Exclusive: Scott Snyder On Wytches, Clarifies Batman Plans and Looks to the Future

In an interview yesterday in support of his creator-owned horror book Wytches with artist Jock (check out the first of our two-part interview here), Batman writer Scott Snyder explained for ComicBook.com readers what was up with rumors that hit over the weekend that artist Greg Capullo was preparing to leave the title.

During a panel at Baltimore Comic Con, Capullo himself appeared to say that he was readying to leave DC's best-selling title, with an eye toward finishing his long-delayed creator-owned series The Creech.

Well, it isn't that simple, according to Snyder, who explained to us that Capullo may have actually said the words that ended up all over social media, he was more musing than making any kind of grand pronouncement.

We asked Snyder, whose Superman Unchained artist Jim Lee announced that he was leaving the book and it was ending before DC had officially done so, whether it leaves him particularly hanging when he's suddenly deluged with fan and press questions about comments he didn't make.

Here's what he had to say:

Well, it depends. It's case by case. I still do my best to block out a lot of that stuff. I love being online, I love talking to fans on Twitter but I have such difficulty with anxiety in general that I try and avoid a lot of the groundswell of expectation or response to the comics just because I have to for my own mental health.

Jim when he said that about Superman, internally we'd talked about it and I knew that we were likely going to end at 9 and then we had discussed going further and doing another arc and it was becoming clear because of his responsibilities as publisher -- and mine too -- it would be really hard to do another arc and keep it monthly and all taht stuff. So when he said that, we both knew that was the case and had decided it. I wasn't quite aware it was going to be out right then, that that's what we were doing, so it kind of caught me a little off-guard. That said, I was with Jim when that happened and so I just elbow him and go, "Dude!" And he says, "Of course, man! Sorry!" And you're over it; you're friends. Again, he has been an incredible person to work with on that. He's become a friend and I feel very likely to work with him.

With Greg, that specific case was a little bit different in that I think he got taken a little bit out of context. I wasn't there for what he said, but I know what he meant because I spoke to him afterwards. He went, "Should I tweet something out to clarify?" And we were like, "No, dude, just leave it alone. It's not worth it."

What he meant was that our contract -- and we're a team. Wherever Greg goes, I'm going to go and wherever I go he goes and we've made that pact both as friends because as hokey as it sounds, it's just true, we've become extremely close. He's one of my best friends, even though we started out not really liking each other on the book. We try now to go to cons together with our wives. So we plan on sticking around together, post-Batman, to do whatever we're going to do together next, whether that's creator-owned or Marvel or DC. It could be any of those things, whatever comes next. His contract is up in sixteen issues from where we are right now. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't sign on to do more. He was thinking out loud that, "Maybe we'll do this, maybe we'll do that." The Creech is a series that he wants to finish. He feels badly that he didn't finish it and he asked me If I would be willing to work with him on some of those issues and finish it or write it or whatever, and I was like, "Of course, man. I'd love to do that sometime." So what got kind of construed as a plan to leave Batman for The Creech as an ongoing, wasn't the case. That's not what we're talking about. I absolutely plan on doing that project with him and we might do it right after Batman or we might not do it right after Batman. We might do more Batman, we might go to Marvel, we might do our own creator-owned and do that on the side. We don't know. All of this is stuff we're deciding together, that's entirely up in the air right now. So those kinds of things do catch you off-guard a little bit in the way that all of a sudden I was getting all these tweets that said "Sorry you're leaving," and I'm like, "Wait, what?!" [Laughs]

At the end of the day, the truth is that Greg was being honest about just saying this is how much time he has left in his contract and at the end of that we'll decide what we're going to do -- and it could be any of those options. And I absolutely plan on doing Creech with him to help him finish his series the way he wants to do but going from Batman to that as our next big ongoing that we're going to be on for years or something like that, however it was presented, no. From whenever we leave Batman, we want to pick something really big and exciting for both of us to do, and that's part of it: finishing The Creech is a huge, fun thing that we want to do. But how and when that happens, just depends on what we decide to do.

Final order cutoff is fast approaching for Wytches, which reteams Snyder with his Detective Comics collaborator Jock in a tale of pseudo-science and psychological horror. You can preorder it from your local comic shop with Diamond Codes AUG140523 for issue #1 and SEP140768 for issue #2.