Next week sees the launch of another groundbreaking mini-series Batman Beyond. Writer Adam Beechen talks to CBR on his upcoming project!

CBR News: Adam, it's pretty fitting that you've been tapped to pick up the reigns of "Batman Beyond" since you came to comics by way of animation, and your first gig with Batman was writing an episode of Warner Bros. "The Batman" series. How'd you roll your interest in the Dark Knight into that gig?

Adam Beechen: I worked on "Teen Titans," and the story editor on "The Batman" was the story editor on "Teen Titans." He knew what I could do and knew I was a comic book nut, so he brought me in as a freelancer on that show. It was a story they had already planned to do, so they already had the premise pretty much laid out and wanted to know if I could write the outline and the script for it. And I pretty much jumped at the chance to write anything Batman.

Having written Batman in a few different media and circumstances, do you feel like there's one Batman voice that's carried throughout the work that you've done on TV or in comics?

No, because with the cartoons it's a little different. If you're freelancing, you're working off of someone else's vision of the show, so your job as a freelancer is to match their tone and their style, and I was trying to write the Batman, in that case, that had already been established for that particular show. I didn't bring a whole lot to it in terms of my vision, because that wasn't what I was there for. So I wasn't able to write "my own" Batman, if you will, until I was working on the "Robin" comic book.

It's just an example of how pervasive the character and his supporting cast is that you can write plenty of Batman appearances without ever writing a "Batman comic book."

Correct. I wrote a Batman story that was purely my own in "Legends of the Dark Knight" in which Batman wasn't even the central character, and that was a lot of fun. That focused on how other people see Batman in Gotham. And in "Robin," he was a necessary character because of his relationship with Tim Drake, so there are a lot of different ways and approaches and angles to look at Batman, and it was kind of fun to look at the character through some different angles than I had seen traditionally explored for him.

For the full interview click here...

(Source - CBR)