bane tagged posts

Sword of Azrael (Volume 2)
Issue No. 1 – August 2022
Say Your Prayers
Jean-Paul Valley does not want to be Azrael ever again. All it has brought him is pain, violence, and misery. He has sequestered himself away at a monastery in Europe to find peace. But when a young woman who claims to have the same System programming that made Jean-Paul into Azrael arrives at the monastery, he won’t have a choice but to don his violent mantle of Azrael once more to protect her from the deadly assassins who wish her harm.

Sword of Azrael (Volume 2)
Issue No. 2 – September 2022
Title TBA
Vengeance has arrived to capture Brielle, the young woman who has come to Azrael for help, but Azrael won’t let this stand. He will fight back against Vengeance and her forces…but will he be able to keep the murderous programming of the System at bay? And is Brielle all she seems, or is she hiding secrets that could shatter Jean-Paul Valley forever? All this as Azrael’s foe the Poor Fellow pulls the strings…

Arkham City: The Order of the World
Issue No. 1 – October 2021
Chapter 1

The Joker’s attack on Arkham Asylum left the long-standing Gotham establishment in ruin, most of the patients killed or missing, and only a handful of surviving staff—a few nurses, a gravely injured security guard, and one doctor. In the chaos of the assault, it is believed that several of the asylum’s patients escaped and scurried off into the dark nooks and crannies of Gotham City. Now, these Arkhamites walk among us, and it’s up to the Asylum’s one remaining doctor, Jocasta Joy, to round up her former patients.

Meet these Arkhamites: a woman with no face, a pyggy in search of perfection, a man who feels nothing and burns everything, a woman who must devour life to save herself, a man unfit for the waking world who looks instead for Wonderland, a body with more than one soul, a being unbound from time who lives in the present and the past, a boy who seeks the comfort of vermin, and the twisted man who sees them all for who they are. And witness the avenging angel who stalks them.

Arkham City: The Order of the World
Issue No. 1 – October 2021
Chapter 2
Dr. Jacosta Joy, Arkham’s last living psychiatrist, continues her descent into the Ten-Eyed Man’s world of delusion. But are his claims of ghosts and ritual purely figments of his imagination, or is there a method to his madness?
Meanwhile, Dr. Double X, a man with the ability to project his soul outside of his own body, has been taken prisoner by a very friendly couple who have discovered that his powers of astral projection can be used on others…and they are addictive. But when Azrael appears in this den of sin, will anyone be safe from his cleansing fire?

Arkham City: The Order of the World
Issue No. 1 – December 2021
Chapter 3
Solomon Grundy has lived many lives over a great many years. Now, located by Ten-Eyed Man’s strange, but nonetheless effective, methods, he leads Dr. Joy and her many-eyed friend on a tour of the hidden history of Gotham City and the madness at its core.

Arkham City: The Order of the World
Issue No. 1 – January 2021
Chapter 4
Dr. Joy is now face to face with the ghost of Amadeus Arkham-the ghost that she had assured all her patients did not exist. Now faced with overwhelming evidence that the Ten-Eyed Man’s “delusions” were anything but, she has found herself questioning everything. Meanwhile, Dr. Phosphorus and Nocturna attempt to live a “normal” life in Gotham, but the good doctor’s radioactive body may be having unforeseen side effects on their unsuspecting neighbors.

Arkham City: The Order of the World
Issue No. 1 – February 2021
Chapter 5
Like layers of skin peeled back by madness, Dr. Joy finally comes face to face with the absurd, gaping maw of the one true order of the world. With only the fires of Azrael and Detective Stone’s hatred lighting the way, what chance do our poor Arkhamites have at survival as they descend into that which lies beneath all things?

Arkham City: The Order of the World
Issue No. 1 – March 2022
Chapter 6
Dr. Joy has reunited with her missing patients. Now all the survivors of Arkham Asylum’s destruction are together again under one very, very nice and normal roof. But they are not alone in this strange reflection of their old home. For there is a specter with them, one of flame, flesh, and righteous fury—the angel Azrael, and he is very, very angry.

Tales from the Dark Multiverse – Batman: Knightfall
Issue No.1 – October 2019
Knightfall
Thirty years after Bruce Wayne was broken and failed to take back the mantle of the Bat, Jean-Paul Valley, now known as Saint Batman, has turned Gotham into the city of his dreams. In his new order, killing has become commonplace and criminals live in constant fear-all in the name of justice. But just when all seems lost, a new hope for Gotham City rises…the son of Bane! With the help of a tortured Bruce Wayne, Bane gets the help he needs to turn the tables in the Batcave, only to be double-crossed by Wayne himself in a plan years in the making!

Screenrant
Tales from the Dark Universe: Knightfall Writers Finally Break Batman
October 16th, 2019

An Interview with Scott Snyder & Kyle Higgins
Interview by Andrew Dyce

When DC’s Metal introduced readers to the Dark Multiverse, it was obvious the concept had far too much potential for just a single series. Now that roiling sea of alternate realities too violent, too grim, too hopeless to ever survive is being given its own line prestige one-shots. These standalone stories ask the same question: what if a pivotal or iconic DC storyline had turned out differently? And it’s officially begun, with the release of Tales From The Dark Multiverse: Knightfall #1.

The first ‘what if?’ nightmare brings fans back to the story that saw Batman broken by Bane, with Azrael (Jean-Paul Valley) taking up the cowl in his place–before Bruce Wayne returned to put an end to his brutal reign. Bruce defeated Azrael, saving Gotham and sending Valley on his own mission of redemption… but what if he hadn’t? The answer to that question is delivered in Tales From The Dark Multiverse: Knightfall #1 from writers Scott Snyder (Batman: Last Knight on Earth) and Kyle Higgins (Power Rangers: Shattered Grid), and artist Javi Fernandez (Justice League). A vision of Gotham thirty years in the future, when Azrael–sorry, ‘Saint Batman’ rules with gleaming cross and flaming sword, and the most unlikely hero returns to free the city from his tyranny. Screen Rant had the chance to speak with both Snyder and Higgins about how this alternate Knightfall embodies the spirit of the Tales From The Dark Multiverse stories still to come, along with some “giant” events coming in 2020.

With Batman: Last Knight on Earth and Nightwing: The New Order under your belts, neither of you are strangers to hypothetical nightmare realities of the DC Universe. But how did Knightfall, and the question ‘what would Gotham have become if Azrael had won?’ make it onto the shortlist?

Kyle Higgins: The whole initiative really started with Alex Antone, an editor at DC, who started putting together–off of Scott’s awesome work in Metal, and the creation of the Dark Multiverse–this idea of, ‘would there be any interest in exploring some of the other worlds?’ Then from there it became a question of which other worlds? Which stories made the most sense to dive into? I think for Scott and myself both, Knightfall is one of those iconic stories from an earlier generation of Batman that definitely influenced me growing up. So the opportunity to dive in there and see what that might look like through the lens of a broken world, and had Bruce never actually returned to the mantle, what that might look like. Especially based on the idea of who Jean-Paul Valley was at that time, and how mentally ill-equipped he was for the mantle, and that role. It definitely felt like all the great makings to build out a pretty killer new character, and a ‘what if’ scenario, for lack of a better descriptor.

