously greenlit comics have been canceled). DC Comics exists to publish comics, so we would hope it’s still in that business, but at least it sounds like DC isn’t going to go the way of, say, Fawcett Comics or Charlton Comics and have all of its best characters get swallowed up by some more-successful competitor. That being said, Marvel coming along and doing a Watchmen-style deconstruction of the Justice League would be pretty funny.

Anyway, in other news, Jim Lee says that Oscar-winning screenwriter John Ridley is doing a Batman book that will have “a huge impact on the rest of the line,” which seems both exciting and unlikely (when was the last time any comic had a huge impact on the rest of the line?), and DC is also resurrecting the Milestone imprint to showcase “underrepresented heroes and creators.” As for DC Universe, Lee says that its original content is being moved over to HBO Max (which has mostly happened already), but that there “is always going to be a need” for the kind of “community and experience” that DC Universe was built around. He suggests that the service is going to change in some way, and given the fact that he highlights the amount of “backlist content” on the platform (i.e. old comics), we’d guess that it’ll turn into something more like Marvel Unlimited’s huge comic vault. Maybe we’ll know more when the DC FanDome descends next weekend.