At C2E2 this year, while hanging out at Cara McGee’s (Black Canary: Ignite) table, I had the great pleasure of talking with artist Suzi Blake, currently one of the background artists on Batman: Wayne Family Adventures! Suzi revealed a lot of fascinating information about the production process and creators behind the beloved smash hit webtoon.
After joining the art team for episode 12, she and the other artist, Lan Ma, mostly alternate episodes. For the character-focused two-part episode arcs, the creative team will often, but not always, try to schedule production so that a single background artist can do both episodes in a row, but sometimes time and publication requirements do not allow this. In cases where a two-part story is split between the two background artists, Suzi mentioned that there’s a lot of attention paid to how a particular room or space, like the Batcave, is drawn and rendered so that consistency is maintained.
Some of the fascinating behind-the-scenes details discussed included the roughly one-week production time for background art per episode. With the two-month break between season one and season two, the art teams continued production to get ahead of the publication schedule. In general, the creators are a couple of months ahead of the most recent paywalled episodes on the app. Additionally, though the general production pipeline is the script to layouts to character inks to the background art, sometimes the background artists produce the background art before the character inks and colors, which can allow the coloring of the characters to be integrated deeply into the overall strip! Some upcoming issues starring Kate Kane as Batwoman followed this less common production pipeline and should be a great treat both for their art and for fans of the current Batwoman!
We chatted a bit about the upcoming release of the first 25 episodes of Batman: Wayne Family Adventures as a printed book. The whole team is very excited and very interested to see how the vertical phone/scrolling formatted episodes will be printed out to make visual sense in a physical, page-space-limited format!
Another topic that arose with Suzi Blake was the three crossover episodes that Batman: Wayne Family Adventures has done with the other DC webtoons – Vixen, Red Hood: Outlaws, and Zatanna & the Ripper. There wasn’t a direct collaboration with the other art teams, but there was a lot of fun in transferring the character designs between series! Though season 2 isn’t over for quite a bit, Suzi is very hopeful for a season 3 – as are we! She mentioned that her favorite character is Nightwing and that she loves putting in “Sailor Moon” details like sparkles and star flashes when he shows up in costume (as seen in episode 22).
Suzi also revealed a really awesome detail that she spent hours researching the Batman suits featured in Bruce’s closet for episode 77. That level of dedication really shows that the team behind Batman: Wayne Family Adventures is comprised of fans who love the rich history of Batman and his whole family, from the serious to the delightfully silly. Every episode shows that dedication as well as excellent craftsmanship, from the witty and warm writing to the excellent character art and, of course, the wonderful backgrounds created by Suzi! Here’s to many more years of great Batman: Wayne Family Adventures!
Editor’s Note: If you enjoyed this interview, check out The Batman Universe Podcast interview with CRC Payne, writer of Batman: Wayne Family Adventures.
