What do you find most interesting about Batman as a character?
JEPH: His pain. He has taken on an awful responsibility because as a child he saw his parents murdered and tries everyday to make up for that horror. And he can't. So he is caught in this never-ending cycle of trying to heal himself while doing the very thing that is hurting him. We feel his pain; we share his responsibility; we look for some hope for him, for us, for everybody.
TIM: What drew me into comics in the first place was, graphically, a strong sense of black-and-white, and Batman lends himself to that more than any other character. I like the outer shell of this large, scary man who so clearly wears his heart on his sleeve, who so obviously is scarred and will never really recover from seeing his parents killed in front of him.
How does Batman: Dark Victory differ from The Long Halloween?
JEPH: While it is a continuation of some of the characters from TLH, it really isn't a sequel. You don't have to read TLH to understand Dark Victory, but it would help to know how things got to be the way they are in the first issue. At the end of TLH, Batman is left empty; Gordon has lost his best friend; and Harvey Dent has lost it all. With Dark Victory, there is the chance to tell the other half of the tale... to begin with futility and end with hope and possibilities once more.
What role does Robin play in Dark Victory?
JEPH: After TLH, Batman is totally cut off from any kind of human relationship. His parents are gone and now, as an adult, his only true friend--Harvey Dent--has been destroyed. Dick Grayson provides a way to go into Batman's heart, and we'll be looking at what makes this 10-year-old boy so unique in Batman's world.
TIM: Jeph has wanted to tell a story with Robin for a long time and I have always fought it... Batman as a solitary figure adds to the tragedy for me. But because it fits in with the story that we're doing and because Jeph found a way to make Robin tie in emotionally in a way that made sense to me, something just lciked. Plus, one of the visual elements I liked in Superman For All Seasons was playing with the size of the character, and having a 10-year-old boy stand next to Batman is very appealing to me in a graphic kind of size way.
Dark Victory introduces a new villain to the Batman mythos. What makes him/her different?
JEPH: Ah... that would be telling. TLH was, at its center, a 13-part murder mystery that introduced the Holiday character. Dark Victory is an all-new 13-part murder mystery that... ach...urk...can't speak... (chokes)
What other supporting characters have you enjoyed using?
JEPH: We built on characters from Batman: Year One written by Frank Miller, who was generous enough to give his blessing for their use in TLH. We also created a family tree detailing the members of the Falcone and Maroni families. With so many of them dead, we pick up the pieces with the few who have survived and others whom we have never seen before.
TIM: Jeph's put most of the focus on the mob story, so we've talked relatively little about any new supervillains. One of the things I've liked about the supervillains we've done is that--aside from the Joker and Harvey--they're generally interesting visually but ineffective as villains. And because of their minor status I've been able to play with them more than I would if they were more iconic.
I also really like the new DA we're introducing in DV. My inspiration for her is a movie I was watching at the time, called The Bad and the Beautiful with Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner... she's my inspiration for the character. I hesitate to tell people that because I'm terrible at likenesses and I don't really try... it's "inspiration" rather than model."
How did Superman For All Seasons influence Dark Victory?
JEPH: Superman For All Seasons was different from anything else I had done in comics. Tim and Joey [Cavalieri, editor of SFAS] really pushed me to bring some personal emotion to the tale. All that emotion triggered a response from an enormous number of readers and retailers who called and wrote to tell me how the story had touched them. It changed how I want to tell stories and, fortunately, Batman affords a first-person narration as a matter of course, so we can really get into his skin.
How does the pacing differ between a 13-issue miniseries and a 4-issue mini?
JEPH: The bigger the canvas, the more you can throw paint up on it. In TLH, we could afford to do the April Fool's issue, entirely devoted to how the Riddler would have solved the Holiday murders. We have a similar-sized story planned with Batman and Solomon Grundy as the only characters. We want to bring an epic feel to Dark Victory, with lots of subplots and false clues that you can't really do in a shorter format.
TIM: I don't really feel a difference due to length. With Superman, the stories we wanted to tell tended to be bigger and more open, while the Batman stories are tighter and more cluttered. Even though there's a lot more detail in SFAS, it was meant to feel more open. That's why it was inked and colored that way.
Do you keep the color palette in mind in the pencil stage?
TIM: Well, I'm colorblind in the first place, so I do very little in the way of choosing or suggesting colors. But I do a lot in mood and time of day and "warm" or "cool" and I'll suggest things that influenced me. I wanted SFAS to look painterly, very European... in black and white, most of the Superman pages are just skinny lines, and they don't come to life until they're colored, while the Batman pages almost look better in black and white. For Batman, I like a very flat color treatment with no modeling, no airbrushing... I liken it to a silkscreen effect. Greg [Wright, colorist for TLH and DV] is very good at that. I just tell Greg to mix gray into whatever color he's going to use and we go from there.
Tell us a little about your collaborative process.
JEPH: What collaborative process? Tim does all the work and I read the comics when they are published. No? Um, aside from the fact that he is one of the best storytellers in comics, aside from the fact that he does more with a single expression than most artists do with an entire book, aside from the fact that he creates mood, setting, and pacing as few do, aside from the fact that he is my best friend... what was the question?
TIM: My wall is plastered with little stick figures that Jeph's drawn when I have no idea what he's talking about in a description in the script. We've worked together for a long time, and it's reached a point where it all goes very smoothly... we go back and forth an awful lot. We both feel that the colors and the letters are a big part of what we do, so we also send stuff back and forth with Richard Starkings at Comicraft to tweak things. We've got our fingers into as many pies as we can.
