The general logic goes that Justice League is the flagship title of the DC Universe. When you’ve united some of the most recognizable and powerful superheroes in the world under one banner, it isn’t to tell small stories. As Justice League goes, so goes the DC Universe. Or at least that’s how it should be.

But over the last few years, no matter how big the story (and they’ve all been big), Justice League has felt fairly self contained, with its tales rarely impacting the rest of the DCU. That isn’t to say it hasn’t been good, as the book wrapped its previous volume with a terrific run by Christopher Priest and Pete Woods, for example. But under the stewardship of Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, and a host of killer artists, Justice League is currently changing the very fabric of the DC Universe, introducing wild new concepts about the nature of powers and how things work by the handful each issue.

“It’s really refreshing,” James Tynion IV says. “Everything building up to the current place of Justice League books and where we wanted to go, like the Source Wall breaking down, operates kind of on two levels. For one, it set a little story in motion for what we’re doing for this Justice League. On a story level it was also meant to represent that we wanted to take all of the rules of the DC Universe and literally tear the wall open and make it so everything that you felt was a complete tapestry, you suddenly realize you’re only seeing a piece of it. We wanted all of the characters to be faced with not understanding the entirety of their mythology.”

That’s pretty heady stuff, but there’s a more basic reason for the scale of the stories, too. “We also just wanted these books to be incredibly fun,” he admits.