We caught up with writer James Tynion IV at WonderCon 2017 to talk about the current arc of Detective Comics , "Kiss of the Dragon" with artists Fernando Blanco and Christian Duce.

Cover by Eddy Barrows, Eber Ferreira and Adriano Lucas. (DC Comics)

Exclusive Preview of Detective Comics #954 6 IMAGES

Warning: this article contains full spoilers for Detective Comics!The arc features the return of Lady Shiva and the League of Shadows. Shiva has some ruinous plans for Gotham City, natch, but her real goal centers around her daughter Cassandra Cain aka Orphan. Cass is considered the best hand-to-hand fighter in the DC Universe, even better than Batman, so Shiva is sick of how her daughter refuses to use her full, lethal potential and views Cass as weak, so she's continually testing her and trying to push her limits. This story has become a battle for Gotham with Batman's team taking on the League of Shadows and a personal family quarrel as Cassandra tries to come to grips with what she is and good ol' mom.We talked to Tynion about this messed up mother-daughter relationship, the unexpected popularity of team-member Clayface, and what to expect from the newly announced Batman-centric DC event Dark Nights: Metal . Hear what Tynion had to say, then let us know your thoughts in the comments.Also, be sure to click through the slideshow below to get your first look inside the next issue, Detective Comics #954.

Cover by Eddy Barrows and Eber Ferreira. (DC Comics)

There was a great bit in Zero Year by Scott Snyder where he kind of addresses that a bit, which is that Gotham is a challenging city that forces you to become Batman. It is something where you need to overcome the horror of it and there's a charge you get out of that. By becoming the person who can survive Gotham City, you become a more sharpened version of yourself. So that's a meta-reason that exists.It would be pretty horrifying to live there. I'm not sure I would, maybe a visit on the weekend or something like that but I would want to visit Gotham the week after some horrifying attack there so it's just like "alright everyone is gonna stay put for a little bit" but still rebuilding the buildings and stuff, now's the time to go do some sightseeing.I wanted to go back to in their relationship, their own continuity where she would show up and she would test Cass. She would see where Cass was in her training and her abilities. Here you have Shiva showing up much earlier in Cass' story. Like Cassie is working through a lot of stuff, she's still figuring out her place in this world. You think about the sped up time line of comics and remember that months ago in continuity were the events of Batman and Robin Eternal where she's had maybe a couple months of a kind of normal life and then Shiva comes up and she's here to test her and she's here to see if she's worthy of attention.The thing with Shiva is, and this will come into play much more in the next few issues where we see a bit more of her motivations both in a larger scale way, why is she attacking Gotham, but also in what her intentions are for Cass. We'll also see Cass sort of rise up to meet her in a really big and badass way. This is sort of resetting the beginning of that relationship in the most dramatic way possible. I'm excited to let it all play out from there.I think everyone else on the Bat team sort of views Clayface as a ticking timebomb. He is someone who is being reliable right now, Batman has put his trust in him, but he's been a villain. He's been a really bad guy in the past. The thing with Cass, her forming moment was killing Harper Row's mother. It was the one time she actually killed and she views herself as still bearing that from the scar of that. So she sees herself as on Clayface's level so there's no condescension, fear or anything of Clayface. She takes him at face value and he also sees her pain, actually understands it in a way that the other members of the Bat family can’t because they have been more fully on the righteous path from the beginning. He understands that in a more real way. That is a connection that going back to the original pitch of this series and of this team, that was a relationship that I really wanted to build. That and it's fun playing them off of each other. There are scenes coming up in the next arc that play into that, that I'm really excited about.The number one thing is, "When is Tim Drake coming back?" Which I can not answer. What I can say is I know the answer to that question.The other thing is Clayface. Clayface is really spoken to a lot of people in a way that genuinely surprising because it surprised me too, writing him in this. Initially the way he ended up in the book is I was sort of piecing together the group and it was mostly the group you see in the book now but they said "we need the wild card on the team, we need the character that no one will expect to have been a part of the team, potentially someone that has an interesting silhouette to make covers cooler when they're all lined up together." I sat around thinking about a few different options and the one I kind of settled on was Clayface.At first it was a more practical decision, this is a stealth team and Clayface is a shape-shiftier and that's useful. He's a shape-shiftier and a Hulk-style bruiser so you've got both of those things in him. So it was in pure utility and then in writing the book it was finding the sadness at the heart of the character and it really opened up a whole realm of story in a team book. People are really responding to it.No. This is not to get too much into spoilers of what's coming up, but basically the League of Shadows is a separate entity from the League of Shadows and Ra's is not happy about that because that did not used to be the case.Well I would say that Batman is at the heart of these stories and that means it'll absolutely reverberate down to Detective Comics. The first place you actually saw the words “Dark Days” was in the little prologue piece in the last four pages of Detective Comics #950. That kind of set the stage with Tim Drake seeing that Bruce is up to something and Bruce has been planning for something to happen for a while now. This is the story that I've been talking about with Scott for years, now we're actually going to get to tell it and I'm incredibly excited for that.I know what I'm building towards, I have a lot more story. I have enough story to get me to 1000. I don't have it blocked out issue by issue but I know the general shape of the pieces and how I wanna play these arcs off of each other and give each of the characters the right... part of it is sort of viewing it in chunks, like everything right now is building towards #975 which will come out next year. If all the books are still double-shipped, then it’ll be another year until #1000. All I know is that I told everyone at, all of my bosses at DC Comics "I want to write Detective Comics #1000."That's an interesting question, I would say not so much because the thing is we are playing out of the Gotham aesthetic. Every artist has their own take on the Gotham aesthetic and it gives the city its own unique voice in that. It's also something that readers have an easy time understanding, they understand that like if one arc has one feel and one arc has a different feel but as long as both feel like Gotham then it reads smoothly.Honestly my biggest thing with my artists, especially at the beginning was learning to play to each of the artist's strengths. There’s three main artists I've worked with. Eddy Barrows can layer in the emotional weight to really create a gut punch of a moment. Alvaro Martinez does all this incredibly detailed world-building. Eddy Barrows did the first appearance of the Belfry, but pretty much all new settings have come from Alvaro, like we've seen Fox's laboratory and he threw in a basketball hoop in the background and all this stuff that really makes it feel lived in and real. It's that kind of thought that I love working with him. He's also been great designing some new characters and stuff. Marcio Takara is incredible at these very human moments and that's why he was the perfect choice on Detective Comics #950. It was kind of an essay on the internal crisis of Cassandra Cain and he was the perfect person to bring that to life. He was the person I originally worked with on the first introspective Cassandra Cain issue of Batman and Robin Eternal, so yeah I love working with all of my artists. They all bring something different and incredible to the table and I'm glad that they get to show off their strengths. We aren't trying to force them to all look the same here, I'm trying to play to each of their individual strengths in building one larger, singular story.I would say the biggest carrot I can dangle out is that Zatanna is going to be a key player in the summer storyline in Detective Comics. We just saw her in the solicits on the cover and Zatanna is one of my all time favorite characters and putting back into continuity the idea that Bruce trained under Zatara at some point in his past. We're going to see bits of that past together. Alvaro Martinez is doing that arc and what he's done with those scenes is-- it made me write more scenes in that time just because it was just so good.Yeah, we're gonna be seeing that from when he spent time in Las Vegas when Zatara was a performer, like he was locked into performing for a few months at one of the casinos there and we're going to see Batman’s burgeoning relationship with Zatana in the past and how that affects the present.

Joshua is IGN’s Comics Editor. If Pokemon, Green Lantern, or Game of Thrones are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter @JoshuaYehl and IGN