Scott Snyder: For me, I think Knightfall is one of the stories that really haunted me as a kid. Even the first time I read it. I really felt Bruce broken, and really felt he might not get back up. So there was always a question of massive possibility, and there is a real sort of uncertainty around it for me, just as a reader. I remember I genuinely believed he might not come back this time. So the idea of the Dark Multiverse, when we created it for Metal based on all our greatest hopes and fears are material and sort of bubble up into worlds all their own. It felt like a perfect starting place for Tales of the Dark Multiverse series. To go back to one of the stories that felt like it genuinely could have ended a different way, and take it to someplace really imaginative and dark. And then just give Kyle and Javi credit, I just helped a little bit in the plotting. All the great stuff in there from the psychology and the design of Son of Bane, to the way Azrael appears as this kind of broken king. That was all really their doing. So I was just happy to be a part of it and see it become something even more than I hoped it would be.

KH: It was a really cool, exciting opportunity. Because I really started my career writing monthly comics with Scott, with Gates of Gotham together back in 2010, 2011. Then leading into the New 52 with him and Greg [Capullo] on Batman, and then Eddy Barrows and I doing Nightwing, and trading off arcs and certain Court of Owls reveals and things like that. It was cool to kind of slip back into that dynamic here. It had been a few years but I think, not to put words into Scott’s mouth or anything, but it just felt comfortable. Like talking to an old friend again, breaking stories and building it out. So for me it was also a nice return to the DCU after spending the last couple of years in Power Rangers world… where I also built out some authoritarian, broken kings. I’m trying to keep it on brand.

Readers of Flash Forward are going to be familiar with Tempus Fuginaut, but a lot of people might pick up this one-shot and feel like they’ve missed an important story already being told. How much do they need to know?

SS: What I always say is we try to construct things that don’t require you to read beyond the issue itself. So hopefully even if you don’t know who Tempus is, you can get a sense from this and not feel in any way lost. We’re hoping that’s sufficient. But I always say, one of the things that we’re proudest of right now at DC is that we’re trying really hard to build one connected universe. The stuff that we started in Metal in 2017 really comes to a head this year in Justice League, as the story is ramping up to the end now. And more in Batman/Superman with what Josh [Williamson] is building, and what James [Tynion] is going to build in Batman, and in Hell Arisen at the end of Year of the Villain. It’s all connected. The hope is that you’ll read it and won’t feel left out at all by seeing Tempus in there. But you’ll be able to go read Flash Forward, you’ll be able to go read whatever else to get a bigger picture of this expansive tapestry, this immersive, giant soap opera we’re telling that’s going to end in something really huge in 2020.

Batman fans are almost guaranteed to be at least a little familiar with Azrael and Jean-Paul Valley, but for those who haven’t read Knightfall in years, what was it about Azrael that informed the Batman he would become, and the mission he would take?

KH: Well I think there’s two components to that. The first is purely from a kind of, ‘hey, what would that look like?’ standpoint of logistics. It was a lot of fun to take this character and see the longer he was Batman, the more of his authoritarian tendencies started to come to life. Then just before Bruce came back in the original story, he straight-up killed somebody. So extrapolating from that, ‘what might he look like had he defeated Bruce when Bruce came back to try to reclaim the mantle?’ And with the increased level of influence that the St. Dumas programming was starting to take in Jean-Paul Valley. How would that manifest in his leadership? Particularly as he is left to his own devices, and unopposed. So from a world-building standpoint that created a lot of really interesting questions and possibilities.

From a character standpoint though, one of the things that interested Scott and I the most was that this is a guy who knows deep down he was the wrong choice. I think there is a massive inferiority complex there. So as you see in the series, his relationship with broken Bruce Wayne is really the crux of this story, and of this world, and of his decision-making. I think there’s probably a part of me that remembers that era and thinking, ‘why didn’t Bruce call Dick to become Batman?’ Then there was the whole prodigal son storyline that came after that, where Dick did become Batman and addressed some of those choices Bruce made. I think Jean-Paul Valley would definitely feel that, and know that he’s basically another man’s stand-in. I think if they don’t have a solid enough foundation, that can drive somebody mad. That was one of the things that really attracted us to this, and building out what this version of Batman might look like, given where his insecurities and fears in this Dark Multiverse world would really be rooted.

I expected a dark vision of the future, and a pull no punches story, based on the Dark Multiverse one shots from Dark Nights: Metal, but… boy this goes to some incredibly unexpected places very, very quickly. Was that Horror part of the initial idea, or did that line of what would be too outrageous only get drawn once you started building out the story?

SS: I think it was a fun balance. On the one hand we didn’t want it to be a straight-up ‘what if’, or show what happened right in the days after. Because it almost felt like that would be too predictable, and too familiar. We wanted to really play with the idea that it’s been a long time since Knightfall came out, so we wanted to take you to a world that would reflect that. Not just, ‘what would have Gotham become in the immediate aftermath?’ Which again is something you can imagine right off the bat. I think having Knightfall take you someplace a little bit more speculative, and more surprising. And it would give us room to create a more inventive extension of some aspect of that story. Like with the Son of Bane. Take us further, really show Bruce in a way we’ve never shown him before, take him to a darker place.

The world-building is what attracted us to taking it a little bit further down the road. I think the fun of this series–and I hope people will pick up the rest of it as well, with the other classic DC stories imagined in darker iterations–they allow you to revisit some of your favorite work, but do so in a way that opens up completely new worlds. Really explore the core aspects of those stories while staying true to what those stories were about, and what Batman is about for this one, what Superman is about for The Death of Superman. Trying to say something important about the heroes in the context of the stories they were revisiting. But do it in a way that allows us to really flex these muscles creatively, and create characters that you’ve never seen before.

I mentioned Tempus Fuginaut earlier, and not to get into spoilers, but Tempus puts this Dark Multiverse tale into the context of a coming “crisis.” That word isn’t used lightly, so how much should fans read into that?

SS: Yeah… I think they should read a lot into it! These books are not meant to be–we don’t want to mislabel them, or position them in any kind of false way as a ‘prelude’ to a giant Crisis or anything like that. But what they speak to in terms of something coming, I think it’s been a drum beat that you’ll see, again, across the DCU. Both in Year of the Villain and Hell Arisen’s ending, and Batman, and Justice League, and a lot of the things that were doing in the whole line. We are planning something really big, and a giant story. Greg and I are really excited about it. And without sort of spoiling anything about it, I can just say we wanted to be able to read everything independently and enjoy it, and then at the same time feel like it will all be rewarded. My motto for 2020 is, and this is a piece in what we’re building to, is that everything matters. The idea that we want you to feel like everything you’ve read will be rewarded. There’s nothing that you’ve read, whether it goes all the way back to Metal, whether it’s Flash Forward, whether it’s Leviathan or Doomsday Clock, that isn’t revisited in a way that fits into a larger plan or a larger tapestry. We’re trying really hard to make something connected and fun and completely enveloping in that regard, that’s cumulative.

Because one of the fun things that… I think the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the first time I’ve seen it done outside of comics, but at its core, one of the few things that comics has that other mediums generally don’t–save that one or two examples–is their connectivity. You can immerse yourself in a world where these superheroes coexist, and the stories come together once in awhile to make something huge and amazing. That was always a great joy for me, as a kid especially, feeling the payoff and being like, ‘oh wow, this is all part of one thing!’ Or, ‘oh that’s right, that story happened over here, and this hero is talking about it because it affected him in a way I didn’t expect!’ All of that stuff to me is part of the joy of comics. I think it’s important to remember that in a world where everything is immediate, and total consumption of singular mythology–everyone binges one show or one thing and it’s done–comics go on, they continue. And the fun of it is living in that huge, immersive world.

