Imaginary Worlds - Being Batman (For Now)

Episode Date: February 11, 2015

They say you shouldn't meet your heroes because you might be disappointed. What happens when you're told from now on you are your childhood hero? For many people that would be a metaphor but that actually happened to Scott Snyder when DC Comics assigned him to write Batman. It was hard to avoid emulating the other versions of Batman he loved, so he decided to pretend that he made up the character by himself. Scott's fears and anxieties became Bruce Wayne's.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Molenski. They say you should never meet your heroes because you might be disappointed. But what happens when you're told from now on, you need to become your childhood hero? Just don't disappoint everybody else. I know for a lot of people that would be a metaphor, but that really happened to Scott Snyder. Right now, this city, ruined and beautiful, it's ours and ours alone. It's fears, they're ours too. Superstorms, cataclysm, madmen with private ideologies who come at us with weapons of every magnitude out of nowhere some morning. These are the fears that haunt our city.

But believe me when I say that we will face them together. Because right now, this is our Gotham, Scott Snyder writes Batman. There are actually a lot of DC comics that feature Batman, but he writes the one that just has Batman in the title. And it's consistently the best-selling title, not just for DC, but for all of comic books. To say that I'm a Batman fan would be a bit of an understatement. But I can never really explain why I was obsessed with this character, or why my obsession started in high school.

I mean, I didn't even like him that much as a kid. But since then, I've devoured every version of this character, or why my obsession started in high school. I mean, I didn't even like him that much as a kid. But since then, I've devoured every version of this character, from Frank Miller to Tim Burton to the animated series, actually many animated series, to Christopher Nolan to the Arkham video games. But what's different about Scott Snyder's Batman is that he isn't really angry and edgy and tormented. He's raw and vulnerable, and sometimes kind of charming, without losing the darkness. Scott Steiner is a busy man. We had trouble finding time to meet in Manhattan,

so he very generously let me come all the way out to his house in the suburbs. Now, in some ways, he's not your typical comic book geek. Most of the toys in the house are for his kids, not him. His wife is a doctor. Scott's expertise is literature. He has a master's in fiction from Columbia. And he loves to write dense monologues full of existential ideas and arcane trivia, which you can't really cram into a comic book speech bubble. I wrote Swamp Thing for a while, and I loved writing that book.

But one of the problems with Swamp Thing is when he talks, it's orange. It's like an orange caption. And it's much more obvious when you're talking because it's like a blaze orange caption. And when you look at a page that's beautiful and green, and there's orange, orange, orange, orange, orange, orange over it, it's just like, God, this guy does not shut up. But I love the ambition of his writing. I recently read an independent comic he wrote called The Wake, which is about a watery apocalypse brought on by these giant sea monsters. And after I put down the book, I just had this overwhelming feeling

that life is so precious and fleeting. And I had to go tell my wife that I loved her, which is not a feeling I usually get from comic books. I'm constantly obsessed with the idea of how quickly time passes. Ever since I was a little kid, I used to, my parents, I remember they would tease me because we'd have these family get togethers for Thanksgiving and I would secretly tape record them before, you know, I put a tape recorder under the table. I still have a lot of

these tapes actually. I don't know if it was just anxiety, you know, of how quickly things would pass or if it was something that was less, less negative and something that was maybe more loving about it. You know, I want to ask you, because I know you grew up in New York, and I know, like, I grew up in the suburbs outside of Boston, and I always, I was like one of those kids in those movies who dreamed of going to the big, bad, exciting city. But when I know people who did grow up in New York, there's like this anxiety, especially if you grew up in the 80s or 90s, there's just this incredible anxiety you have of growing up in that New York, that sort of, you know, much more scary, dangerous New York. Is that something that sort of influences you in the way that you write Gotham? Oh, completely. I mean, I think my Gotham,

