Warner Bros. tapping Ava DuVernay to direct a movie about Jack Kirby’s New Gods characters from DC Comics seemed like a surprising choice, if only because of how unexpectedly awesome it was, and now it looks like she’s brought in a bit of a ringer to help her craft the cinematic adaptation of Kirby’s “Fourth World” stories. As announced on her Twitter page (via Deadline), DuVernay has hired comic writer Tom King to help her write The New Gods, which seems like a pretty smart choice considering King has won awards for his work on his New Gods-adjacent Mister Miracle series and his Batman comics, so he’s not only a guy with a solid familiarity with the DC universe, but with Jack Kirby’s weird corner of the DC universe specifically.
For those who don’t know DC’s New Gods, they’re basically superhero-y deities who took the place of the old pantheon of gods after they all died. There are good guys and bad guys, with the former living on the idyllic paradise New Genesis and the latter living on the crater-filled nightmare planet of Apokolips. Along with Mister Miracle, the New Gods include folks like Granny Goodness (who is actually bad), Darkseid (the big villain of the DC universe), and Big Barda (who DuVernay has said is her favorite superhero).
Now let’s just hope the plot doesn’t require King to put in a much-hyped superhero wedding, because it didn’t work out so well the last time he did that.