So this is one giant story leading to something huge, and every part of it is relevant in that regard. We want you to feel like you can buy in as much or as little as you want, and enjoy whatever aspects of this you choose.

For you Kyle, how does it feel to create the most disturbing version of Batman in easily the last decade? Is this a case of the student becoming the master?

It’s pretty cool. Well, I don’t know if it’s the most disturbing of the last 10 years because you haven’t seen what’s coming next. But I also would say that it’s rare in life that we ever get to revisit eras that are ostensibly over. And for me, like I said, to come back to work with Scott again, to work on something like this where I’m able to come back and show what I’ve been doing for the last 5 years–especially all the world-building I did in Power Rangers–it was really really cool and gratifying. I feel very honored and lucky to have the trust of not only editorial, but Scott as well. I know how hard it can be sometimes to let people come in and play in your world– like I said, I literally just spent all of last year doing that with Shattered Grid, and running all of that–so I totally recognize that.

It’s very special to me to be able to come back and work on this. So hopefully people pick it up, and dig what we’re exploring here. And stick around for not only the rest of Dark Multiverse, but as Scott eluded to, all of the big things that are coming in 2020.

CBR
Dark Multiverse: Knightfall’s Kyle Higgins Talks Batman and a New Crisis
October 15th, 2019

An Interview with Kyle Higgins
Interview by L.D. Nolan

Running from 1993 until 1994, “Knightfall” remains one of the the most iconic tales in Batman’s long history. After sustaining a backbreaking injury at the hands of Bane, Bruce Wayne gives up the mantle of Batman to Jean-Paul Valley/Azrael for a time. However, Valley proves too brutal. Wayne eventually has to return and defeat his former protege in order to protect others and once again become the Dark Knight. However, Scott Snyder, Kyle Higgins and Javier Fernandez’s Tales from the Dark Multiverse: Batman — Knightfall #1 imagines a world in which Valley beat Wayne and remained Batman.

Announced earlier this year, Tales from the Dark Multiverse is a set of one-shots set in the worst-case-scenario universe first introduced during the Dark Nights: Metal event. The book picks up 30 years after Wayne fails to take his mantle back from Azrael and explores the dystopian world resulting from such a cataclysmic change, as well as the new Batman’s extreme methods.

CBR caught up with co-writer, Kyle Higgins to talk about the new “Crisis” teased in the book, why Azrael fails as Batman, writing fascism, and world-building for the newest world in the Dark Multiverse.

CBR: My first question for you is about something right towards the start of this issue in the preview that CBR ran. Tempus Fuginaut, who’s heavily involved with Flash Forward teases a new Crisis. What can you tell me about that and how it fits into these one-shots?

Kyle Higgins: I really kind of started my career at DC. I started at Marvel, but my big breaks came at DC, and those were in conjunction with Scott Snyder, working on Gates of Gotham. And then I transitioned for the New 52 to Nightwing and Scott transitioned to Batman. Anyone who remembers that era probably would remember that we often interlinked arcs. So there’s a natural fit here as to why he and I decided to do this initial one-shot to kick off all the Dark Multiverse one-shots that are forthcoming.

And that particular point that you just keyed on about the tease of a new Crisis, perhaps the biggest yet, is absolutely a component of that… I can’t say anything specific about it, but what I can say is that it’s there for a reason, and it’s not a coincidence that Scott and I did this issue together.

Azrael really struggled with being a hero when he first took over for Batman during the original “Knightfall.” Why do you feel that he fails at being Batman?

There’s kind of two components to that. The first is that he was really kind of designed and set up to fail. From a narrative standpoint, if you look at the era that that story was built during, and you look at old interviews that Denny O’Neil gave, he talks about this kind of proliferation of antiheroes. Whether it be Lobo, Punisher, Wolverine, the popularity of these antiheroes of that era is what really sparked this idea for the Bat office, which was “okay well let’s explore this and let’s show people what a Batman that kills looks like, ultimately as a cautionary tale as to why it’s so significant that the Batman as we know him, Bruce Wayne, Batman does not.” So that was kind of the initial set up for what became the “Knightfall” event in the comics.

As far as in-story reasons, I just don’t think Jean-Paul was really equipped for the task at hand. And if you look at a lot of his conditioning under the Order of St. Dumas and his background, he did the best he could with the wiring that he had. But I think that as the pressure mounted and what it means to try to be Batman in a city like Gotham, some people are kind of cut out for that and others aren’t.

I mean, you look at quarterbacks in the NFL, and the ones that come in with immense talent and are playing off of that talent purely for a period of time. They might have success early on, but eventually, there’s enough tape on them, that opposing defensive coordinators figure out how to scheme away a lot of that natural ability, and they’re forced to actually figure out how to play at a higher level within a scheme and that’s where you see careers go off the rails, or you see them rise above… I just don’t think Jean-Paul Valley had the fundamentals. He didn’t have a strong enough foundation that would have made him the type of Batman that could have risen to the challenge.

So, going off of that: your Knightfall picks up a long time after Azrael defeats Batman. Were there any stories from that time that were kind of floating around in your head that you didn’t get to tell. Maybe of successes, maybe of failures? Because as you said, he wasn’t quite equipped for that role.

To me, because of the answer I just gave, I was only interested in exploring this era that was. I think it’s in the solicit. It’s about 30 years after he became Batman. When someone’s not equipped for it, but is either enabled, or, well, I don’t want to get into how and why he was able to, in our version here within the Dark Multiverse, stay as Batman, but to me looking at what that kind of darkest timeline with a Jean-Paul Valley who does not have the right foundation and perhaps moral compass to rise to the mantle that he’s taking on… showing the extreme of that after a significant amount of time [had] passed was the best way to explore it. I wasn’t as interested in jumping in and looking at a few months after the point of divergence and what that would look like.

To me, looking at how the city would have changed, how his support structure would have changed how the very idea of Batman would have changed some 30 years later, that started getting exciting for me.

A lot of that change is that Azrael is kind of running an almost pseudo-theocracy. And in your previous work — I’m thinking specifically of Nightwing: The New Order, which dealt a lot with fascism — what draws you to these stories about authoritarians misusing their power?

Without getting political or anything, I think they’re very timely right now. I think they often make for really compelling cautionary tales. In something like Nightwing: The New Order, or even my Power Rangers work with Lord Drakkon, the idea of someone, for the greater good, doing what is necessary, but ultimately what is necessary undercuts why they got into the work in the first place, that to me is always, like I said, a fascinating kind of cautionary tale.

And in the case of Jean-Paul Valley and the setup of this story, it was pretty ripe for that exploration. Like I said, this is someone who has not equipped morally or mentally for the task at hand, and when left to his own devices, this is a story of how things can go incredibly wrong.

I guess I hadn’t really thought of that before, that I have explored some of those kind of authoritarian tendencies in past work. But, again, I do think that there’s something very — we write about what we’re afraid of. At least I do. And there are definitely things in the world that we live in right now that, again, without getting political, echo some of those fears.

How do you view Azrael’s relationship in Knightfall with the rest of the DC Universe? What’s his relationship to all the other characters who are kind of floating around. Superman? Nightwing?

