CBR talk again with Batman group editor Mike Marts about this weeks momentus Batman #700 and what's in store for Batman...

CBR News: Mike, you've been editing comics for a while now, and I'm sure you've done a few anniversary issues over the years. When walking into a project like "Batman" #700, do you have a certain kind of benchmark for what you want to include in the comic either as a centennial story or as a Batman anniversary issue specifically?

Mike Marts: You always approach one of these big anniversary issues a lot different than you would a normal issue. Actually, when we started working on "Batman" #700, I started thinking back to whether I'd ever worked on a big centennial issue, and I don't think I had. I know I've worked on 50s and 150s and 75s and other numbers that are divisible by 25, but I don't think I'd ever gotten to do a 100 or 200 or something like that. So I knew off the bat that we had to make this issue extremely special. And fortunately, Grant Morrison had an amazing plan already in place. He had stared talking about a storyline that was split into three different parts, and as we talked about it, it started to evolve into a storyline that was split into three different eras.

So he thought up the idea of using three different artists, which was great. We knew right off the bat that no matter who we got to draw the issue, we'd have three great artists, so already it was shaping up to be pretty special. Additionally, with anniversary issues you want to have bonus content that you wouldn't have in a monthly issue – pinups, special features and things like that. Those are things you take into consideration when planning one of those issues.

In a way, the book reminded me of issue #600 where Ed Bruabaker wrote kind of fake "classic" stories with artists aping the style of Dick Sprang or whoever. Grant's story also fits that "we're going to have classic material here" idea but pushes those previous eras past reprints or homages and reveals a bit of secret history.

Exactly. Nothing against reprinting old stories from the past because they are classic stories, but we have a whole trade paperback department that handles that side of things. This time around, we didn't want to go back and reprint old material. We wanted to make each page within the issue new content.

The focal point artist for each of the issue's chapters is Tony Daniel, Frank Quietly and Andy Kubert. The thing that jumped out at me about Tony's art was not just that this was a specific callback to the "new look" era headlined by Carmine Infantino but that the little quirks – particularly with Batman's mask – were drawn from the Adam West TV show as well. Those are things Grant has talked a lot about as inspiration, but we haven't seen him write in that era. Did he put notes in the script about different visual cues, or did you work with the artists to pull out reference to match each era?

Grant was fairly specific about that at the beginning of the story. At the beginning of each chapter, he gave each artist a bit of art direction, primarily with Tony because there we were going back into an era from the past. The Silver Age approach was very intentional for the design of the chapter. With Frank, it was mostly asking him to continue all the great stuff he'd been doing in his "Batman & Robin" run. And with Andy, it was going into the future and bringing the same style and sensibility he took when he did "Batman" #666. But I think maybe the most challenging chapter was also the shortest one which was the David Finch-drawn feature at the end. That required a lot of extra thought and imagination on David's part. Grant did a great job describing all these brilliant futurescapes, but it was really going the extra mile with what David had to bring to it.

For the entire interview click here...

(Source - CBR)