GKO: MADHOUSE
Here you will find our rambalings on all area's of Batman, interviews and speical features!
ComicsAlliance: In the second issue of "Batman, Inc." you're started to go further and further outside the established canon of Batman stories, bringing in Lord Death Man from Jiro Kuwata's unofficial Japanese "Bat-Manga" stories from the 1960s. What interested you about that story?
Grant Morrison: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I love that whole thing; I got Chip [Kidd]'s book a couple years ago... Death Man appears in the '60s in Batman in America, but just the way Jiro draws Death Man... He didn't really come to life for me until I saw how he was drawn in the "Bat-Manga" book.
You know, you're obviously familiar with it, so you know what I mean about that beautiful creepy energy of the skull... and carrying a tommy gun that just seemed so Batman-esque, you know, so perfect a villain. And the fact that they called him Lord Death Man and not just Death Man elevated him to this new kind of metric. But yeah, why not just incorporate all of that stuff into this legend of Batman so that we can kind of draw on every aspect of the character's 70 year history, and the actual publishing history as well. This story is going to be about how the Batman of the Bat-Manga comics gets his job, and it's Batman himself who recruits him.
CA: You've talked a lot about the versatility of Batman, and watching the character make the jump to another country and to manga seemed like another example of how Batman can adapt to so many different spaces. Are there any other sort of fringe Batman texts that you've been looking at besides "Bat-Manga" that might have an influence on your run?
GM: Not... well, I have to think. I mean, if there's one thing that has influenced the new stuff, the "Batman, Inc." stuff, it's a book called "Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero," which is written by E. Paul Zehr. It's a guy who is a doctor, and looking into the actual possibility of Batman and what it would take to be that person in real life: What it would do to your muscles and what it would do to your head, and how long it would take to learn the martial arts. And it's really quite fascinating, this idea of the real facts behind it. So I've been looking at that, not anything in comics or any other weird version of Batman that I've found, but very much this kind of physical reality of Batman -- that's really playing into Batman's continuity build-up.
CA: When you first announced that Bruce Wayne was coming back, it seemed like it might happen in the first season of "Batman and Robin." How did the initial idea evolve into all the different threads of "Return of Bruce Wayne" and "Batman Inc."
GM: Well, it just kind of seemed natural that once Bruce was out of the way we had to have a new Batman and Robin team to take his place, and it made sense for Dick Grayson to take over, because he's been in line for along time and he also makes a great Batman. It also made sense to use the Damian character again because I've been building him up in Batman, and suddenly it seemed to be a good idea to have a Batman dynamic with a smiling happy-go-lucky daredevil Batman and a little violent, angry Robin.
And the fact that Bruce was back in time allowed me to play a little bit with all the different threads of entry which turned him into Batman. So each of the "Return of Bruce Wayne"s is a genre piece as well as a Batman story, which kind of looks at all the different pulp genres that fed the Batman idea, inspired Batman and inspired Batman's creators. We were able to do a story that was really about the character as well a story about the character as an idea, as well as a story about fiction itself and the way heroes develop through time.
check out the interview here.
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