Scott Snyder is everywhere nowadays. If isn't his work on his American Vampire series or his work on Severed or Swamp Thing than it is all about Batman. The Onion's A.V. Club featured a profile of Snyder on their site on Friday. A few new questions related to his work in The Batman Universe were asked and appropriately answered.
AV Club: Do you have any plans to incorporate Batgirl and Catwoman into the Batman book?
Scott Snyder: Yeah. We’re going to see Barbara pretty soon in Batman, and I think you might see Selina pretty soon. We’re really interested in bringing in some strong female characters. Actually, in #7 you’re going to see somebody who I’m excited about as well. You’ll see a lot of the Bat-family in general, and those characters specifically. We wanted a story that is very deeply about Bruce and Gotham. The story, for me, is built around this notion that, the way Gotham challenged Dick Grayson in Detective, in terms of changing itself to fit his weaknesses and try and challenge him in the most vicious way it could, we want Gotham here to be a challenge to Bruce in the same deep and probing way.
The same way Dick’s greatest strength was his empathy and compassion and Gotham went after that by giving him a villain that had none of those things, one of Bruce’s greatest strengths is his confidence and his familiarity with Gotham. He knows he is its hero and its protector and he feels very much at home, and he’s coming off the events of that and feeling very confident. What we wanted to do was construct a story where Bruce, little by little, begins to feel that there is some enemy in Gotham that has maybe been there since colonial times that he has never believed in but he has heard about. And if it’s been there, it’s built into the architecture, and this organization has deep pockets and has manipulated things over the years in ways that Bruce can’t even imagine, and plays a part in the fate of both his family and the families of his allies, like Grayson.
And in that way I think it undermines his confidence and is more backbreaking in a more figurative way, where he feels like, how could something so big and dark be happening in his city and he didn’t see it? That’s pretty disturbing to him, and in that way we want it to be a story that really does bring in the rest of the Bat-family and the other characters, because even though it’s a Bruce alone story, it’s also a story about him needing other people. You’ll see a lot of Bat-family people. Nightwing plays a big part.
AV Club: How closely coordinated are the Batman and Nightwing books?
Scott Snyder: They’re closely coordinated. We really wanted them to be things that you could read independently and don’t really lean on each other at all. I don’t want people to get the idea that the story playing out in Nightwing is somehow answered in Batman, or visa versa. That’s not the way it is at all. But they’re characters that have a deep and interesting relationship. I think both of them need each other and depend on each other for things that are essential to who they are as characters, so we wanted the stories to cross at a certain point and impact each other. Around issue seven you will see the story of Batman resonate through Nightwing, and the story of Nightwing will resonate through Batman around then, too, a certain revelation. We’re excited to play in the same sandbox; I love Kyle [Higgins] and his work. That was a huge pleasure, writing Gates Of Gotham with him, too. I’m excited to share a little Gotham with him.
For the entire interview, including talk about all of Snyder's other projects, head over to The A.V. Club. Batman #3 hits stores next month.
