Comic-Con: DC Entertainment to Launch ‘Injustice 2’ Comic With Videogame Debut

July 22, 2016

1:33pm PT
by

Graeme McMillan

Comic-Con: DC Entertainment to Launch 'Injustice 2' Comic With Videogame Debut

Writer Tom Taylor will return to the franchise to tell the backstory of the upcoming game.

When Injustice 2, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment's follow-up to its massively successful Injustice: Gods Among Us videogame, arrives in 2017, it won't be alone. As with the first game, it will be supported by a digital comic book revealing the backstory to the events of the game — and, as with the first game, that comic book series will be written by Tom Taylor.

The Injustice 2 comic series, which will be released in weekly digital chapters, sees Taylor return to the Injustice mythology that he helped launch with the original 2013 Injustice: Year One comic.

Calling his return to the franchise "really exciting," he told The Hollywood Reporter, "it's a book I never wanted to leave. It's right up there with the most fun I've ever had on a project. I had to leave to do my own TV series, but we've just wrapped a season of that and now I get to come back — this came up at just the right time, and when offered, I just said absolutely."

The first Injustice comic series — which ran five volumes, with the first set to conclude its run in the next few months — tells of a world where Superman has set himself up as the despotic ruler of Earth after the murder of Lois Lane and their unborn child. (A murder that caused him to break his own moral code and kill the Joker in retaliation.) For Taylor, that posed a particular problem.

"Superman is my favorite superhero. He was the guy I could believe could fly as a kid. He was my guy, you know? So, for the first chance I had to write him requiring me to have him do something so horrific, the first thing I did was call my mom and say, 'They want me to do this to Superman and Lois,'" he laughed.

"I think what people saw, and really responded to, was seeing a writer who really didn't want to do this to Superman and Lois. You could see that reluctance on the page, so it had to make sense. Everything that was happening had to make sense."

With Superman going bad, there was only one hero who could lead the charge against him.

"I love Batman," Taylor said of Injustice's other main character. "I give him a lot of stick because he's the biggest superhero in the world and that's wrong. Superman should be. But I'm sitting here in a Batman shirt, with a Superman wallet. I love both of these characters. To me, Injustice, regardless of what else was going on, was the break-up of the World's Finest partnership."

With the teaser trailer for the game showed various DC heroes turning on each other, Taylor promised that the upcoming comic book will reveal an in-depth backstory to what has happened to the former Justice League.

"The new game takes place two years after the first Injustice, and this new series fills in the time in-between. After the first game, you have Superman locked up. You have the world in turmoil. It essentially needs rebuilding, and the guy to do that is Batman. So you have Batman essentially trying to rebuild the world while other forces try to prevent that, or rebuild it in their own image. So he's got to bring other heroes — like Harley Quinn — to do so. And then you've got characters like Supergirl, who's showing up for the first time."

This isn't exactly the Supergirl audiences are familiar with, however. "She hasn't rocketed to Earth yet. She arrives in our comic,' Taylor said. "She arrives in the middle of everything. There's a lot for her to handle."

Returning to the franchise after an absence of a couple of years — Taylor left the Injustice series in 2014 — brought an unexpectedly pleasant surprise, he said.

"I've read the script to the new game and what's really interesting is how much of our first comic has informed what happens in the second game. So anyone who's been reading the comics, they'll have a richer experience and the sequel will make a lot more sense. It's great. We've created this massive, multi-media epic. It's now a canonical ongoing story."

Injustice 2, he teased, will live up to the billing of "epic," leading up to the events of the new game with plenty of unexpected characters and plot twists that even gamers won't see coming. "When you're writing Superman or Batman, these are the greatest toys in the world," he said. "To be given them to play with — you know you have to give them back at some point, but, man. You play hard when you've got them."

Injustice 2 will launch in 2017.