So, it was 2000, I was in 7th Grade and I was an X-Men Kid.



I got to the comic shop a few times a year with my dad, and usually, I’d hunt down a handful random X-Men comics (particularly Age of Apocalypse comics — I didn’t have a full set, just a frustrating checklist inside the book and no way of getting them all), but then an amazing thing happened… A Borders Bookstore opened across the road from my Mom’s Milwaukee apartment, and there was a shelf (stuck at the far end of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section) labeled GRAPHIC NOVELS. They didn’t have any X-Men trades, so I took the next thing that caught my eye… A beautiful black trade with art that looked like it was practically REAL.

It was called KINGDOM COME, and it was my first real DC Comic.

It was like a more concentrated Age of Apocalypse that made A LOT more sense! A beautiful look into a tragic apocalyptic vision of a whole superhero universe. A universe that was aspirational, idealistic… The ideas there felt BIGGER than they did at Marvel, they carried this powerful weight. They were more like myths than soap operas, and I was enraptured by them. I knew some of the characters, but met a lot of others for the first time. Just like AOA had made me go out and seek every last bit of X-Men knowledge I could get my hands on, I wanted to know absolutely everything about DC.

I was hungry for more DC Elseworlds, because I’d figured out early on that they tended to be the best way to learn about ALL the characters and their relationships, and the only place to turn was that Borders Bookstore shelf. THAT’S where I found another book that would have an insane impact on me and my life… It was YOUNG JUSTICE: SINS OF YOUTH. It had all these alternate hero designs on the cover, and so many different characters… THAT was where I met Tim Drake for the first time. The book was almost incomprehensible without context, but every tie-in hinted at a whole bigger world around it. The DEO. Cadmus. Klarion (bum bum bum) The Witch Boy. Doiby Dickles and Myrg. Kingdom Come was my character encyclopedia through which I was trying to decipher Sins of Youth, and it gave me ENOUGH but not everything… There was a lot left to understand.

It was Tim Drake that really stood out to me in the story. This awkward, earnest teenager who cared so much about his friends, and his strained relationship with Batman. After that, my semi-annual trips to the comic shop became archaeological studies, as I slowly gathered (wildly out of order), the full run of Young Justice. I studied it like it was homework, trying to piece together an entire universe. Sometime during the next year, I got my hands on the novelization of Batman: No Man’s Land by Greg Rucka (Flipping through in a Cruise Ship library of all places, I had seen that Tim played a part, and in an age before Tumblr fandom, I had already declared myself the biggest Tim fan in the universe — I don’t think I returned that book to the library)… The book introduced me to a wider Batman family of characters… To Oracle, Huntress, and most importantly, Cassandra Cain… Giving context to little glimpses I had seen in Young Justice and Kingdom Come, and the handful of other trades on the Borders Bookshelf.

My new project, I realized, was going to be gathering everything I could about these Bat-Family characters. I wanted to understand everything I could about them. I’d watched the animated series as a kid and seen all the movies, but there was something purer about the comics. Like I was finding out about the real person I had only seen biopics of before. I read Year One. I read Dark Knight Returns. I got Long Halloween and Dark Victory. There really is NOTHING like those first few years reading comics. It’s like you’re entering a whole new frontier and every discovery feels important and revelatory, and Batman happens to be the star of some of the greatest stories in the medium. I developed a strong connection to Oracle and Cassandra Cain. And I kept following Tim, wherever I could. By the time Graduation Day happened, and Young Justice became Teen Titans, I had Graduated too. I was a weekly customer at my LCS, a student in High School with an interest in writing comics, and the course of my life had changed. And that era, once I had done the background study, was glorious.

From Identity Crisis to Green Lantern Rebirth to Infinite Crisis to 52, I was completely hooked onto this incredible universe, a universe in which my favorite character played this crucial central role. Which is a very long way to say that to me, DC has always been about a larger, interconnected universe, and that the Bat-Family has always been my way into it, and at the heart of the Bat-Family was Tim Drake. He wasn’t the best fighter, he wasn’t the charming ladies man, he wasn’t the unstable engine of rage… He was just a smart kid who knew the world could be better, and wanted to take it on himself to make it so. He was like me, he was obsessive, he knew he could get lost in his mind and that could be dangerous, but he had a good heart and when he let THAT guide him, he could accomplish the incredible.

By the time I started writing comics, DC had changed a bit. It was the early years of the New 52. A lot of the connections that defined the characters I loved were dropped… And my favorite character was no exception. (It became a running joke with my early Bat-Editors how I would try to slip references to old Tim Drake continuity in my books, to no avail). I almost got a chance to write a solo Red Robin series in that period (that opportunity transformed into my gig on RHATO when a creative team shake-up required a new writer on that book more than a solo-Tim series), but now that I look at it, that pitch was a little generic superhero and I’m glad that it didn’t become my mark on the character.