Gotham is the antagonist in Batman for me personally. I think in every arc that I've done on Batman, it becomes the source of conflict somehow, the bigger enemy. The thing for me growing up in New York in the 80s, you know, Batman became incredibly important to me because the books The Dark Knight Returns and Year One both came out when I was about 10 and 11. In case you don't know, Year One was a Batman origin story written by Frank Miller in 1986. He also wrote The Dark Knight Returns,

which was about an old Batman that comes out of retirement. They were both really gritty and really badass. Suddenly Batman was walking the streets of a city that I recognized. I mean, I wasn't allowed to go to Central Park at all, ever. You know, you couldn't ride the subway. I wasn't allowed to ride the subway. So it was just a different city. And it was dangerous. I mean, for a kid, it was scary. You weren't allowed to do a lot of things. And all of a sudden, there was Batman walking the streets that you knew with graffiti and prostitution and drugs and gangs and all of this stuff that you were afraid of that you hadn't seen in a comic book before. And it made it

viscerally real. And it made the world of comics relevant. His big break for DC was working on a storyline for Detective Comics, where Dick Grayson, who used to be Robin, has to pretend to be Batman because Bruce Wayne has gone missing. He's a character who wears his heart on his sleeve and feels the way you do, writing Batman as Batman. He's bewildered by it. He's completely intimidated. He's kind of giddy. So it was the easiest kind of Batman to write where he's like, I can't believe I'm Batman. And I'm like, Dick, I can't believe I'm writing Batman.

We're going to get along great, you know? But then things got really intimidating for him. DC asked him to write the main Batman title, but they were also going to reboot the entire DC universe from scratch, because after 70 years, you needed Wikipedia to follow all the storylines. So Scott's first issue of Batman would be Batman number one. I really remember being up in this house late at night with my wife,

just being like, I think I'm going to have to call in sick. And she was just like, all year? You know, what are you going to do? You can't just hide. Because it's so paralyzing because so many of the stories that you, for me, that matter to me, that made me want to write,

not just comics, but write, are Batman stories. And I'm realizing what a great match you were for Bruce Wayne. I mean, in terms of like fear, vulnerability, losing the family. And he has also become a father figure to, you know, all these different other characters. I think that's probably why it's such a good match for you.

Thanks. I mean, honestly, I cannot think of another character I'm as connected to as Bruce Wayne. I mean, I feel badly. It's almost like you got your dream job first. And now where is there to go but down in some way. Scott decided to make this work. I had to decide, you know, just decide, decide. I'm going to write this character like I made him up,

and I'm going to pretend that I made him up, because if I try and write Frank Miller's Batman or Grant Morrison's Batman, or I try and even play along with those Batmen, I'm going to fail. But if you're a writer and you're trying to pretend that you invented Batman and the Joker, how do you block these voices out of your head? I'll break you in two.

Batman, if you had the guts for that kind of fun, you would have done it years ago. You dropped me into that vat of chemicals. That wasn't easy to get over don't think that i didn't try i know you did i think you and i are destined to do this forever you'll be in a better cell forever maybe we could share one it's very hard it's very hard and it's hard to block those voices out of your head i mean the joker i was only ready to write him when i knew i had a different take and i had to really think about it for a while, you know, and, and come up with something I thought was my own and spoke to my own fears. And that basically the way I thought of the

Joker was this, um, my Joker story came about when we were pregnant with our second kid. And I was terrified that I didn't have the, the, I just didn't, I just wasn't going to be a good dad. And that I was already stretched to my limit with our first son. And I remember thinking, well, Batman has this family, like you said, this extended family. And I wonder if he feels this way sometimes where he thinks, I wish I didn't worry about these characters. And then I thought, oh, what if a villain came along and said, I just heard you think you wished your family was dead. Well, let me do that for you so you can go back to the way things were. Then, you know, looking into this notion too, it was so interesting at the time. I was like, well, why a clown? Like the natural enemy of a bat is not a

clown. I mean, what's so scary about, you know, this and why would he do that? And looking up the history of sort of court jesters and realizing that in some ways they often were this really trusted confidant of the king because they could be trusted to bring the bad news of the kingdom to the ruler and make him laugh about it, even when it was horrible. Again, I just sort of, I had this mythology in my head where I was going to do the Joker as the jester and that he served the Bat King. And that was what he saw his role as. And he was making Batman stronger by challenging him with these terrible, terrible scenarios. I thought you really were going to kill them all off. Like when they opened the box and you saw all their faces. Well, thanks. I really, you know, it's

