DC Comics chief creative officer and publisher Jim Lee has denied rumours of a reboot of the DC Universe dubbed 5G. During a pre-recorded Q&A segment at DC FanDome: Explore the Multiverse, Lee confirmed that DC won’t be publishing a comic or event called 5G.
“There won’t be a project called 5G, or a big reboot, or whatever,” Lee said. “We really want to focus on individual titles, and organically build up individual characters over the course of the next year.”
“We had a lot of great ideas that we were floating around. 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.”
“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 continued. “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.”
While DC had never actually announced it, 5G, or Generation Five, was rumoured to be built around the creation of a new DC timeline, with all major characters aging up and the newer, younger generation taking their place. Former co-publisher Dan DiDio had revealed glimpses of the detailed timeline in 2019, dividing DC’s entire publishing history into four distinct generations, with Wonder Woman being the first superhero.
However, with the exit of DiDio from DC, the cancellation of DC’s Free Comic Book Day 2020 release, Generation Zero and the pandemic, there seem to be no plans for 5G in the near future.