SDCC COVERAGE SPONSORED BY MAD CAVE
Saturday’s DC Comics: Gotham City panel, moderated by the line’s group editor Rob Levin, included Matt Fraction, Scott Snyder, Nick Dragotta, Daniel Warren Johnson, Dan Jurgens, and Kyle Higgins. The panel began with a trailer for DC High Volume’s new weekly cinematic audio podcast adaptation of Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale‘s Dark Victory series set for Wednesday, July 30th.
Levin started with Fraction, in his playful and witty self, about being one of the few creators to relaunch the main Batman title. Levin asked about the personal stakes of taking on Batman. Fraction stated, “Ultimately, I can draw a straight line from today back to, I looked it up, July 1979. So, yeah, it’s a new day in Gotham, and I want to make a Batman book that reminds everybody why he’s the coolest character with the coolest stuff and the coolest partners and the coolest city and the coolest car and the coolest gadgets and make a comic book that celebrates Batman comic books.”
Fraction spoke highly of his collaborator, Jorge Jiménez, saying, “he’s brilliant and incredibly fast.” Tim Drake is the active Robin who’s partnered with Batman in this run and has a significant role starting in issue #2, where he has a nasty run-in with the GCPD, now run by Vandal Savage. An ongoing thread is going to be Batman and Robin in a Gotham where they can’t work with the police. Fraction made references to Batman using gadgets like James Bond and having more opportunities to see Bruce Wayne in action in times when he can’t just be Batman.
Next, they moved on to discuss Absolute Batman and its current arc with Snyder and Dragotta, focusing on the new version of Bane and Arkham. Snyder said, “Under Gotham, it’s a labyrinth. You don’t know. I wanted it to be completely alien and unknowable and scary because that’s the fun of the series, right?”
Dragotta followed up with, “I mean, now that you look at this, this is a black site. This is a place where people disappear. So it’s black.”
On Bane, Snyder said, “Bane, the venom doesn’t just enhance his muscles; it enhances his mind. And so he has every single fighting style, every military battle, every sort of strategy you could think of in his head. He is like walking war.”
The panel then pivoted to Jurgens and Mike Perkins’ The Batman: Second Night, a sequel to the DC Black Label miniseries The Batman: First Night. Taking place in 1939, Jurgens explained, “Bruce Wayne has only been Batman at that point for a couple of weeks. There is no Batcave. There is no Batmobile. There is no Alfred. It’s basically the story of Bruce alone, struggling with the idea of whether or not he can even be a Batman. There’s no technology.”
Levin then turned to Higgins about the Elseworlds title Immortal Legend Batman, a tokusatsu-influenced future space-faring Batman family story. Higgins praised Dan Mora, the artist on the title.
The panel concluded with Johnson and his work on the upcoming Absolute Batman Annual #1, where he presents a one-page story focusing on how Bruce got his monster truck and fought white supremacists. Dragotta and Johnson discussed how Johnson joined the annual, and Dragotta pursued artists he found visually exciting, while also allowing them to write. Fraction ended the panel by charming everyone with his story of learning Adobe Illustrator to make a map.
SDCC COVERAGE SPONSORED BY MAD CAVE
English (US) · 