hard because some days you think if you wrote out of continuity, you would do those kinds of things. Because the thing is, DC really has given me a lot of latitude. I mean, if I wanted to kill Alfred or kill a character in the Bat family, I could probably get away with it at this point. That's a lot of power for a guy who was afraid of taking on a corporate cash cow. But after all the acclaim he's gotten from fans, and these are picky fans, he still feels a lot of anxiety about the job like remember when he was growing up the big touchstone for him was an origin story called year one well dc asked scott and his collaborator the artist greg capullo to recreate batman's origins again for the 21st

century it was called year zero it really hit me the weight of what i was doing when i started writing the beginning of it because it it just hit me just weight of what I was doing when I started writing the beginning of it, because it just hit me just all of a sudden, I'm touching the sacred material, I'm redoing the scene where the bat comes through the window, I'm redoing the murder in the alley, I'm redoing all of this. What am I thinking, you know, and I knew my heart was in the right place with it. And Greg's was and we had a great chemistry. and I knew we had a take that was important to me that it was going to look punk rock you know where it was going to be pinks and greens and where year one was small and intimate and gritty this was going to be bombastic and

muscular and totally out of control silly all of that stuff but it would but it just I just could not do it it just I got panic attacks and I was waking up in the middle of the night and I just could not do it. I got panic attacks and I was waking up in the middle of the night and I just couldn't do it. I was sweating. Greg was the guy. He was so great. He was just like, he was like, he'd always been my partner on the book, but then he was just like, what's the matter?

And I would talk to him and I'd be like, I just don't know if anyone's going to like it. And he'd be like, I don't care if they like it. And if you've ever seen him, he's huge. He's this big, muscular kind of wrestler guy. He's got a handlebar mustache, you know what I mean? And he's like, you're going to get up, and you're going to write that story, and it's going to be awesome. We're going to kick some ass.

They did. The Riddler is a cyber terrorist who hacks all of Gotham and turns it into a pre-industrial jungle. It's really fun, and some of it's actually kind of silly. But there's a scene at the end that just stunned me. Bruce Wayne and his butler, Alfred, are at Wayne Enterprises. And we cut to a pretty young woman sitting in the lobby, just kind of scrolling through her phone.

There's someone I'd like you to meet, sir. A girl, Alfred, says Bruce. She asked to be introduced, sir. She says she knew you when you were a boy. Julie Madison. You went to school together, she says. You even dated briefly. Julie, says Bruce. There's no harm in reconnecting, sir. We are relaxing today. You said so yourself. Sure, bring her over. But Alfred, I have to let you know, I'll never quit. And then Alfred kind of looks at him and he says,

you say that now, sir, but you're young. You're 25 years old. You should have heard me talk about acting at your age. How I'd never... Alfred, there's something you don't know. Sir, not long after they died, Mom and Dad, I was having a hard time. No, more than a hard time. Everywhere I looked, I saw them.

My parents in every face. I couldn't live. I couldn't function. The world was like some nightmare hall of mirrors. So I paid someone to pretend to be you, Alfred. I got papers, and I paid the doctors at Arkham. Sir, if you needed treatment. I didn't want treatment, Alfred. I wanted to stop being me.

I wanted to be rebooted, started over. I wanted them to just shock me until i wasn't myself anymore until i was somebody else sir i i came close i came so close alfred i was seconds away but i knew and then he in the flashback he yells wait stop and we see and can you describe also what we're seeing yeah what we're seeing you see bruce bruce is essentially he's checked himself into arkham asylum and he's only about you know 14 15 years old and he's on the um he's on the table, he's checked himself into Arkham Asylum, and he's only about, you know, 14, 15 years old. And he's on the table, and he's about to get electroshock therapy. And he has the rubber stopper in his mouth, and he has the electrodes on his head.

