To that point, with the Legion having never really been in continuity, has it been a challenge for you to sort of reinvent this threat that a lot of people associate with the camp of Saturday morning cartoons and make them a big, legitimate thing?

The whole idea, with everything, is to be able to give you what looks like “comfort food” but reconnect it to the stuff that I really loved growing up. I wanted to create a line up here that reflected the animated stuff, that reflected Super Friends — all of those kind of things that bring new people in the door with that kind of “core” love of our characters — but then use it to just launch into place you’d never expect.

Even though the team looks core, that we’re back in familiar places, when we get our story going — even by page one — you’re going to see how ambitious and big we’re going. We want to take you places that you’ve never been in the DCU. This is really the culmination of a lot of years of work for us, the way that Metal really put a lot of the treads of Batman to the floor, this is really going to take everything we’ve been doing and roll it forward.

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You’re going to see a lot of the characters from Metal come back in this, Barbatos, the Dark Multiverse, you’re going to see more about the World Forge. The Titans that you’re experiencing in No Justice, these celestials, they play a huge part in the secrets of the Source Wall and this huge arc we’re going to do later with Aquaman. We wanted it to be one giant soap opera.

These are the stories I’ve wanted to tell since I was a kid. Batman will always be my favorite character, no secret there, but Justice League was the golden ring. That was the book that I’ve had my eye on since I was a kid. This is my absolute like, opus for superhero storytelling. Everything I’ve done at DC builds to it. And I’m so grateful to have such great partners in Jorge Jimenez and Jim Cheung — also in James Tynion and Joshua Williamson, writing books that intertwine with Justice League itself. With that, I think with these guys at my side and the latitude that DC’s given us, I really think we can tell the most epic story over the next two years that culminates into something huge.

Looking at this line up, I have to ask — I see a bunch of pretty stable, at least relatively sane villains here… and then there’s the Joker, who is obviously going to be a whole different animal. How are you approaching someone like him on a team?

He’s got a very dark role, but as the series goes on, he actually becomes more and more important to the Legion, and Luthor’s reasons for picking him become more and more apparent. But! I didn’t want to sort of put him out there and have him be doing everything and use him really quickly in a big way, because Joker is an extremely special character to me. If I’m gonna put him on a team, I need him to have a very specific role.

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Honestly, Luthor sees him as his partner on the team. Luthor has this vision all of a sudden of what we’re supposed to be as a species, what humans are supposed to be, what people are supposed to evolve to — and he sees Joker as a great inspiration in the story. Joker is almost a touchstone for him to go back and say, “Am I doing this right? Does this bring us closer to what we’re supposed to be?” Joker gleefully plays that role.

It’s almost like — if you look at Justice and Doom, I drew symbols for each of them, the Justice circle is almost a semi-circle, with these lines going through it. The Doom symbol is the same symbol, flipped upside down with a little triangle over it. They’re opposites of each other. To me, if justice is something we impose on the world — out in nature, right is not reward, wrong is not punished, but we strive to be better than this make up. We strive to be better than what we’re made of. So in that way, we impose a system upon the world and there’s the idea of justice.

Well doom, in its original form, is just a word that meant “fate.” It implied “fate” without any connotations. So what Luthor sees is that our nature is bad, our nature is petty, predatory, we’re animals. We’re biologically at odds with this system we’ve created, so why not embrace that? Why not realize that the true heroes here are the Legion of Doom? As a reader, that’s the question: are you going to pick Justice, or are you going to pick Doom?

Justice League #1 hits shelves June 6.

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