Since it debuted earlier this summer, fans have been noting the similarities between the Scott Snyder-led Justice League comic and the classic Saturday morning cartoon The Super Friends.

Not only did the new series rebuild the Hall of Justice base for DC's premier super team, it also sees earth's heroes facing off against the greatest villains as the swamp-based Legion of Doom. However, these Easter eggs are just set dressing for the series writer. The ever themetically-minded Snyder used the bases and lineups from the classic cartoons to drive deeper into how he views the Justice League as a franchise operating in this moment in time.

CBR spoke with the fan favorite writer during Comic-Con International, and Snyder opened up about what the Hall of Justice means for how fans see the League as well as the true meaning of Doom for the path of his book as it drives its way to a 2019 event.

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CBR: Let's start by talking about Justice League and the storytelling style on the book. You've worked to cram as much as you can into each issue. Does that come from the team aspect or a new creative direction for you?

Scott Snyder: It was really important to me to set a certain kind of tone. I felt coming out of Metal... Metal was me and Greg having all the toys and doing a big event. So it was sort of non-stop punishing guitar riffs. Just crazy stuff. And we only had six issues of our own stuff together there, so it was one of those series where you had to put everything in, as much as you could. It felt right for that tone.


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With Justice League, I wanted it to feel more magisterial -- have a little more grandeur and a little bit more cosmic scope. It's a little bit slower, but at the same time, for it to feel important to me -- and this is not a knock on the Justice League stuff people have done, because there's been good stuff over the past ten years -- what I felt was missing was the connectivity and the sense of purpose in the DCU itself. [It needed to] reflect the stories happening in other books and generate stories for other books.

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So with this first arc in particular, where the Legion of Doom comes in and the Hall of Justice and Hall of Doom are literally opposing architectures, I wanted it to feel that every character and every idea is there in the first arc. So you can see the scope and see the energy – the bombast and the sense of purpose of this whole thing. And it's connected to the rest of the DCU because the stuff that's spinning out like the Invisible Spectrum and the Still Force... you'll see those in Flash, and you'll see them in some Green Lantern stuff. We want you to feel like this book is the heart and the soul of the DCU – not because we're more important but because that's what this book should be.

It's why we used the Hall of Justice. Whereas Grant used the Watchtower because there hadn't been a Justice League of America that was larger than life, my idea was that they've been larger than life for so long that you can go into the Hall of Justice and see their trophy room and maybe catch a glimpse of Swamp Thing through a window. I wanted it to feel inclusive and connective.

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You have your core cast, but you keep bringing in Plastic Man or Swamp Thing in the background. The Justice League is a bigger organization, but you've got the pieces you'll be telling story with, it seems.

Yeah. It's really personal to me, honestly. Not to get too nostalgic, but being [at DC] for so long, Justice League was the book I wanted to write since I was a kid. Batman will always be my favorite character, but Justice League was sort of the golden ring because of The Super Friends, and then the Justice League animated stuff to me was the best. Those interpretations were the entire DCU as this one big, aspirational, crazy, lunatic, surprising storytelling engine. Those were so perfect and visionary in that way that I felt Justice League would be perfect as that. I don't know how much more I have in me with big superhero stuff.

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This culminates. I'd say to anyone watching that this is one giant story from Metal to No Justice to Justice League. And in about a year from now, you'll start to see the pieces come together again. But I want you to feel when you pick it up that it has purpose. It's dealing with things that are personal to me. What it's about for me is when the Source Wall breaks in Metal, it's like the universe is slowly bleeding to death. It was supposed to live a lot longer, and it's not.

What the heroes realize is that when this happens, planets are going to start spinning out of the universe, and universes from the multiverse are going to start going, and soon that will become part of the main story in a big way. And if they don't fix it, it will wind up getting recycled in this void. The Justice League is like, "We have to do these certain things." They find this design and secret map. It's "If we can do this, we can make the multiverse what it needs to be and get it where it's supposed to be." But the Legion of Doom is like, "No no. We're going to turn this into the weapon it's supposed to be – that it was always meant to be. We'll get what's ours and kill whatever's on the other side."

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For me, it really represents these two philosophies. Justice is the belief that we're better than our biology. We're better than our fate. But the natural world doesn't have any justice. It doesn't reward right and it doesn't punish wrong. We impose that dream upon ourselves and our world to be better. That's why the symbol itself is these lines reaching above the semi-circle. It's meant to be reaching higher than you are. And doom is the opposite. It's this triangle with lines reaching down. Luthor says, "Our biology, our DNA, our fate" – which "doom" meant in its original form – "embrace it. Let's be predators. Let's be dark. Embrace your inner self." I think it's creating a moment in time where everybody is divisive and on one side or the other. I want people asking, "Are we doom, or are we justice?"