Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Friday, September 15th. I can't believe we are halfway through September. My God. The kids are fully in school, we're back in that routine, and there's part of me that's kind of sad about it. I miss them. I mean, as much as I was ready for them to go back to school, I miss having them around the way they were over the summer. And they're always stressed about this test or that quiz. I was helping Emmett with a quiz up until late last night about how you measure changes in acceleration and velocity. I don't know, I wanted to just, like, play Zelda with him or something. Anyway, the weather has changed, which is nice where we are. It's 65° instead of 80°, so fall is coming. It feels good. A bit of housekeeping really quick. Zapp Con is this Saturday in Wayne, NJ. The whole con is just one day. It's really fun. It's me and Tom King and Amy Chu and a whole bunch of people, come by. Ty is going to post my signing times here:
It's one of those cons where you'll get to actually interact with us a lot. I think it's going to be full, but I don't think it'll be overwhelming. And again, if you're a paid Best Jacket subscriber at the beginning of any of those signings, I'll have you up in a private line. So in case there's a big line, you can skip.
Also next week, we'll do our “How to Write Superhero Comics” masterclass. And then probably the following week, I think the following week, we'll do a class looking at your work. Right now, tentatively, I'm going to say Thursday night for the “How to Write Superhero Comics” masterclass, usually 9:30pm EST. Should be really fun! Been thinking about it for a very, very long time.
Also, we have Undiscovered Country #25, the beginning of a new arc back in stores.
Barnstormers #3 is out:
We announced that Canary is coming out from Dark Horse as the next installment in our Comixology line. It's been coming out in incredible printed format from Dark Horse. They do such a great job with extra materials and just delivering like a real elevated print version, so I’m so, so happy with what they’re doing over there and so excited to do more stuff with Dark Horse as well!
So I wanted to do a quick post about Batman Day. It's Batman Day tomorrow, right? September 16th. That's what we've made it. I was there for the very first one when I was writing Batman. So I thought I'd do a tiny post about what Batman means to me and how my thoughts on him as a character have changed over the years through working on him. For me personally, he's my favorite character in like, all of literature. Not just comics. And I remember vividly running home from school to go watch Batman ‘66 as a kid, which they showed on reruns on Channel 11, and taking it so seriously. I didn't understand camp. I mean, I was a kid, and I just thought it was so epic and high drama and funny and wonderful. And then when I was in college, the animated series did that for me, but there's always been a Batman that's meant something to me at different times in my life, whether it was some of my very first experiences with how powerful and resonant a superhero story could be, like reading Dark Knight Returns when I was nine or ten and it reflected all my fears about the Cold War and the city falling apart and gangs and all those kinds of things that a boy at that age was afraid of and here was Batman facing off with him, all the way to recent times when Nolan was doing The Dark Knight or the new The Batman movie.
I mean, I love the fact that he's a character that has not only been there for me in different versions from when I was a kid, but still is. I still have some Batman stories I would love to do one day. One in particular that I've been thinking about forever that I know I'm going to have to do at some point. No matter what, even if it's something that people say, “oh, you did so much Batman or whatever,” the point is, Batman is a real touchstone for me in the superhero universe. And I've tried to figure out why over the last few years, because when I started on Batman, there were certain aspects of Batman that I really, really found important. I had things that, like, I knew I needed to put in every issue when I started on Batman, the main series with Bruce. Every issue I wanted to show some really awesome gadget. Every issue I wanted to show his detective work. Every issue I wanted a great badass fight scene where he has some cool one-liner. All the trappings of Batman were important to me to show and I love those things about him. The cars and the vehicles and Alfred and the cave and the Rogues Gallery and all of it.
But the longer I was on the book and the more I sort of spoke to other Batman writers who really mattered to me like Grant Morrison and Denny O’Neil, the more I started to realize that he's also probably, as Grant says, “the most adaptable superhero character ever.” When you burn him down to his core, so many of those things that you think are important or crucial to Batman really aren't and the stories that I'm most interested in now do that reductive or stripping away or trial by fire approach to Batman where they take away the things that you would assume are quintessential to him and flip things or invert things. You can see it through the trajectory of my career—I started doing very traditional Batman and even though we took our risks, we tried to add to the mythology in ways that might have been upsetting, like, we added a possible brother in the Court of Owls and all this kind of stuff and made Joker more of a horror character and maybe he knew who Bruce was and we redid the origin. But as my career in relation to Batman progressed, I became more and more comfortable changing the context and the trappings of Batman. So, Court of Owls, very traditional in terms of the things you'll see in Batman, right? The cave, the vehicles, he starts from a position of power. And as we go, Zero Year was when it was okay to start to strip some of those things away and change exactly how he fell into the cave, change what the Red Hood Gang meant in the early years of Batman.
All of it to try and make it more resonant, to try and make it more personal, to try and make it a Gotham that reflected in some way the fears and anxieties that I had for myself and for my kids. And then with Commissioner Gordon as Batman, it was a real test. It was saying, “what does Batman need? Could a real person be Batman? Could somebody as part of an establishment be Batman?” It was like, “no, they can't. Batman is more of an ideal. Batman is these pure few things that you have to cling to and almost can't be allocated to an actual person in the real world because they're so pure and so primal.” And so as I kept going and then I got to do All-Star Batman, which was all about that. It was taking him out of Gotham City. Doing things with him like grindhouse, chain gang, Two-Face, up at the top of the world fighting Mr. Freeze. It was being in Washington, D.C. and fighting Ra's al Ghul in a way that took away all the stuff that he was used to using in his fights.