What Tim needed back was context, connections. He needed Gotham. He needed Batman. Those elements defined him, and in a real way, defined the DC Universe I knew and loved. My first time writing him, and the entire Bat-Family was the backup story to Batman #0. My first ode to what I saw as the core of each of the powerful characters that reflected and elevated Batman. Batman is a story about family. About a man who loses one to tragedy, becomes an engine to fight that tragedy, and finds people like himself to build a new family around him, while protecting them from the trauma he faced by being so alone for so long. Sometimes people think of Batman as a solitary character, but Batman only existed for a SINGLE YEAR without Robin (He was introduced in 1939, Robin in 1940). With the Zero issue we were tasked to tell a piece of the Character’s origin, and I did it the only way I knew how… Through the family itself.

But I was hungry for more. Thankfully, I was given the opportunity pretty quickly. Batman Eternal was my first opportunity to try and build a new version of the kind of interconnected Bat-Universe I was looking for, taking the pieces of the New 52 as they stood and trying to create something new, while bringing back elements that had fallen away. At the end of that series, I started my first attempt to pitch a book that would let me take all those characters and make them into a team. Instead they said they wanted a follow-up to Eternal, and that became Batman & Robin Eternal. But I kept at it. I wanted to do a book that could encapsulate the feeling of when I first discovered these characters and fell in love with them. I wanted to create that kind of beating heart of the Bat-Family. When we started talking about it in earnest, the pitch was called Shadow of the Bat. When it was released, it took the title that created Batman, and gave DC its name. Detective Comics.

The only problem was, as I learned in my first meeting with Geoff Johns about the title… I was going to need to kill Tim Drake.

I mean, SURE, he was still alive — Heck, he was still alive AND connected to the larger mysteries of Rebirth, which does a hell of a lot to show the importance of a character — but to the world of Gotham I wanted to build, I was going to have him ripped away from me just as I was about to put him in the center of a system that in my head couldn’t work without him. And then after I sat, panicked for an evening, I started to see the larger scope of the story. The opportunity of letting Tim Drake build a crime-fighting system that he would be the heart of, and then pull him out of it, and see what happened next. Especially because Tim would never plan on running it himself. Part of the design of the character from his beginning was the fact that he aspired to become something else, when he was DONE being Robin. (Which was also the tragedy, the belief that at some point, his work would be “done”). This system, being put in place, The Gotham Knights protocol, was Tim’s way of being “Done.”

And it was mine, too. Even though I didn’t really think of it in those terms just yet. This was a story that a deep fanboy part of myself needed to put in the world, an almost selfish desire to take control and make the Gotham I thought always should have been there. Once it was all in place, my work would be done. But that’s not how serialized storytelling works. You need to keep the stories going, not “perfect” them and then enshrine them in amber… There was a moment in the middle of planning Detective where I was kind of confronted with that, simple as it might seem, and it stopped me in my tracks. I knew that I was going to have to blow it all up, and I didn’t know how to handle that. How could I build the Gotham Team book I always wanted to exist only to destroy it? And that’s when I realized that Tim would react in the EXACT same way, when he realized that he couldn’t control things. He couldn’t just WILL the world to be perfect. People would make mistakes. Rifts would grow, people would disagree… And it would put him in this crisis mode, because his whole LIFE has been building to the moment it all perfects itself. And if that’s not possible, what the hell is he going to do?

It was Geoff, again, who suggested we make Tim’s cellmate the future Tim from Titans Tomorrow. The Tim who tried to control the world so hard it left him a shell of the man we knew in the present. It was my incredible editor, Chris Conroy who gave the story its name… THE LONELY PLACE OF LIVING. The story that really let me solidify this as my Tim by tapping back into his classic origin, and making the most definitive statement on him that I really make in the book. It also let me put the endgame in place, to blow the story wide open.

Tim builds the “perfect” system. Tim is confronted with the fact that his future self ALSO built the perfect system but that staying in it, left him a broken mess. Tim returns from captivity to try and “perfect” the perfect system to prevent that future, and only ends up speeding it up. Ultimately he learns that he needs to let it go control over his future, and embrace his present. Letting go of control is hard, I know that feeling all too well, and while there was a part of me screaming at me to stay, another part knew it was time to step out Gotham City. To get in a car and drive, not knowing where these characters would go next. But trusting that it will be someplace new and incredible.