I don’t want to spoil too much here, but that was something that Scott and I talked quite a bit about. What does the outside world look like? And the idea of cutting Gotham off from the rest of the world as a result of what has happened in the rest of the world… Azrael definitely believes that the ends justify the means, and that he has kept Gotham standing, and he has turned this city into a paragon of virtue that the rest of the world could only ever dream of becoming through strong moral conviction and willpower. But so much of what the rest of the world has become, you could argue, is actually a direct result of Azrael cutting Gotham off from it. So, there’s a little bit of a chicken and egg kind of question at the core of this story.

There are little hints throughout the issue as to what things look like. Whether outside of Gotham, whether it be other heroes or other threats, different types of plagues. Even just kind of the status of Lazarus Pits in the larger DC Universe. To me, that wasn’t the core of the story. And this a story with a pretty limited amount of space. I mean, larger than most one-shots, but still, to build out an entirely new status quo, you have to really kind of pick your battles as far as where you decide to focus your page real estate for world-building. So again, we kept things pretty tight on what Gotham looks like in this world. But I think eagle-eyed readers will see hints about the fate of different characters throughout.

You have worked on a lot of alternate worlds and continuities or things that give you more room for play. When you’re writing something like Tales from the Dark Multiverse, what storytelling possibilities does that open up for you?

Well, I definitely pride myself on finding the most interesting through lines within a kind of higher concept. And a lot of alternate timeline stuff really allows for that, because at their core there tends to be a point of divergence or a higher concept that, for lack of a better term, a quote unquote “elevator pitch,” right? This is a story of where it’s this but in this era, where this happened and then that naturally leads to questions. Well, how did that come about? What is this person? As you just said, what happened to Superman? What happened to these people, and then it allows for really interesting world-building opportunities.

I kind of really spend a lot of time figuring out the world- building and in the most efficient and, hopefully, emotionally resonant way. It’s kind of like a tumbler lock, where each pin is a different possibility within a concept, and you have to get them all to kind of lineup right for the lock to open. I just really enjoy that challenge. And the “what if?” of it all, to me, is always a lot of fun to play around with. You can take it to an extreme that you couldn’t in standard continuity and use that extreme and the exploration of that extreme status quo to ultimately make whatever kind of emotional or thematic point interested you in the story in the first place.

Is there anything else you’d like to add just as we finish up?

It’s always fun to come back to Gotham, and I’m really proud of the issue and really happy to be working with Scott again and hopefully people will pick it up, give it a chance. The other Tales from the Dark Multiverse stories are all very exciting. And I think this is a really cool line that’s coming up and hopefully people won’t sleep on it.

Comic Talk Magazine
August 1993
Issue #7

First off, can you tell me how you ended up getting involved with Batman?
After issue 25 of Darkhawk, I decided that I was going to leave the title because I had done 25 issues straight. I figured 25 issues in a row is a pretty long run by today’s standards. I was getting a little burned out and didn’t want to start doing poor quality work. So I wanted to leave after issue 25, which was the biggest selling issue, probably since the first issue.
I’d known Archie Goodwin for several years, so I decided to go over to DC to see if they had any Legends of the Dark Knight for me to do. I figured what I would do was float around and see what else I could pick up. Archie gave me the Legends of the Dark Knight annual to do, which, in turn led to other people seeing samples of my work – specifically Neal Pozner and Dennis O’Neal.
Than one evening at around 7:30 at night, Dennis calls me up and goes, ‘Would you like to do Batman?’ I thought about it for about 30 seconds and said, ‘Yeah, sure!’ It was great because they asked me, so I felt very flattered.

Have you always wanted to do Batman?
I would say he was one of the characters from when I was a real fan, back in my teens, that I liked. Specifically, what Neal Adams did on him. I was a super big fan of his stuff; I used to blatantly imitate his stuff. I used to draw so much like Neal Adams that it hurt.
Maybe I’m different from some other people, because it was rare that I would fall I love with a character because the artist that I like is doing the book. Since Neal did a lot of Batman stories, I ended up liking the character.

How do you see Batman? Do you see him more as a grim and gritty Dark Knight, or as a reasonably well-adjusted caped-crusader? Or as something entirely different?
It’s something that I had to ask myself because I hadn’t read Batman comics for a very long time really – besides the ones that Neal Adams and Dennis O’Neal did. Occasionally, I would look at the title of someone like Michael Golden or somebody that I liked worked on it.
That was my reference point, basically, until Frank Miller and then with David Mazzucchelli did Year One. That seems to have set the tone.
Adams came back and established the creature of the night, the dark aspect of the character, being spooky and creepy. I imagine it will take a few issues to get my own feeling of the character because in a way, I’m working off of the inspiration of the artists that I admired as a teenager. That’s what’s firing me right now.
I don’t really know. He’s pretty much a dark, grim character. I think he has a pretty bent personality in some ways. He’s obsessing over this one event so much that he’s willing to put himself through this torture and pain, mentally and physically, to avenge the death of his parents.
It also has to do with what Doug Moench has in store for the character. At this point I have just received the script for Batman issue 500 and I will be starting on it in the next week or so. I’ve talked briefly with Jordan Gorfinkel, Dennis O’Neal’s assistant, and Doug. It’s like everything is speeding along so fast you just have to grab on.

What’s it like coming in at the tail end of a rather exciting timeline?
There are four or five Batman books right now, so different parts of the story take place in different titles. I get a script from Doug Moench and it’s like a telephone book. It’s huge compared to the plots I usually get from Marvel.
So there is a big of an adjustment working from a full script. That’s going to take a rearranging of the creative process at the beginning.

Are there any other differences you noticed in making the switch from Marvel to DC?
Well, I would have to say that for me, I would say that DC wants me to be the best Mike Manley on the character. They all seem to be very encouraging and very excited to see what I’m going to turn out. I hope I don’t disappoint everybody and send the sales into the dumpster.
I think there is a difference in personalities of the people that I’m working with, just like when you change any job. You go from one job to another. You have to get to know the people at the job and then you develop a rapport and a routine with them.
I’m really looking forward to collaborating more closely with Doug Moench and Dennis O’Neal on this stuff. It’s hard to say how things are going to turn out because at this point, I have drawn only seven pages for Legends of the Dark Knight Annual. I am also inking an issue of Shadow of the Bat that my good friend Bret Blevins is doing. In fact, he’s the guy who recommended that I go see Archie. Bret Broke his contract at Marvel, went to DC and got a good reception there. They gave him Legends of the Dark Knight issue 50, which is retelling the first meeting of Batman and the Joker. He was very ecstatic about the way things were going, so he said, ‘You should go. You should call Archie, you should go see him!’
So I did, although it did make me feel a bit strange because I did know Archie to a degree socially. I felt like, ‘I don’t want to call him up and ask for a job.’ [Laughter] That’s what I did anyways.

You mentioned that you want to collaborate with Moench. Do you want to write any Batman stories on your own?
At this point it’s too soon in the creative process for me. I think what I really want to do now is concentrate on the art side of it. I think that they have the plot for the next eight or nine stories at this point. I would imagine to Batman issues 510 to 512. I just want to concentrate on the artwork right now. I think if I was to concentrate too heavily on the plotting, it would become too much.
Sure, I would like to do a Batman story myself somewhere down the road or stories with other characters. But I’m quite happy at this point to be able to pencil and ink my own work on a monthly basis and I’m trying to take my work up a level or two. That’s very difficult when you have to produce a certain amount of pages per day. Day in and day out, week after week, you can’t fall behind work or books start missing shipping.
I think if I was to try and write…I’m so booked now, even besides Batman, with other special projects, I really don’t have the time.

