And the end is here. Our final look at James Tynion’s newsletter takes us away from his time on the Bat-Books. Instead, he shares his advice and hopes for what future Batman writers will keep in mind when they have their turn writing the Batman title. And while Tynion’s last Thinking Bat-Thoughts has been released, there is still plenty to think about.
FINAL THOUGHTS TO FUTURE CREATORS IN GOTHAM CITY
- “BATMAN” IS THE FLAGSHIP TITLE OF A LINE OF BOOKS – If you’re writing it, don’t silo yourself away from the other Bat-Books. You want to connect with your fellow Bat-Writers, and build shit together. If you get your hands on ‘BATMAN’, your decisions will reverberate through all the Gotham Titles, and you should encourage that, and enable that, because it will make your book stronger. If you’re working in tandem with your fellow creators, and your editors, the line of books is the strongest sales force that exists in superhero comics. If you don’t try, your book is still going to drive the secondary titles but it’ll happen without your input, inelegantly in a way that will impact what you’re doing yourself. Try to build an era for Batman, not just a run. Give your peers cool toys and characters to play with, and big touchstone moments for them to react off of. If you don’t the bosses are going to shoehorn something external into your titles, and you’re going to have to react rather than be proactive. Be proactive. This goes for the supporting titles as well as the big books. Don’t build silos in the supporting titles either, pick up each others toys and play with them. Let them build and crescendo off of each other. If you’re just in a corner by yourself, you might as well be doing a Black Label book. Lean into the strength of a shared continuity.
Thoughts: Tynion has a real sense of being a team player. He’s got his ego, he’s got his ideas, but unlike Morrison, Snyder, and King, he appears to be much happier giving away pieces of his plans and able to work with others to incorporate their plans into his. Perhaps that doesn’t make for the kind of runs that stand up and shout “I am Important Batman Comic,” but this run has been incredibly fun to read, especially with the artists that Tynion has been able to work with. I don’t think most writers have the ability to think in such a collaborative, and even managerial, way as Tynion. He’s got a gift for the office politics and how they interact with the creative decisions that I think most writers prefer to ignore – but cannot, as Tynion points out – as those decisions always impact the whole office, so it’s generally better to know what that impact will be and get in front of it, rather than behind.
- BATMAN IS NOT A LONER – Batman was created in May 1939. Robin was created in March 1940. Batman hasn’t been a solo act since 10 months after he was first introduced to readers. There’s power in a solo Bat-Story, but some people get it in their heads that Batman is some kind of loner character, and that is completely ahistorical. The larger story of Batman is a kid who lost his biological family when he was a child, who built himself into a crimefighter to prevent that from happening to other kids, and then who started building a new found family around himself to prevent children from going through the pain he did. He is frustrating, and a weirdo, he is terrible at expressing his emotions, and he pushes people away constantly, but he isn’t a loner. This also impacts how the book rests in the line. Batman is the center of a whole web of comic book titles. If he’s pushing everybody away, that means that he has the same boring relationship with each character in each supporting book. Let the books be vibrant and alive.
Thoughts: Anyone who reads Tynion knows that he thinks Batman is part of a vast family of new and old characters. Anyone who honestly thinks about Batman’s history will acknowledge that this has been true for eighty years. And I wish future Batman writers would pay attention to his final two sentences of advice – it’s better to have a Batman with often complicated, but not boring “I work alone” relationships.
- GOTHAM CITY IS NOT A REAL CITY – Gotham is a nightmare of a real city, with murder clown gangs fighting street ninjas every night. Where colorful villains and crime bosses have been in power for decades, and there are dozens of costumed characters jumping across rooftops day-to-day. There is power to showing what the mundane looks like inside of Gotham, but there is no power in making Gotham mundane. It’s an extraordinary, strange vibrant place, and at every point you should be trying to show how extraordinary and strange it is. Trying to make it into a generic New York clone isn’t going to ground your book, it’s like deliberately avoiding a seasoning that can make any Bat-Story read better. One thing that we tried to do a little bit in the last year, but I would love to see future creators do more with is trying to give every little neighborhood of Gotham its own flavor, just like real cities do. What neighborhood a character lives and works in says a lot about that character’s personality, and the neighborhood around them. Push the city to make it more vibrant, and to help define your characters. It’ll make them feel more real, and it’ll make the city feel more real.
Thoughts: Batman: Year One is my favorite comic of all time. It’s famous for being “realistic,” but it’s very poetic and in a lot of ways not realistic at all. I think Frank Miller (writer of Batman: Year One) and Tynion both understand this and write it quite well. What is more important than “realism” is “connection” – and the differences in the neighborhoods seen in Tamaki, Tynion, Taylor, Cloonan, and Williamson’s works really help give a sense of a living and breathing world that our favorite characters swing through.