I’ve already heard rumblings of the next plans for Tim, and I’m excited to read the character as a fan again for the first time in a long, long time. Hell, I’m excited to read ALL Batman comics as a fan again… I remember hearing about the Wedding Special tie-ins and realizing that this was the first Batman related event I hadn’t been a part of in five years. And that’s kind of exhilarating. To have NO idea where a story is going. And I’m eager to experience it. And hell, I could have written a piece about any of my cast members. How the Batwing/Azrael bromance was the first time I let two characters guide themselves towards each other to see what would happen. How the experience of writing Clayface changed me as a writer, and a person. How writing Detective Comics #950 with Cassandra Cain was completely revelatory to me… And God, I could write an essay this long about Kate Kane in a heartbeat. She was the other beating heart of the series.

And Batman. There’s a whole mountain of stuff I could say about the honor of writing Batman. I still remember trying to convince Scott while writing Batman Annual #1 for the New 52 that he should write all the Bruce scenes, because I felt I hadn’t earned the character yet. How many hours I’ve spent in his head, in stories I’ve written, and stories I’ve talked through with Scott. Finishing Detective, I feel like I said something about the Bat-Family, but there’s still a big Batman story in me. An ACTUAL Batman story. One day I’ll tell it, but I think I need to live a little more, first, so that when I put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, more realistically), it does the job I want it to.

Now… All that said… There IS one story I didn’t get to finish telling in Detective Comics. A first act that didn’t get the second or the third. THAT’S a story I’m already itching to get back to… But it might be a little bit. She has some adventures to face in the meantime. And I have a few hours I need to put in at the Hall of Justice before I get the time to tell that story right.

This is all a bit too long, too earnest, and a bit messy, which I think is the trademark Tynion style. But I want to thank the incredible artists I worked on this series with. Eddy Barrows defined this book, and I’m so thrilled he got to come back for the last issue, along with the dream team of Eber Ferreira and Adriano Lucas. I think Eddy, in particular, drew the quintessential Clayface in this book. Alvaro Martinez brought pure fire with the characters and settings, helping define them for me along with the incredible Raul Fernandez and Brad Anderson (I loved their work so much I stole that whole team over to my next project, Justice League Dark :P). Marcio Takara had already helped me define my Cassandra Cain in Batman & Robin Eternal, and his work on League of Shadows was absolutely extraordinary. And so many other incredible artists… Ben Oliver, Javi Fernandez, Miguel Medonça, Christian Duce, Carmen Carnero, Phillipe Briones, Scot Eaton, Joe Bennet… With an absolutely stunning variant cover every two weeks by the artist I did my very first Gotham work with, Rafael Albuquerque. Not to mention the incredible work of Marilyn Patrizio and Sal Cipriano on letters each and every issue… As you can tell from this post, I am not brief, and somehow they made my overwrought speeches SING on the page. Clearly some kind of superpower.

I want to thank Steve Orlando and Andy MacDonald for taking the series through the thrilling Night of the Monster Men… Marguerite Bennett for helping me find Kate Kane’s voice and launching an incredible series out from the pages of our book… And Chris Sebela for helping me when I was drowning in Metal, to give Stephanie Brown the spotlight issues she deserved.

I want to thank the person who made everything make sense, who kept me on track, and who was a tireless defender of this series when it needed defending… Chris Conroy was the best editor a writer could ask for. Working tirelessly at his side was the phenomenal Dave Wielgosz, who is one of the kindest funniest human beings, whose enthusiasm and passion for the project I can feel in every page. My pal, Andrew Marino helped me land the most difficult and heart-wrenching story in the mix with A Lonely Place of Living. And to Mark Doyle, who I believe told me a few weeks before I got the gig officially, “James, obviously you’re going to be writing the Bat-Family Book” like I was stupid for asking. Good books don’t happen without editors who believe in you, and I got to work with the best editors in the business.

I also want to thank Scott Snyder for his guidance and friendship. You gave me the keys to the Batmobile probably before I was ready for them, but your belief in me as a writer paved the road to where I am today.

I love this book. I fucking love it. This is the comic I always wanted to exist. The pure passion superhero book I used to talk about to my friends at lunch in school, when I’d say “One day, when I’m writing comics, you know what I’d do?”

Well, I did it. Now onwards to the next thing.

…

A quick Post Script…The next chapter of my love of DC Comics came a few years after I got deeply into Superhero comics. The moment in High School when I read Books of Magic, Saga of the Swamp Thing, and Sandman for the first time, and they blew up everything I thought I knew about comics…That’s the story that is about to to culminate in my run on Justice League Dark.

Alvaro turned in a page today that might be some of the scariest imagery I’ve seen in a Superhero comic… And what we’re building for the fall…

Oh boy, just you wait and see.

James Tynion IV

5/23/18