And then Metal and Death Metal was an absolute extreme version of pushing at the limits of what could be contained within Batman's mythology or how to add to it or stretch it or push it in ways. It took it to the very boundaries of what Batman could be, and he's literally a zombie who controls other zombies in Death Metal, the Lord of the Dead. He faces off with hundreds of evil versions of himself and traverses time-space in Metal.
So you can see me pushing him further and further into different zones, and I'm very interested in taking him back to basics. But let’s take him back to basics, I'd want to do it in a way that investigates what things are important about his mythos. But why? So all of it, what am I getting at? What I'm getting at is that Batman to me isn't about the wealth. In fact, like my least favorite line in any Batman movie or TV show is when they ask him what his superpower is in Justice League, forgive me, I know there's a lot I love about that movie, but when he says “my superpower is I'm rich,” it really turns my stomach. Because to me, what Batman's superpower is, is that he faces something horrible. He sees the worst of humanity. He has this thing happen to him that’s terrifying and crushing. And he decides to use that thing to fuel him to make sure the same kind of thing won't happen to someone else, and he uses it to become the pinnacle of heroism. Every day, all he thinks about, like a samurai or a soldier, is going out and doing his job.
And that, to me, is the core of Batman. The core of Batman is facing your fear, experiencing something that you know is the darkest aspect of human nature. Facing that thing night after night in various ways, going out and every time some fear pops up that says you're not going to be able to do this because you say I'm using that to overcome. That's Batman to me at core.
Superman, yes, he has a traumatic beginning because obviously Krypton blows up, he loses his family. But Superman doesn't experience trauma growing up. He doesn't see the worst in humanity. He's surrounded by the best in humanity. And so Superman is someone who looks at us and sees the best of us and challenges us to be these versions of ourselves that he knows we can be because he's seen them in his parents, in Lois, in people that have inspired him. He's an outsider who longs to be, or who is proud to be in a lot of ways, human because he looks at us and sees our best first.
Wonder Woman is someone who is half and half to me. She grew up in a not-idealistic place, even though Paradise Island is Paradise Island, but a place that was well aware of the ugliness of man in some ways. And so therefore was also a pinnacle a social experiment in this godly place. So Wonder Woman is someone who sees the truth. She sees the good and the bad. Batman is someone who knows and sees the bad and yet believes that we can be better, believes you should be better, believes I should be better, believes he can always be better.
And so he's a character that I gravitate towards. I think a lot of people who have dark periods in their lives or who have anxiety or depression or have experiences with trauma or have experiences with really dark thoughts or just bad periods, Batman is the one that says, “I know that that's what happens. I know that's who we are. I see it all the time. I live in it. And yet, I'm encouraging you to use it as fuel to not only overcome that thing, but to make yourself even better for next time. Always be fighting. Always be moving forward. You're the best. I'm the best. I'm Batman. I don't lose. You don't lose.” That to me is at core what he is. Everything else almost is mutable. He doesn't need the money. He doesn't even need the Rogues Gallery as much as I love them. He doesn't need the mansion. He doesn't need Alfred. And all those things are things I love. I wouldn't want to strip them away. But at core, what is Batman? If you ask him, what is his superpower? That's what he is to me. He's somebody who faces trauma, faces fear, faces self doubt, faces all of it and says, “I see it. I'm gonna use it as fuel and use it as motivation to go out there and face it in some form every single moment of my life to be better and better and better and be refined by that fire into something that's just the pinnacle of human or the zenith of heroism.”
He cares about nothing else and that's what makes him happy to me. That's why, like, of course, you know, he's happy as a father with Damian. Of course, he's happy with his family. But he's a fictional character as well. And as a fictional character, to me, when people say, “why can't he be married and retire and be happy?” Because that wouldn't make him happy. What makes him happy is the same thing, I think, that makes somebody happy who is absolutely 1,000% devoted to a purpose in life. His purpose in life is to make sure that what happened to him or things that would traumatize people or harm coming to people or anything like that won't happen. And what makes him happy is going out and putting himself on the line to make sure that he does the best job he can to stop that. Because he knows what it's like to be in that dark place. And that's Batman to me at core. Everything else can be changed. Anyway, happy Batman Day. Go get some great Batman books. I wanna put a couple recommendations in here of books that are a little bit more off the beaten path. Obviously, whenever I list my seminal ones, it's usually the same as most people's. Dark Knight Returns and Year One and Long Halloween and Arkham Asylum and The Killing Joke and there are a few outliers like Venom and The Cult and Gothic that I love and Ego, but I'll put a few here that I think also show Batman pushed to his mythological limit where someone takes Batman out of the context of familiar Gotham to show how, again, the trappings and the peripheral elements or some of the iconographic elements of Batman can be changed. And in such a way that at first you think, wait, is this Batman? And then you realize it's a story that shows you how pure Batman is, and it's very much Batman.
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight by Brian Augustyn, Mike Mignola, P. Craig Russell & David Hornung
Batman: Holy Terror by Alan Brennert, Norm Breyfogle & Lovern Kindzierski
Batman: Nine Lives by Dean Motter and Michael Lark
Batman: Year 100 by Paul Pope and José Villarrubia
Batman: White Knight by Sean Gordon Murphy and Matt Hollingsworth
All right. Take care, you guys. Have a good weekend. Come see me at Zapp Con. And the following weekend, I'll be in Milford, PA for an arts fair. If you're anywhere near there, it's going to be really fun. It's like, Harvey Fierstein and me, and it's a whole thing. It's going to be a blast!
S
Newsletter #156: What Makes a Good Batman Story?