So you’re going to ink Batman as well?
That’s a goal I made for myself after doing that on and off with Darkhawk. Nothing against other people that I’ve worked with, Ricardo Villagran is a great guy. I have had other people from time to time on the book, but there is a certain satisfaction that you have when you finish the artwork yourself. If you mess it up, at least you mess it up. If it’s successful, then you feel good. I look at the inking really as the drawing.
The way comics are set up today, they specialize everybody so that you have guys that just pencil, guys who just ink. You have guys who pencil who, if you asked them to ink their work, would be absolutely lost. I try to take after more the old school where most of the guys inked their own work. Besides the layout, the inking is the most important stage. Because after you erase the page, the pencil is gone and all you have left is the ink. If the inker isn’t very good, if the inker you’re working with loses your drawing or the emotional quality of your work, it can seriously alter the impact that you’re trying to give the reader on the page, besides destroying the drawing.
I guess you’re aware Batman gets a new costume as you come on the book.
Yeah, he’s getting a new costume. I’ll be working on that now. Issue 500 is split into two parts. Jim Aparo is doing he first part and that’s going to be inked by Terry Austin. And then, starting right on the first page that I do, he’s in his new costume.
How long he will have the new costume, I don’t know because I’m just as surprised as everybody else at this point. I don’t know the full story.

Graham Nolan told me that the new costume was a little difficult to drawn.
It’s pretty complicated. But if you draw them 400 times over the course of a year, you can generate ‘em out of your imagination, no problem. It’s just part of the job.

Batman is going through a lot in this story. What did you think when you heard about all the stuff that was happening to him?
I think they’re doing a real smart thing. They had a great success with The Death of Superman. With competition being the way it is in the marketplace today, you’ve got to come up with some good ideas to capture the readership. Everybody has a lot more choices today. I think what they’ve come up with is great so far and I think that some people may have guessed what it is while some people won’t have guessed at all.
I think the best thing about Batman is that he’s such a basic, simple character that so many people can do so many different takes and interpretations on him. I think that’s why he’s lasted 50 years. There are a lot of characters who are interesting, but they lasted 50 years.
It’s the same with Superman. Maybe it’s a little more difficult with Superman, because you can’t make him a dark Superman. It might be a little bit harder to do certain things with a character like that. Whereas Batman is a vigilante and I think that those are timeless characters. They can appeal to a lot of different people in a lot of different ways.

Do you think Batman goes far enough in his dealings with criminals? Do you think he should be a bit more ruthless or is he fine as he is?
The Batman of old of new?

The Batman of new
It’s hard to say. I think it really depends upon what each creator, what each writer or each artist is going to bring to the character and what kind of story they’re trying to tell. If you’re trying to tell a story of a guy who’s slowly, inch by inch, losing it, he may slip. He may go a little too far; he may whale on somebody a little too hard.
That is something that has also been done a lot. Part of the problem that people face in this business now is that you get on a character like Batman who has been around so long, you have to ask yourself, ‘What haven’t they done with him?’ There’s been so much done with him.
Also, I think with the movies and things like that, there’s a certain amount of restriction as to what they can do with the character.

Is there anything else you want to say about being the artist on Batman?
I guess I’m going to try harder than ever to do the best I can because the competitions stiff. If you can’t hack it you can be replaced easily.

Comic Talk Magazine
August 1993
Issue #7

Can you tell me how you ended up drawing Detective Comics?
I decided I was finished with Hawkworld and wanted to move onto other projects. I had sent some Xeroxes to Denny and kept calling him. They were in-between artists, so they had an opening on four issues.
Then, I guess on the strength of that, they asked me if I wanted to do Vengeance of Bane. When an opening finally came through on Detective Comics a few months later, I was the first one considered.

You did some design work on Vengeance of Bane didn’t you?
Yeah, I designed him. I designed Bane and the ‘terrible trio.’ I guess they don’t have a name do they? Now they’re known as ‘The terrible Trio.’ [Laughter]

Did you have any input into the creation of Bane or his personality?
No, he was pretty much fleshed out already.

Have you ever gone to one of those infamous Batman-summits?
No, we had a mini-summit at the last Great Eastern show, but it wasn’t really a Bat-summit. It was more like a Detective summit. It was Scott Peterson, Chuck Dixon, and Scott Hanna.

You came into Knightfall in about the middle. What did you think about what was going to happen to Batman?
I knew what was going on from Vengeance of Bane because Bane was created and designed before the Knightfall storyline. I knew from the beginning.

Did you think, ‘wow that’s terrible,’ or ‘wow, that’s great?’
What he goes through, which I’m not at liberty to say, has evolved from the basic idea to hat was finally decided upon. It’s gone through some changes. I really, really like the final product. It’s better than what the original ideas were.

How do you see Batman? Do you see him as a grim and gritty Dark Knight, or a caped-crusader super-hero?
A little bit of both. I think Batman is the ultimate hero in the DC Universe because he has taken adversity in his lie and channeled it into something positive. He’s dedicated his life to making this decayed city a better place for those who live there. So to me, he’s the ultimate hero. He sacrifices so much for everyone else.

Do you think that Bruce Wayne is as important to Batman as Batman is to Bruce Wayne?
Absolutely. They’re not two different people. They’re the same person.

Are they? Can’t anybody put on a Batman costume and be Batman?
No, absolutely not. Batman is a persona created from a tragic event in Bruce Wayne’s life. I don’t think anybody else could possibly be Batman.

Well, you know Robin isn’t necessarily Dick Grayson. Robin is Tim Drake or Jason Todd or whoever else puts on the costume.
Right, but he’s not the same. They are two different types of people. Robin is an extension. If there isn’t a Batman there wouldn’t be a Robin. So Batman’s influence could shape a Robin, but there’s nobody to shape a Batman other than Bruce Wayne.

Okay, so what’s it like doing Detective Comics?
It’s been great. I love it. If there wasn’t a Batman, there wouldn’t be a Graham Nolan cartoonist, that’s for sure. Because when I was a kid and the TV show was on, that influenced me a lot, as well as the comic books. Batman was a seminal influence on me, so it’s something I always wanted to do. Having the opportunity to work on it with such talented people such as Scott Hanna, Chuck Dixon, and Scott Peterson really is a thrill.

Wasn’t Detective Comics the title you always wanted to do?
Yes, it is actually. Detective Comics were the first Batman comics I ever read. Also, the first appearance of Batman was in Detective, so it’s his home. Also, DC gets its name from it. It has a long history. I’ve big shoes to fill working on it.

Do you have any input to the story so far?
No, most of the story and the direction were all hashed out at the last Bat-conference. I wasn’t involved with that. I guess for the next batch of storylines I’ll have some input. At least I can offer suggestions and input. Whether they use them or not, who knows?