- BAT-BOOKS SHOULD BE COLORFUL – People are going to take this the wrong way, as if by Colorful I’m saying Camp, but I mean this in the most literal way possible. There can be an instinct to lean way too hard into crime noir “realist” takes on Batman, and those takes can wash out the color and vibrancy of Gotham City. But even those takes are best when you lean into the strange and the colorful through the lens of “realism” (Gotham Central did this perfectly, with Mr. Freeze and Two-Face and Joker all making key colorful appearances). I’m thrilled to see the design that Dan Mora is using in the World’s Finest book next year, and I honestly hope that Batman gets back into a blue cape and cowl in the core Bat-Titles. Even the Hush costume was blue! Don’t be afraid of color! The Robins are colorful! The villains are colorful! Joker’s got a Purple Suit! People like eclectic colorful superhero and supervillain costumes! Don’t be embarrassed by the color, lean the fuck in, and make it cool to look at. Realism is often a dead end in superhero comics, and going too hard into realism can silo your book without even meaning to. It creates limitations, rather than stripping the limitations away.
Thoughts: Some may disagree here – there’s obviously a lot of mileage to be gotten from a, dare we say, a “black and white” approach to Batman. I think that Tynion and Jorge Jimenez pushed a bit too far into the overdesigned and clashing colors, most obviously in the Designer, but also a bit with Ghost-Maker and the Gardener, who tend not to stick in the mind as much because they just have too many details.
- PLAY WITH THE TOYS – One of the best things I learned working closely with Scott Snyder that I tried to emulate in my run is that you should have Batman do something you haven’t seen him do before in every issue. Have him use a cool new gadget. Have him use an old gadget in a new way. Have him use a weird trick one of his teachers taught him when he was 19 years old, travelling the world. People like it when Batman does cool shit, so you should have Batman do cool shit. This also goes with the Bat-Family. Each of them have their own range of cool tricks and gadgets, based on their personalities. Give him a new Batmobile. Redesign the Bat-Cave. Create a weird new vehicle nobody has thought to have Batman use before. Even in the middle of a dark, serious story, folks always want to see something neat pulled out of Batman’s utility belt. Also: I never got away with doing the kind of dissections of his base and car and belt like I wanted to. People love that stuff. The goal here is giving fuel to people’s imaginations. If you’re not showing that you’re going to surprise and delight them, why should they keep reading?
Thoughts: Tynion hinted at the amazing ideas he had for the utility belt in the first arc of his Detective Comics run, when the Colony examines Batman’s belt and is amazed, and it would have been fun to have more scenes like that. This also reminds me of the amazing CAD drawings done for Tim Drake’s design as Robin when Chuck Dixon took over the character in the early 90s – that kind of detail, while not “realistic,” builds connection to the characters. And it’s also great for toys!
- LET THE BAT-FAMILY GROW AND CHANGE – Batman is a bit of a constant. The War on Crime has no end. He’s never going to retire. But the supporting cast around him CAN grow and change over time, and Batman’s history is measured by the people fighting by his side, who can grow and change, and get new superhero identities and have status quo changes in major ways. They can be reactive in a way that Batman can’t. There’s a difference between the types of soap opera style stories you can tell with DC Characters, and the kind you can tell with Marvel Characters, but the benefit of the Bat-Family is that you can tell Marvel style stories with them. The Bat-Family can fail in ways Batman can’t, which allows for human stories, with more human complexity. Use that power, and take the supporting characters to the next step in their journeys, rather than just put them back into a previous status quo. The two exceptions to the supporting cast being able to change are Jim Gordon and Alfred Pennyworth, who will always end up rubber-banding back to the status quo over time. I don’t know of any plans to bring Alfred back from the dead, or making Jim the Commissioner again and if I were staying on the books, I’d be pushing against both happening as long as I could, but I think we all know that five years from now they’ll be back in their classic molds.
Thoughts: Tom King has also remarked that he’s tended to write Marvel-type stories – about characters who grow and change, rather than about archetypes – in the DC Universe, and it’s interesting that a writer as different as Tynion would say something so similar. And we’ll come back in 2027 and see where Jim Gordon and Alfred Pennyworth are. We’ll probably have at least one reboot in that time period, I’m putting my money on 2026, five years from Infinite Frontier, which isn’t a reboot, but served a similar function in terms of rebranding and relaunching nearly all titles at the same time.
