We talked that second arc, I think, about Bane, Catwoman, and Batman being three sides of the same shitty coin. But now with Thomas included in there, it feels like it’s kind of four points on a graph, labeling each axis. You’ve got like Batman who had privilege but lost everything at a young age. You have Thomas on the other end who had everything for most of his life and then lost everything. You’ve got Catwoman, who was born into nothing and kind of hangs on to everything but keeps it at arms length. And you’ve got Bane, who kind of grabs whatever he can and crushes it to death. As Thomas evolved into this, does that sound like what you were thinking at all?

Yeah, I do think they all represent this idea of who’s top of the mountain in their own way. I guess you could say who does Gotham belong to? Bane sees Gotham as a prize that he has to win. Thomas sees Gotham as a burden. For Catwoman, Gotham is just who she is and she’s sort of queen of that city. And then for Batman, it’s … I mean that’s what the whole question is. What does he mean to Gotham?

With Alfred’s death, was it kind of a backdoor way of you taking a look at Bruce’s origins? You know, using the death of a father figure to kind of shock him out of being Batman the way that he was shocked into being Batman?

Yeah, but it was also a way to show what the difference is between Bruce losing his parents when he was young and connected to them, and Bruce losing Alfred having been raised by Alfred. To me that was a tribute to sort of Alfred’s parentage of Bruce for all these years and him guiding him through that trauma. Because you expect Batman in that moment to bury himself in anger and go insane and do all the things that drove him to be Batman in the first place. But instead of that, he hears Alfred’s voice and he composes himself. To me it’s sort of about the maturing of the character and maturing of it through the love of Alfred. I know I said this in the book, there are no good deaths. There’s a nobility to death if you’ve treated your children right.

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