To say this is a big week for the Batman universe is a bit of an understatement. With the release of Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne on Wednesday, CBR have posted a Bat Signal interview with writer mastermind Grant Morrison to discuss his run on the six issue mini-series and some the big reveals in Batman and Robin.

CBR News: Let's start with what everyone is talking about today, the big reveal in Wednesday's release of "Batman and Robin" that Oberon Sexton is, in fact, The Joker. Did you feel you couldn't tell this epic Bruce Wayne story without the Joker playing a role?

Grant Morrison: It's obviously been planned for a long, long time. The Joker had to be in it. The Joker is the yang to Batman's yin and yin to his yang, so he always had to be there. And because he played such an important part in "Batman R.I.P.," we really wanted to see Dick Grayson and Damian up against The Joker. That was the one that I thought was important for fans to see.

So it seemed inevitable that he would be in there. And as I said, the character has been kind of haunting the book since "Batman and Robin" #1. There's been these little scenes here and there hinting that it was The Joker, so it's been building up for a long, long time. But it's also, as you'll see in #13, which I think is going to be [Laughs]... well, people are going to be really excited about it. It's quite cool. And Frazer Irving's art is amazing. But The Joker is quite different than anything we've ever seen before, so again, we wanted to keep ramping it up and keep doing new things and keep doing new twists and turns that people hadn't seen before.

You've been writing Batman now for nearly four years. How important is it to add new elements, ideas and philosophies to the character and his supporting cast versus going back and reading old Batman stories and being true to the character and honest with his long history?

I keep going back to those early stories and you forget because you're so familiar with them, but for instance, every time you go back to the first Joker story, it's really quite shocking how hardcore the character is and how dark it is and how very specific and well-worked out his plans are. And then you pick up a Batman comic from the 1960s. I just sort of re-discovered some of the stories Gardner Fox did after the "Batman" TV show. There is a really bad period in Batman's history where the books are all trying to copy the TV show. They were all kind of campy and crappy, but Fox came in for a very short time right after that and he did this amazing run of brilliant, really great and twisty takes on the Batman mythos.

So you can find stuff like that and suddenly you get a different version of The Joker, which is really cool. And then you get Denny O'Neil's version of The Joker, which is really cool. A lot of them are not what you remember. So they all kind of go into the mega-take and then you have to try and do something that honors all of those and incorporates all of that continuity while putting another little twist on it.

For the full interview click here...

(Source - Comic Book Resource)