Is there anything you would like to say to the people reading Batman comics now or to those who will pick them up as Knightfall rolls along?
I think people that are reading it, especially the older-time Batman fans, are in for a real treat. We’re making an concerted effort to bring Batman back to the greatness that he should have.
He’s been portrayed in recent years as a psychopath and a nutcase. It seems to me that he’s becoming a lot more heroic. I think the old-time fans will really enjoy seeing Batman as a great hero again.
I think the new fans will enjoy it too. They’re hopping on a great storyline. The whole Knightfall series should have a lot of impact.

CVM
October 1993
Issue 86

When the Bat Breaks…The Knight Will Fall
By Neil Hansen

“…and down will come Batman, costume and all…”

Two new additions to the Batman mythos have turned the caped crusader’s world upside down. One, a villain named Bane, has broken Batman’s back in a quest to ultimately humiliate the spirit of Batman; causing the second, a hero called Azrael, to take over the role that millionaire Bruce Wayne created to fight the forces of evil.
Holy setbacks Gotham City! Will Batman be able to get out of this, or is this the beginning of the end? Readers have already seen Superman killed fighting Doomsday; the world doesn’t seem to be safe for superheroes anymore. Why?
In actuality, the DC creators wanted to explore what it would be like if someone else became the Batman. “To get a different Batman,” said Doug Moench, writer of the Batman comic, “obviously, the original Batman had to step down for a time and a new one had to take his place. Of course, the Batman costume, which has been a classic for so long, also needed a new look. What kind of twist could be done on that? What would the classic design look like if it were altered for the nineties?”

The Beginning of the Break
The genesis of the story called, ‘Knightfall,’ where the old Batman was forced to step down, and the new Batman took over, started two and a half years ago.
“I was having lunch with Peter Milligan, and at the time he was writing Detective Comics,” said Batman group editor Dennis O’Neil, “and we were just talking over story possibilities. He mentioned that it would be a good idea to put someone else in the Batman suit for a while. Peter left meetings,” revealed O’Neil. “I had about four or five of them. We decided that we needed a new villain for this. The only villain that was even close was maybe the Joker; but he’d been used a lot. And even then, he was not emotionally right for this storyline, the way it was developing.”
“The Joker is much more of a psychological villain, “ said Moench, “than a physical villain, and we wanted a physical villain. Bruce Wayne had to be physically unable to continue as Batman to bring about a new Batman.”

The Bane of Batman’s Existence
Bane was created as the instrument of batman’s downfall in a one-shot called Batman: Vengeance of Bane, written by Chuck Dixon and drawn by Graham Nolan and Ed Barreto.
“I don’t remember who exactly said what, said O’Neil, “but most of the credit would go to Chuck Dixon, because he actually wrote the story and filled in the blanks; and without all of those blanks being filled in, you don’t have a very good character.”
Bane was connected with the ‘Venom’ storyline created in Legends of the Dark Knight #16-20, written by O’Neil himself. “I had created him for a completely different story,” O’Neil remembered. “When I wrote that story for Archie Goodwin (Legends of the Dark Knight editor), I certainly didn’t think it would have any ‘life’ beyond those five issues, but that was the one piece that was just serendipity.”

O’Neil’s experience with Batman first started as a writer. He was instrumental in first bringing the character back to his grim roots in 1970 (Detective Comics #395) with artist Neal Adams, following the demise of the popular but campy Batman television series of the 1960’s. Through this foundation, subsequent writers like Frank Miller built on this base, amplifying the grimness that O’Neil originally instituted. Moench, who wrote Batman from 1982 to 1987 had to play catch-up when he returned to the title using Miller’s increased grit and appreciated the fact that O’Neil wanted to go the same way.
“It does feel a little odd,” said Moench, “but I think I’m up to speed now, and I have been since ‘Knightfall’ began. It was strange getting back into it because I no longer read the book after I stopped writing it, so I had to read all of the back issues. One of the good things about it was that, after I left, Batman had been done in the way that I wanted to do it – and did do it to a certain extent, but not as much as I wanted to. At the time, I guess they weren’t ready for a dark, gritty Dark Knight kind of thing which Frank Miller’s book (Batman: The Dark Knight Returns) convinced them that was the way to go. So, before Miller did it, that was the way that I had wanted to go. The editor, Len Wein, kept saying, ‘No, no no! It’s perfect like this!’ and I kept saying, ‘I don’t think you quite know what I mean.’ O’Neil’s critical slant is closer to what I’d wanted to do all along.

The Avenging Angel
The character of Azrael taking over as Batman will push the grit to the limit. In creating Azrael, O’Neil said, “Again, we’d decided that we needed someone fresh.”
For instance, Nightwing, the first Robin and leader of the Titans, was given the thumbs down for the role. However, O’Neil had a bit of a struggle in creating the new character.
“I first looked at animals,” said O’Neil, “trying to think of what’s the natural enemy of the bat. I did some research – which is something writers get to do and pretend that they’re working – and found that the only natural enemies that bats have are men. That seemed to be a dead end, so from there we began to look at mythology. I don’t know how I stumbled onto Azrael, who was an angel of vengeance in two different mythologies, but once we had that – the idea of an angel of vengeance – the rest of it kind of fell into place.”
Azrael, like Bane, didn’t originate in the regular Batman continuity of titles, but began in a four-issue mini-eries called Batman: Sword of Azrael, written by O’Neil and drawn by Joe Quesada and Kevin Nowlan (Quesada, who designed Azrael, is also designing the new Batman costume).
“There was no way to bring them onstage in the current continuity,” O’Neil pointed out, “without bringing everything to a screeching hault, and we didn’t want to telegraph our intentions that far ahead. I’m not sure that the way we did it was the right way, but there was no other way, those two books came out after there had been an awful lot of Batman out, the second movie – so they didn’t get as much attention as they probably would have, even if they weren’t going to be important to later continuity.”
Unfortunately, sales on the Azrael and bane titles weren’t as high as O’Neil thought they’d be.  “We were a little disappointed,” O’Neil said, “at the reception of both, because we felt that they deserved better. On the other hand, we couldn’t put a blurb on the cover that said, “This is going to be rally important, dear reader, buy this book!”
However, initial disappointments on the two books turned into big money for comic book dealers.

“I’ve seen Batman: Sword of Azrael #1 go for as much as $25,” O’Neil said. “If I had to do it again, maybe we could have found a way to bring Bane on stage. I work with consummate craftsman, and I will stipulate that even if you never saw those books and will never see them, there’s plenty of information in the stories themselves. You have everything you need to know about those guys if you read Batman and Detective Comics. That’s one of my criteria for doing comics. I don’t think it’s fair to the reader to force them to go outside of what they’ve just bought in order for them to understand what they’ve just read.”

Building Batman
Before Knightfall, there had been complains in fandom that the Batman titles lacked continuity, but O’Neil claimed it’s always been there.
“It just hasn’t been the kind of continuity that Mike Carlin does in Superman, said O’Neil, “where one story ends and the next book picks up ten seconds later. There’s a lot of reasons for that, one of which is that I keep wanting to put emphasis on the story with continuity as a part of that; so I insist that stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that THAT be finite. A writer is really going to have to work to convince me that he is going to need more than three issues to tell a story, so we do that, but I think of it as a mosaic. At the end of the year, all of the features fit into one big picture.  We don’t ever contradict unless we screw up, which is a distinct possibility, albeit a distant one. I was being facetious of course. We make mistakes all the time. But, if Tim Drake’s father is kidnapped in one book, he stays kidnapped in the next book; and we can generally figure out that these three issues took about three days of Batman’s life, and that’s this week. The next story takes about two days, so that winds up the week. I’ve got on my computer an outline for the next year,” O’Neil continued, “which never gets more detailed than who the villain is, and if the villain doesn’t exist, it says, ‘new villain,’ which when we’re dealing with something like Knightquest or Knightfall, then there are other things. Where is Jack Drake’s health at a given time? Has Bruce recovered at al by whatever issue it is we’re dealing with? We can maintain that continuity that we spoke of earlier. I’m not going to say it fits seamlessly, but pretty close to it, so at the end of the year you can make sense…assuming that these guys lead very busy lives! I would say that we have continuity working through the strengths of my creative people.”

