DC Comics Announces Its Big 2015 Event: 'Convergence'

Three years ago, DC Comics hit the continuity reset button with the launch of The New 52, seemingly wiping away the past 26 years of stories since Crisis on Infinite Earths.

But like superheroes, no story stays dead forever.

Next April, DC launches Convergence, a nine-part event series that brings the publisher's regular publishing schedule to a halt while bringing characters, places and concepts from DC's past into its current universe. It's also the culmination of the weekly series The New 52: Futures End and Earth 2: World's End, both of which wrap up just before Convergence launches.

Here's how a DC press release describes the series:

If you’ve been reading THE NEW 52: FUTURES END and EARTH 2: WORLD’S END, now is the moment you’ve been waiting for. All things converge as readers get to experience the DC multiverse like never before—hundreds of heroes, hundreds of villains, numerous worlds, and universe altering events all in one place, one time.
Taking place outside of time and space—on the question mark, just below Earth 29 and above Chaos, on the Map of the Multiverse—and introducing the new villain—Telos, this massive event will be published throughout April and May.

"What we're really addressing is they all exist and have existed and exist within the framework of the New 52," co-publisher Jim Lee told USA Today. "Convergence is in many ways the most meta epic event we've done."

USA Today also reports that the character who sets the whole thing off is Brainiac, who has "trapped cities from various timelines and planets that have ended, brought them in domes to a planet outside of time and space, and is now opening them for a great experiment to see what happens when all these folks meet."

Veteran TV writer Jeff King (White Collar) is penning the main Convergence series, while DC vet Dan Jurgens will co-write issue #0. Art comes from Carlo Pagulayan and Stephen Segovia. In addition to the main series, DC will also publish 40 two-part tie-in series exploring the various corners of the different worlds within the main series.

DC has had something of a corner on the market for multiverse-spanning crises, but 2015 is going to be the year that both of the Big Two publishers have events along similar lines; the preview art for Marvel's Secret Wars features alternate versions of Marvel characters duking it out in space, and Marvel has teased a bevy of tie-ins that hint at visits to other events and realities.

This may be a case of two publishers arriving at similar ideas by pure coincidence, but the similarities between Convergence and Secret Wars are too clear to ignore. DC will beat Marvel to press with a spring release for Convergence. Marvel's teasers all simply say "Summer 2015." Expect a year of tea-leaf reading and partisan fighting about which publisher offers the better execution.

Convergence seems to have ties to Grant Morrison's current Multiversity series, as DC's press release refers to the map of the multiverse created specifically for that story. However, the universes we've seen in Multiversity are not the old DC universes; they're more or less new creations. This may be another case of DC paying lip service to the idea of tying in to a Morrison project without actually doing it. Remember Countdown to Final Crisis?

Here's the biggest question we have: Does this mean some of the pre-New 52 versions of DC's characters are coming back? Speculation has been higher than ever since the last page of Superman: Doomed #2 teased that trunks-wearing Superman, Jack Kirby's OMAC, Ted Kord Blue Beetle, the 1980s Teen Titans and lots more are out there in the multiverse somewhere. Other comics tied into Futures End have had similar reveals.

Will Convergence be another Flashpoint, where a new character waves away the old world to usher in something else? Will everything return to the regular New 52 continuity after this? Or are readers going to end up with some sort of patchwork?

Most importantly, will DC satisfy fans who constantly clamor for new and exciting developments in their comics, but also complain constantly when the characters they like are changed? That may never happen, but here's another roll of the dice.