How Injustice Beat DC Comics' Movies at Their Own Game

The story of how a knife juggler, a bunch of artists, and the creators of Mortal Kombat got together to do what Hollywood still can't figure out.
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Before he was a TV and comics writer, Tom Taylor was a street performer. He juggled fire and knives for change from passersby. Ask him about it, and he'll say his work life hasn't really changed much, even if it's a bit less dangerous.

"I write desperately wanting to entertain people at every moment at whatever I'm working on," says Taylor, "because I'm worried otherwise they won't put money in my hat."

In his own estimation, Taylor has always held onto more than he can fit in his hands, teaching in addition to juggling during his time as a street performer. Now he's a successful comic book writer for both Marvel and DC Comics. He has his own Netflix series, The Deep, which will premiere its second season later this year. Four years ago, however, one of those myriad projects suddenly took on a life of its own, becoming an outright phenomenon that caught the comics world entirely by surprise: Injustice: Gods Among Us, a comic that, by most estimations, should not have come anywhere near "good." Instead, it, and the fighting game it was based on, has done what the DC Extended Universe of films so far characterized by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad so far has failed to do, and redefined one of the most famous rosters of characters for a new generation.

Some context: Injustice was a prequel comic (strike one, because prequels) to a video game of the same name (strike two, because video game spin-offs are "historically, not a benchmark of quality" according to Taylor) and a digital-only series, which meant that—at first—it wouldn't be printed and sold in comic shops or bookstores, instead directly beamed to apps like Comixology or Kindle. In theory, digital series can be more risky or experimental, and they sometimes are. However, when a video game spinoff is a digital first series, it doesn't exactly feel like a vote of confidence (strike three).

Like the comic, the Injustice video game that it was based on also had the deck stacked against it. Created by NetherRealm Studios, the shop most famous for Mortal Kombat, it espoused the sort of grim aesthetic of the DCEU films—only this was April of 2013. Man of Steel was still two months away from premiering, and the dark-and-gritty vibe was only just starting to become tiresome. Injustice's story was almost comically bleak: its inciting incident has the Joker, for kicks, trick Superman into killing his wife and unborn child while a nuke obliterates all of Metropolis. In a fury, Superman kills the Joker and becomes a despot, imposing martial law while the majority of the Justice League falls in line, forcing Batman to hop over to another universe and recruit a more morally intact Justice League to bring his newly fascist pals in line.

"We do have a darker approach to everything we do," says Steve Beran, art director at NetherRealm studios. He mostly attributes that to the studio's heritage as the home of the notoriously violent Mortal Kombat fighting games. But it wasn't like they wanted Superman ripping out Batman's spine or anything. "It is tricky, because you have to respect the characters and not get too crazy with them, but DC's been really cool about us pushing the line and doing what we wanted to do with them. It's actually a lot of fun!"