Howard Porter replaces Kevin Maguire on Justice League 3000, Maguire speaks about the change

Yesterday, Kevin Maguire sent out a tweet announcing that he'd been fired, and taken off of the Justice League 3000 series he was doing with Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis, which was due for release in October. In the following hours, discussions took place over twitter about possible new offers for Maguire, before he later spoke out on his facebook page.

Today, it's been announced that DC have already found a replacement artist for Maguire, Howard Porter.

Porter's Superman design for
Justice League 3000

You'll probably know his work from the character designs that he did for the series a few months ago, featuring future counterparts of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and Green Lantern.

This also comes with the news that Justice League 3000's release date has been pushed back from October to December, to accommodate for the big changes on the art side of the series.

Also, today, Maguire took to the Bleeding Cool forums to speak a bit more about his current situation:

Well, I don’t want to make any big deal about it but I suppose I should say something. This is, as I tweeted, very humiliating. Obviously, I was looking forward to working on a fairly high profile book. I haven’t had a top ten book since the 80s and I thought this would finally be my shot at doing one. But it’s DC‘s book, it’s their property, they can do whatever they want with it. They don’t owe me anything. I’ve been told they wanted a book that was “dark and gritty”, so I’m perplexed as to why they chose us for that. We did exactly the kind of book you would expect from us. Lots of action and humor. AND I turned down a Bendis X-Men project to do JL3K.


As for my doing other projects with DC, they offered me a four page story and a 10 page digital first story. They’re paychecks, so I’m grateful for that, but they’re no Justice League #1. I really don’t want to do back ups and fill-ins for my career. So, right now, I’ll do the four pager and then I think that’ll be it for me and DC for a while. I’ve received some interesting offers from other companies. Marvel generously offered me an issue of a cool book, so I’m going to do that for now, then see what happens.


I was supposed to do Baltimore Comic Con next month with Giffen and DeMatteis, but I’ll be canceling that for obvious reason. Apart from the fact that I no longer have a project to promote with them, Giffen’s Newsarama quote, which I’m certain had no intended malice, still kinda stung.


That’s it. That covers all I have to say about this. It’ll be forgotten news by next week and we all move on with our lives.

I have to say, I was looking forward to seeing Maguire's art on this series and the original idea of what it would've been like seems to have changed since I interviewed writer, Keith Giffen a few months ago. It's a bit of  a shame, really...

(Sources: Bleeding Cool and Newsarama)