With Knightfall, and later, the Knightquest storyline demand the other kind of continuity,” said O’Neil, “stillnot as tightly as Mike does it, but a lot more. Even having said that, we ry to keep the story self-contained enough, that if for some reason Batman isn’t available to you, but Detective Comics is, you’ll get enough of the backstory and surrounding information in Detective Comics to understand what is going on here and now.”
However, fandom has noticed similarities between the physical powers of Bane against Batman and the physical powers of Doomsday against Superman. According to O’Neil, this is just confidence.
“If I had known that Mike was going to do his storyline this year,” O’Neil commented, “I would have considered delaying mine. We were both working independently. There was no reason for me to check what he was doing and vice versa. By the time that we figured out that we were both working on major continuity-altering storylines, it was too late to do anything about it. I read Superman as it comes out. I don’t really read other editors’ stuff except as a reader, but I want to enjoy it. Therefore, I don’t look at scripts or artwork ahead of time. Again, if Batman or Robin makes an appearance, I have to look at it, and complain if necessary.”

The Changing of the Guard
Knightfall reaches its penultimate chapter in Batman #500. Among the creative changes that occur are the changing of artistic guards from Jim Aparo to Mike Manley. Aparo moves to Green Arrow after a long run on Batman related comics.

“I left Darkhawk (for Marvel Comics) with #25,” said Manley, “and I was lining up to do some special projects stuff, and Brett Blevins, who’s a really good friend of mine, left his contract at Marvel to look around and see stuff. He went over to see Archie Goodwin (Editor of Legends of the Dark Knight), who we both know at DC, and Archie gave him some work. Bret was saying, ‘You should go see Archie.’ He gave me Legends of the Dark Knight Annual, and a couple people were in the office – Neal Pozner, Mike Carlin – and they asked me if I would be interested in doing some stuff.”
“Then one night,” continued Manley, “at 7:30, Denny O’Neil called me up and asked if I wanted to do Batman. I thought about it for about 30 seconds and said ‘Yeah!’ I had no idea about Batman #500. I hadn’t read Batman in years. His first artwork is chapter 1 of Knightquest: The Crusade,” which focuses on the adventures of the new Batman.”
“I was sort of coming in at the end,” Manley said, “the beginning and the middle because it’s the end of the first part of the storyline they had come up with. I was the new kid on the block. It’s in the middle of the storyline, and it’s at the beginning of the whole big new thing with Batman. Maybe in a way it’s a good thing I haven’t read Batman comics in years, because I’m trying to come at it from a fresh perspective. It’s enjoyable, and I feel I have a lot of freedom. My preconceptions of the character are basically the stuff Neal Adams did when I read as a kid, and the stuff that Frank Miller did himself, and with David Mazzucelli. That’s the stuff I have in my head. It’d be like, if I did the Fantastic Four. I’d think about what Jack Kirby did. I think all creative people do that when they come on. If you were going to do Spiderman, maybe you’d go back and reread the old Steve Ditko and John Romita issues. Maybe for a young guy, it would be Todd McFarlane.”
Still, Manley has admiration for his predecessors.

“I didn’t sit down [when I was hired],” Manley explained, “and think I was following in Jim Aparo’s footsteps. I feel that if it’ a new character, it’ll be different from what Aparo did. I fondly remember the Aparo stuff from when I was collecting the Neal Adams stuff too. I used to confuse his stuff with Neal Adams stuff when I was a kid. He was one of the best guys in the field. He had a great flair for storytelling. I think to some extent, Neal was a better draftsman, coming from the old strips, but Aparo had a lot of dynamic storytelling to his stuff. He’d chop up panels. He was very good at layouts and treating the whole page as a unit.”
“One of the things that I’m trying to do with Batman,” continued Manley, “is bring up the elements of Gotham City and work very hard on the backgrounds. I’ve really cut down on my workload, and I am just working on Batman, not two, three or four projects at the same time.”
“Knightquest: The Crusade will be seen in both Batman and Detective Comics, but what will happen to Bruce Wayne?”
“Denny will take Bruce off in Knightquest: The Search,” said Moench, “and Justice League Task Force, for a three-part story in which Bruce Wayne is trying to solve the mystery of Dr. Sondra Kinsolving and the adduction of Robin’s father.”
“We thought we’d have to logically deal with Superman,” said O’Neil,  “so a scene has been written by one of Mike’s guys. We’ll have to deal logically with Nightwing, so that will pop up here and there. We’re dealing with Green Arrow in Justice League Task Force. Our version of Batman is that he is not a very public guy. I don’t think there are a dozen people in Gotham City who have decent photographs of him, and he certainly doesn’t hang around talking to crowds. What the world knows is that he’s changed clothes. A few people in Gotham City – Gordon, Bullock, and Sarah Essen – will react to his personality change. Gordon will be shocked by it, and wonder if he’s gone over the line. Bullock will applaud it like he’s finally figured what to do with the lowlife scum: beat them senseless.”

What Makes A Hero?
“A lot of heroes in movies,” continued O’Neil, “and in other comics, commit whole slaughter pretty casually. That’s another idea that we’re playing with in this series.”
O’Neil to use Bruce Wayne and Azrael to explore different aspects of the same theme. “We decided to not just let Bruce be an invalid,” said O’Neil, “but to tell a story of a different type of heroism. In real life, I have not a great deal of admiration for somebody who charges a machine gun nest because that’s adrenaline, but someone who is in great pain, gets up and makes their life work despite that: that’s a real hero. The story will start in Justice League Task Force #5 and 6, then Shadow of the Bat #21-23 – that’ll be written by Alan Grant and done by the regular shadow team – and I will finish it up in a three-parter in Legends of the Dark Knight, again emphasizing that each of these will be self-contained stories in which a problem will be solved. I would like to believe that anyone who reads just one of these stories will be perfectly satisfied and feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth. If you read all three of them, you get the big picture and find out all the details. “A model for this sort of thing,” continued O’Neil, “is a Dashiell Hammett book called The Dain Curse, which is made up of three novellas, and they were each published separately. Nobody ever knew that they were all part of a large novel, so therefore, everybody who read them – they were serialized in Black Mask (a pulp magazine) – got their money’s worth. Then Hammett pulled them all together with very little rewriting into one novel, and you’d say, ‘Oh yeah, man! Now I really see what this is about!’ That’s what we’re trying to do with Knightquest: The Search. We will have failed if we don’t provide lots of action, melodrama, and larger than life characters; but underneath that, [we’re dealing with] heroism. Is it the very violent action that Azrael does? Is it the thing that Bruce Wayne is doing?”
While O’Neil couldn’t divulge the length of Knightquest, or the permanence of the changes, he did disclose, “We’re going to build it to a dramatic conclusion. We’re exploring the character of Azrael. To some degree, we are waiting for feedback. We’re seeing how readers feel about it. We’re seeing how readers feel about it, and how we feel about it.”

