DC shoots down '5G' or reboot speculation - "not going to happen"

DC's publisher/chief creative officer Jim Lee says If you're looking forward to DC's 5G initiative, it's "not going to happen" and that some of the reports online have been "wrong" speculation.

As revealed in a prerecorded 'Jim Lee answers fan questions about comic books' video which debuted during September 12's DC FanDome: Welcome to the Multiverse, Lee shoots down the widespread 5G rumors and instead paints a more "organic" and individualized approach to bolstering the DC comics line in 2021.

"There won't be a project called '5G', or a big reboot, or whatever," Lee says. "We really want to focus on individual titles, and organically build up individual characters over the course of the next year."

Promotional art for Gotham Knights game (Image credit: Jim Lee (DC))

"We had a lot of great ideas that we were floating around," Lee explains. "And rather than dumping it all in one month and renumbering the line and going for that really short term spike in sales, we just naturally gravitated to the story ideas and concepts we love and building them into the mythology, the ongoing mythology, in a very organic way."

Lee doesn't mince words about the concept of a '5G' story or reboot, flat-out shooting down the idea entirely.

"If you're waiting for '5G,' you're going to have to wait for a long time because it's not going to happen," he continues. "But if you're waiting for big developments in the DC Universe … Pretty big ones in 2021 across the board, but again it's spread out and approached organically when it makes sense within a particular title so not everything has to tie into a big epic event all at once."

The best place to begin speculating what 2021 would hold for DC is by looking at what DC has planned leading up to it. Check out the DC December 2020 solicitations, which includes a few January 2021 titles.

Chris Arrant covered comic book news for Newsarama from 2003 to 2022 (and as editor/senior editor from 2015 to 2022) and has also written for USA Today, Life, Entertainment Weekly, Publisher's Weekly, Marvel Entertainment, TOKYOPOP, AdHouse Books, Cartoon Brew, Bleeding Cool, Comic Shop News, and CBR. He is the author of the book Modern: Masters Cliff Chiang, co-authored Art of Spider-Man Classic, and contributed to Dark Horse/Bedside Press' anthology Pros and (Comic) Cons. He has acted as a judge for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, the Harvey Awards, and the Stan Lee Awards. Chris is a member of the American Library Association's Graphic Novel & Comics Round Table. (He/him)