It has been widely known for several months that all of the current DC weekly titles (Batman Eternal, The New 52: Future’s End, and Earth 2: World’s End) are scheduled to end in March 2015 which will coincide at least partially with DC’s complete move of their operations to California. DC co-publisher Dan DiDio posted on his Facebook account as far back as April 2014 that:
Batman Eternal started this April and runs to next March after which it takes a brief hiatus, Futures End starts this May and ends the last week of March 2015, and Worlds End starts in October and ends the same week as the others next March, hope that clears things up.
And though the original post was deleted from his account, he did mention it again in an interview with Newsarama.
Newsarama: OK, I’m going off from Infinity Man, but you kind of dropped a bomb last week on your Facebook page when you said that all this stuff is ending in March 2015. Is there a significance to the fact that all three weeklies are either ending or going on hiatus in March?
Dan DiDio: You know what, it’s funny. That was my mistake. I didn’t think I dropped a bomb. I thought I already said it somewhere else and it was already in print. So that was my mistake. [Laughs.] And I’ve been brought to realize that it was never mentioned anyplace before that, because that’s not where I should have been saying something like that. I thought I was reiterating old information. But yes, that is true. That’s what we’re doing. One of the things I was to say is that, especially when it comes to weekly series, it’s important for the fans to understand the length of their investment and time they’ll be investing in those weekly books. And that’s one of the reasons why I like to mention when they’re going to end, because they don’t end cleanly — they’re not all 52-part series, like all the weeklies done before. They’re all ending at different numbers, at different lengths, on a particular day though.
Newsarama: But my question was, is there significance to the fact that they’re all ending at the same time?
Dan DiDio: Everything that we do is significant.
However, exactly what a potential “hiatus” might mean has been left up to speculation. Many have assumed that while the other weeklies will end altogether, that Batman Eternal might continue with a new story (and potentially new creative minds involved). This assumption gained a little more credibility when Tim Seeley spoke with Bleeding Cool earlier this week at Rose City Comic Con. While promoting other works on which he is currently working, Seeley also commented that he had been asked if he’d like to work on more issues of Batman Eternal after a 2-month gap. He went on to say that:
They’ve asked if I’d be interested in more Batman Eternal but I don’t know if that means it continues after the initial 52 issue run. They only ASKED. [And] they haven’t told me yet! (Laughs) I may end up being one of the last to know!
It seems odd because even Scott Snyder himself mentioned the series running for about sixty issues over in an interview on Comicosity:
And there’s so many things that will happen in Eternal. There are so many issues in that thing — 60 issues, essentially double what I’ve written on Batman already in its entirety.
So, while this still gives fans of Batman Eternal anything certain, it does lend credence to the idea that the weekly title may continue even after the current story ends. So how many issues do you think the series will have? Or will they keep it as an ongoing since it continues to be one of DC’s top books every month?