Anniversary Shakeups
Between the publicity of the death and resurrection of Superman in Superman #75 and Adventures of Superman #500, and the current goings on with the Caped Crusader with the new armored Batman debuting in Batman #500, violent occurrences and radical changes seem to be the new milieu for DC superheroes anniversaries.
“Mike Carlin and I arrived at our ideas completely separately,” said O’Neil, “without so much as ten seconds consultation, but I can pretty much figure out why we did it. We both have the same problem to solve, and that is that we have characters that are half a century old. In my case, I made a guess based on my 26 years’ experience that maybe we were getting routine.  I know that movies and television shows would draw attention to the character, and we’d get hepped on that, but all of that was going to be over now. It’s deadly to let a character like Batman or Superman go on autopilot, and it’s easy enough to do that. Both characters have had stretches in their history where it’s happened. You still collect your paycheck, and sales don’t slide dramatically, but you want to keep the stuff fresh.”
“The trick,” O’Neil continued, “is to keep it interesting for you.” Then, if the writers or artists have interest or are having a hard time doing their jobs, that’s probably going to have a lot of interest for the reader. There’s always people who hate what you’re doing, but if you didn’t do this shakeup once and a while, there would be a danger of the characters repeating themselves, going on autopilot. That would be the death of them.”
O’Neil described how he handled that major shakeup. “What we’ve attempted to do,” he explained, “is preserve the essence of the character, that core identity, what made him a hero in the first place. Then, either allow the externals to evolve or every once and a while give the externals a kick in the slats to make them evolve, to keep them contemporary. If we’re doing our jobs right, we’re doing stories that appeal to a twelve-year-old or a fifty-year-old. When I started in this business, there were all sorts of rules. Some of them made sense. Some of them were simple rules someone that of at the time; but we had far less freedom to deal with the essence of the character then. Any changes that happened during the 50s, 60s, and 70s, happened as a sort of evolution. It happened when people weren’t really watching. Now, we are allowed to actually tell dramatic stories, and dramatic stories always involve change.”

Prelude to Knightfall
Sword of Azrael
Vengeance of Bane

Knightfall
The Broken Bat
Who Rules the Night

Knightquest
The Crusade
The Search

Knightsend
The Story
Aftermath

America Online Fan Chat with Dennis O’Neill and Archie Goodwin
Reprinted in Azrael #3
April 1995

On December 19, a week before Azrael #1 htit the stands, DC Comics held a question and answer session on AOL (America Online) With series writer Dennis O’Neil and editor Archie Goodwin fielding the questions. For those of you who missed the session, here’s the skinny on what went on…

What will be the driving premise behind Azrael?
Dennis: The driving premise will be a young man , striving to discover his identity and his place in the world. We’ll also play with the difference between men and angels, and men and super heroes.

Do you think the dark hero is a fad, or do you see this type of hero lasting forever?
Dennis: Batman has been a dark hero for 55 years. I don’t think dark is a heroic category. The coloration of the hero proceeds from the premise. In Azrael’s case you have a dark premise, someone who is driven to acts of violence by forced that are beyond his control.

Do you think that Azrael is freer now that he doesn’t have to be Batman?
Dennis: No, he is still a slave to the system, a victim to old compulsions. Some of what the series is about is Azrael’s attempt to free himself.
Archie: I think he’s in the process of earning that freedom.

Do you think it will be difficult to make Jean Paul a character readers can sympathize with – or even understand? He was pretty gone by the end of Knightfall and many of us just didn’t care anymore.
Dennis: We’re starting from way behind square one with Azrael. Normally, an audience’s feeling is neutral at first. We know in this case that a lot of people actually dislike him. To make him a hero, and a likeable one, is the biggest challenge we face. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve tried in 29 years of writing comic books.
Archie: From the time we Sword of Azrael it seemed Jean Paul had the potential to be more than just the role he was given in Knightfall. This book will let us realize that potential.

Will Azrael be a Batman book like Robin, or a spinoff, like Catwoman?
Dennis: A spinoff like Catwoman.
Archie: Bit interacting with Bats a couple times a year.

How will Jean Paul suppress his will to kill, or will he?
Dennis: That’s what the first story arc is about, his quest to control that. That is his particular ‘grail.’

What role will Oracle play in Azrael and the DCU?
Dennis: In the DCU an increasingly important one. In Azrael she will be a continuing character.

Will Azrael wander forever or find a city to adopt and continue to fight crime like Batman?
Dennis: Eventually, he will find a home.
Will there be any guest stars lined up for Azrael’s first year?
Dennis: Batman is in issues #1 and #2, Ra’s Al Ghul in #5, and Robin and Nightwing eventually, although I can’t say exactly when.

Who will be Azrael’s enemies?
Dennis: Initially, The Order of St. dumas. That will take us through the first six issues. After that, we’ll see.

Will Azrael meet Bane again, and on what terms?
Archie: I don’t think they’ll be dating.
Dennis: It is quite likely that Azrael will run up against all of Batman’s enemies.
Archie: Actually the Batfolk HAVE Bane plans; enough to keep him occupied for a bit.

What role, if any, will the homeless people play in the Showcase ’94 story?
Dennis: There are no plans for them.
Archie: Although Jean Paul’s initial situation gets close to that in a way.

Will there be any crossovers like Batman VS Predator?
Archie: We’re getting Azrael up on his way. That takes time. Maybe in the second year.

Whatever happened to the dwarf guy [Nomoz] from Sword of Azrael?
Archie: I don’t know, I hope Dennis can get sveral issues out of answering that sometime soon.
Dennis: Azrael will meet him again sometime between issues #7-12.

Will we meet Jean Paul’s mother?
Dennis: Very interesting question. The question of Jean Paul’s mother will have a lot to do with his problems.

Will Azrael be meeting the more mystical side of the DCU? Such as the Spectre, Phantom Stranger, Fate, or will he stay urban and dark?
Dennis: Anything is possible. He will certainly meet the same characters that Batman runs into.
Archie: Since I edit Fate, I’d like to see it happen, but not until both are more clearly established.

Will Jean Paul destroy The Order of St. Dumas?
Archie: He may only wound them.

How will the rest of the DC Universe react to Azrael – a hero who they fought beside before but didn’t know it?
Dennis: It will depend on the individual characters. They will have an individual response if and when they meet.

A Somewhat related question having to do with Knightfall – is there a future for books like Knightfall? And will there be any more?
Archie: Only if the storyline justifies it. Our job, in part, is to come up with stories that do.
Dennis: There is a future as long as there are enough people who buy it and want to see more of it.

Speaking of Question, will he be making an appearance in Azrael?
Dennis: Very likely.

Will Azrael make an appearance in The New Adventures of Batman and Robin?
No, that series is now also done with production.

Any suggestions for up and coming writers?
Archie: Read outside of comics. Write, write, write, submit and don’t get discouraged.

Any chance Nightwing will go up against Azrael?
Archie: I’d like to see it, but no immediate plans unless Dennis says otherwise.
Dennis: Nightwing will certainly meet Azrael. I don’t know if it will be in a combative situation. Super heroes don’t have to fight every time they meet.

Super heroes don’t have to fight every time they meet.