Tim Seeley held an interview with Newsarama regarding his story arc in the new Batman series, Batman: Eternal.
My arc is very Batgirl-focused. There are other characters in it, but Barbara is my character for my arc. She's not so vendetta focused, usually. She's focused on helping people. The way she's typically done, she's not the one using her position to get back at people who did her wrong. She's the spark; she's more light-hearted. So her going on this big adventure thing makes a lot of sense. I think having the different Bat-characters really adds to his (Batman) universe. You can just see, while those people help characterize Batman, Batman helps characterize those characters. They bounce off each other and reflect each other.
There are a bunch of new characters introduced in this, which was one of the reasons for the existence of the weekly — to populate Batman's world even further. We, as a team, came up with a bunch of new, interesting characters — both villains and allies.
If I'm writing a character, I need to know what they look like. What they wear, how they look — those things just help me write the character. So sometimes, when we were coming up — just a bunch of writers coming up with stuff, we didn't have a visual, and it would bother me. I couldn't move on until I could really get a sense of who they were.
So I would just draw them. But I think being able to think visually is a helpful skill, especially when you're working with a bunch of people, so you can get everyone on the same page.
According to the interview, Seeley states that Batman: Eternal is a celebatory series that will revive old characters, introduce new ones, and really to build on Batman's universe in Gotham City. How the writers will be doing the series on a weekly basis is that each writer will be focusing a specific genre or a specifc character. For Seeley, he will focusing on the action genre and doing a story arc on Batgirl. This will allow the writers to focus on different sections of the series while Scott Snyder (writer of Batman) and James Tynion IV (writer of Talon and Red Hood & The Outlaws) will be doing overarching plot lines that will move the series forward. Batman: Eternal will begin its weekly run in 2014.
Posted by Kristina Collins
