'Eternal' closes epic year-long Batman tale

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Batman Eternal debuted a year ago with a fiery look into Gotham City's future and the line "We all can't be Batman."

Over the course of 51 weekly issues, the city and its Dark Knight have been decimated, explored and fleshed out like never before by a team of DC Comics' finest artist and writers. Yet the series has also set the tone for a strong line of Bat-books across the publisher in crafting a tale worthy of the superhero's 75th anniversary.

"We wanted to show every little piece of what makes Batman great and what makes him a lasting figure in our culture. There's so much we can do with this character and this world and Gotham City," says James Tynion IV, one of the writers alongside the likes of Scott Snyder, Tim Seeley, Ray Fawkes and Kyle Higgins.

Featuring a number of illustrators including David Lafuente, Eduardo Pansica and Julio Ferreira, Eternal No. 52 begins with an epic face-off between Batman — currently in a bad way, as usual — and Lincoln March, the recently revealed architect of a diabolical plan to take the Caped Crusader down. But everybody has a role to play in the book's curtain call after many have changed their different status quos.

Catwoman is now an underworld boss in Gotham City. Stephanie Brown's been reintroduced into the DC Universe. There was a rise and fall of seemingly idealistic cop Jason Bard to go with the fall and rise of Jim Gordon. And a host of allies such as Talon and Batwoman make appearances as the city's residents rise up in its darkest hour.

"We wanted the story to lean into the entire Bat-mythos and the idea that it's something bigger than Batman," Tynion says. "We wanted to show how capable Batman is as an idea that inspires everyone around him — there's something in him that resonates with all of us."

While any of the hero's colorful villains could have been the main bad guy of the series, the Eternal team always had March at the center of the story. A madman connected to the Court of Owls and claiming to be Bruce Wayne's long-lost brother, he was a major aspect of the first big Batman story following DC's "The New 52" relaunch in the fall of 2011 and, for Tynion, was the perfect figure to spend a year destabilizing and almost killing the Dark Knight.

"He's an amazing broken mirror for Batman," Fawkes says. "While Batman operates in the shadows to do good and help people, Lincoln is all about selfishness and greed and destruction."

Tynion has always enjoyed the younger denizens of Gotham, and in Eternal he developed a relationship between Brown and a friendly foil in teenager Harper Row — he even crafts a moment meaningful to those who miss the old dynamic of Stephanie and Tim Drake, aka Red Robin. "It might be a new universe and new continuity," Tynion says, "but some chemistry sticks around."

One character that surprised Fawkes was the reinvention of Vicki Vale from being just a reporter to "someone who was very much taking part in tipping over the dominoes" in the Bat-family's favor, says the Gotham by Midnight scribe.

Fawkes was also instrumental in bringing in one Eternal's biggest breakout characters, Julia Pennyworth. Before the team began writing in earnest, he had the idea to bring in Alfred's daughter as a street-tough character much like Batman's oldest confidant had been in his younger days.

"It seemed like the craziest idea in the world, and now we see her in the main Batman book," Tynion says. "She is part of the Bat-family in a really core way."

Some story threads from Eternal will be picked up in the creators' separate series while others — including a new commissioner — have effects on the entire Gotham line.

Instead of summing up and closing the door on the past four years of Batman stories, Fawkes says, the goal of Eternal was "to bring it all together and open all the doors and say, 'Look at all this amazing stuff that's happened and look at all this amazing stuff that's still to come.' "