- THE BAT-BOOKS ARE A SUPERHERO UNIVERSE UNTO THEMSELVES, TREAT IT LIKE ONE – I tend to think that while Bat-Characters are additive to DC Universe stories, the DC Universe is RARELY additive to Batman stories. Batman Comics are so rich with characters and villains and key locations, even beyond Gotham City. Via the League of Assassins/Leviathan, Santa Prisca, Batman Inc, and Batman’s training years, Bruce has enemies and allies in every corner of the world, so you can stay in the “Batman Universe” even when you’re globe-trotting. To this end – Moving the Bat-Family members away from the Batman Mythology never accomplishes what folks want it to (Bludhaven doesn’t count it’s still in the larger Gotham Metropolitan area, and the recent Robin series took Damian out of Gotham to explore new corners of the larger world around the Al Ghul family which all works great). In the last couple decades, this trick was often done to try and make the characters more independent, and avoid what was perceived to be a problem of too many costumed characters in the Batman Mythology, all running around in the same city. What those attempts ignored is the fact that people LOVE how these characters connect and interact together, and that the solution is to make Gotham a more dynamic, fictional city defined by its excess of costumed vigilantes and colorful madmen. Away from Gotham and the Bat-Mythology at large, Bat-books can veer towards “generic superhero titles.” If the Marvel Universe’s New York City can contain Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and Daredevil’s adventures simultaneously, I think you can have a bunch of street ninjas hanging out in different neighborhoods of the same city, and I think that when that’s the case, it makes the books stronger. Readers want Bat-Characters to interact with each other. Little touches of the outside DC world can work occasionally, and obviously, if there’s big line-wide event stuff brewing it’s inevitable, but those stories are usually best told in the team books, not the core Bat-Books. Let the Bat-Books BE Bat-Books.
Thoughts: It’s interesting that even as Tynion leaves, we have a Zatanna story in Urban Legends, a Lex Luthor story in the main Batman title – we’ll see how much that works. The description of the Bat-Family as “a bunch of street ninjas” is also quite hilarious and true.
- EXCEPT FOR GREEN ARROW – The Batman/Green Arrow dynamic is fucking great, and there have not been enough comics that focus on it in recent years. Maybe it’s just growing up re-reading DKR and Kingdom Come over and over, but I’ll never shake the feeling like Bruce and Ollie belong in the same corner. The Arrow family is like the weird cousin of the Bat-Family, and it’s nice to get weird cousins together and have them get into some trouble. I can’t even take credit for the bits of the dynamic you’ll see in DC vs Vampires, because that’s all Rosenberg and his love of the Emerald Archer. I never came up with a good enough excuse to drag Ollie in for an arc, and my run is lesser for it.
Thoughts: DC has been hinting at doing more with Green Arrow in the past year, but so far, they have not pulled the trigger. My guess is that they don’t have a writer with a strong enough vision and don’t feel confident enough to do it without something like that. There’s been a lot of speculation for the past three to five years that smaller characters won’t be able to sustain titles – and while I think that’s wrong-headed thinking, if it gains traction, which it definitely seems to be doing, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. But Aquaman is getting another book, even if they seem to be doing that in perhaps the dumbest way possible. Green Arrow could get one too!
- DON’T LOOK BACK – Over the last couple of decades, superhero writers have fallen over and over into the same nostalgia traps. Metatextual callbacks to older comics to signal to the fans that you respect the stories that they respect, but they turn off newer readers who don’t know or give a shit about the specifics. In the mid-2000s it was a novel approach to superhero comics, but now it’s dated, regressive, and counterproductive to what it’s setting out to do. When you train the readership to just look for hidden references to bigger, better stories, you undermine the importance of the present day, and the importance of tomorrow. It tells readers that the current books aren’t important, it’s the stuff from “Back in the Day” which needs to be upheld and reasserted in perpetuity. We’re coming out of a few decades of superhero comics dripping with nostalgia, and now the movies are getting in on the same game – Trying to get you to remember older movies, and the person you were when you saw those older movies. Batman isn’t cool because a comic book from thirty years ago was cool. Batman is cool because he’s a sexy, multi-millionaire master detective that knows kung fu, builds bad-ass cars, and fights murder clowns on top of skyscrapers. Don’t let the past be an anchor. Don’t let your own love of the character and older stories be an anchor. Assess what you think the core of Batman is (and the core is a little different for all of us who work on the character), and then set off into the future, don’t retread the past.
Thoughts: Tynion joins a long tradition, including Chuck Dixon and Alan Moore, in saying this. It’s a bit…odd to hear Tynion give this type of advice to future Batman writers since he spent 2014-2018 trying hard to bring back the past, but given the fact that the n52 brutally erased so much of what he was trying to bring back, it’s understandable. If those things had been allowed to live and thrive instead of being erased, perhaps Tynion would have come to this position sooner. I don’t know how I feel about it – I think I much prefer Tynion’s Detective Comics run to his Batman run, despite how much I’ve enjoyed his time in the driver’s seat – but I’d be curious to know if he feels that his Batman run is much better than his Detective run. Only time will tell.
Anyways… These have been my Bat-Thoughts.
Thoughts: And thank you for sharing them, James Tynion. Your Batman run has been an absolute pleasure to read and cover for the site and the TBU Comic Podcast, and I will miss you so intensely. All the best!
And we’ve come to the end! While we’ll still write some new columns for “Inside Batman” if, say, Joshua Williamson, or any of the other Bat-writers, drop some really key insights into their creative process or behind the scenes information (Mariko Tamaki, email us!), this will round off our efforts on this column for the moment. It’s been a real blast getting a chance to look at “Inside Batman” with James Tynion, Chuck Dixon, Scott Snyder, and the many other writers who have posted their thoughts on their time writing the Caped Crusader, and we hope you’ve enjoyed the information and our commentary.