And all of a sudden, he turns, and he says, stop, and he's crying. And then we're back in the present, and he's holding Alfred by the shoulders, and he says, I knew I had to find some way of fighting through it. I had to find the crazy thing that would keep me from going crazy, if that makes any sense. Bruce, says Alfred. No, in the city today, Alfred, now more than ever, evil men and sick men, they step from the shadows to terrify and Batman can draw their fire. He will be their lightning rod he will show the people of gotham not to be afraid it's the thing alfred it's what makes me happy it's all that makes me happy you say that because you don't know master bruce you don't know that there are there you you don't there are joys you haven't experienced they're deeper types of happiness and bruce just looks

at him and says not for me where did that that come from, the imagery, the idea, everything? Well, I mean, again, it came from a pretty personal place. Those words, that's how I felt. I've felt at times when I feel really depressed, you just don't have any energy and you want someone to just fix you. You want, you want to just, you know, it's close to being suicidal or you just feel like someone just turned me off and fixed me because I can't be this way all the time. It's driving me crazy and it's exhausting me. And so, um, that to me, this story, that story, zero year, the two goals of that story, you know, which was a

retelling of Batman's origin in the modern age, one was to make it modern and to have him face threats that I felt were relevant to now. So he faces a gang that's all about random violence, you know, like, you know, basically a cipher for random gunmen, super storms, and a post-apocalyptic Gotham, you know, because of a fear breakdown of resources and blackouts and all the kinds of things that I think if I was growing up in the city today, I'd be afraid of the way I was afraid of the things that were in Dark Knight Returns, Cold War, gangs, you know, nuclear annihilation, all these things that aren't the same fears that, you know, that I think haunt us today. When a writer makes Batman too indestructible,

the fans will complain that he's turned him into Bat-God. Scott's Batman is the complete opposite. I wanted to show why Batman mattered to me and what he meant to me as a child and as an adult and what I hope he would mean to my children. And that's what he means. He's not a force of intimidation. He's a force of inspiration.

And to be able to say, I overcame this terribly dark moment in my life where i wanted to die basically and instead i used it as fuel to become the pinnacle of human achievement i am the most badass kung fu fighting you know detective sherlock holmes engineer you know everything you could imagine i I am that. And I also dress like a bat in the nuttiest way. And I will swing around the city with these incredible gadgets. If I can do this, you can do whatever it is that you're afraid to do. So it was very gratifying that DC let me do that with him because it was a big

change, you know, to his history to be able to show that he was that vulnerable. I think as a, as a teenager. his history to be able to show that he was that vulnerable, I think, as a teenager. It's funny, this whole journey started when he was a kid, feeling powerless in a scary city, afraid of losing his family. And, you know, Batman was his hero. Now as an adult, I think there's similar fears, but you're on the other side of that mirror somehow where I'm more afraid of how quickly my children are growing up.

And this thing is out in the world that feels like it's literally part of you. Something happens to it, you'd never recover. And so it's just a very, I don't know, it's almost an infuriating kind of love sometimes, I think, where you, it brings such such great joy but it also can be so angering that you're like I wish I could stop worrying about these kids so afterwards I was driving back to Brooklyn it was long drive and I was thinking about our conversation and I realized why I had become so fixated on Batman when I was in high school and college. At that time, I was a really moody, self-absorbed, even self-pitying teenage boy.

And I really wanted to turn myself into a responsible, self-sufficient man. But I had no clue how to do that. And I think Bruce Wayne was an inspiration to me. I mean, to be honest, he still is. Well, that's it for this week's show. Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Darby Maloney, David Hyde, Pamela Hovarth, and Scott Snyder. If you like the show, please leave a comment in iTunes. It'd be really helpful. You can also like Imaginary Worlds on Facebook. I tweeted E. Malinsky.

Scott actually had a lot more to say about how digital downloads are changing the comic book industry and why he needs an outlet for original material, like his new series Witches from Image Comics. Like, I have a lot of friends still in the literary world, and I keep telling them, I'm like, the water is so great over here, you know, just come over if you're having any trouble, because it's a great time in comics. I put a link to that conversation all on my website, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply.