DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan DiDio has all but confirmed that one of the effects of the publisher's line-wide relaunch will be the end of the marriage between Superman and Lois Lane.

“Let’s just say it's being reexamined,” he tells NBC New York's PopcornBiz blog, “because it's something that I think is something that is so valuable to the character's story that you really want to explore all facets of it. Not just as it exists currently.”

Rumblings of the dissolution of the 15-year-old marriage began on May 31, even as the company announced it will debut 52 first issues in September as part of a sweeping overhaul designed to introduce "a more modern, diverse DC Universe." Among the changes to characters and continuity, Bleeding Cool contended, would be a clean slate in which the big 1996 wedding never happened, apparently freeing Superman to have a relationship with Wonder Woman.

The marriage, depicted in the one-shot Superman: The Wedding Album, was a major media spectacle -- it was even billed as "The Event of the Century" on the cover -- that coincided with the episode of the popular ABC television series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in which the characters tied the knot.

Fifteen years later, a relaunch of Action Comics -- the title whose 1938 debut introduced both Superman and Lois Lane -- by Grant Morrison and Rags Morales promises "a new chapter" for the Man of Steel that attempts to "refresh some ideas that have maybe become so well known that people think they've got it all figured out." One of those ideas, it looks like, is his marriage to Lois.

“I think what you're going to see is a lot of big changes for Superman,” DiDio tells PopcornBiz. "We really went back to the core of the character. And more importantly, we got somebody in Grant Morrison, who's really taking the character and reinventing him so you feel a real contemporary tone, a really contemporary time, but still staying true to the core. I think it's so important for us to make sure Superman stays as relevant today as he did when he first was created back in the '30s.”