Jim Lee and Jeph Loeb are no longer keeping Batman Hush 2 under wraps. More than 20 years after Lee and Loeb’s 12-part Batman Hush unraveled the mystery of Bruce Wayne archvillain Tommy Elliot, the bandaged bad guy is back in H2SH: a six-issue sequel that promises a dramatic status quo shakeup for the Dark Knight following the Chip Zdarsky-penned Batman run (which concluded with issue #157 in February).
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First announced at New York Comic Con in October and teased in a three-page prelude in Mark Waid and Dan Mora’s Justice League Unlimited #1 in November, H2SH — written by Loeb and penciled by Lee, with inks by Scott Williams and colors by Alex Sinclair — kicks off in Batman #158 on March 26 and runs through Batman #163 in August.
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“We’ve talked about coming back doing a follow-up to Hush for a while. For a variety of reasons, the timing was never right,” DC publisher Lee says in this week’s DC Nation Spotlight. “Because we’re doing the All In initiative, where we launched the Absolute line but still wanted crazy things to happen in the core line, it made this return to Hush the right opportunity.”
“For 20 years, everywhere I’ve gone, people have asked me whether or not we’re going to do it again,” adds Loeb, who has penned such seminal Bat-stories as Batman: The Long Halloween and Dark Victory. “My answer was always very honest: When Jim’s ready to go, I’ll be ready to go.”
“The challenge we had was, how do we recapture that excitement, yet to something new? Jeph, to his credit, crafted a story that feels very much like the opposite side of the coin to what he did 20 years ago,” Lee added. “It establishes a new status quo for Batman, new villains, new looks, new locations.”
But there will be old villains as well, including those who had a role to play in the star-studded Hush (which pit Batman against everyone from the Riddler and Clayface to a Poison Ivy-controlled Superman). Besides Hush, DC Comics has teased the Joker in the first issue (titled “The Pawn”) and, according to the cover for Batman #159, Jason Todd/Red Hood.
“My phone rings, and Jim says, ‘I think it’s time for us to revisit these characters and to really come up with something that can not only build on what we did 20 years ago, but take it to the next level,’” Loeb says. “That was the challenge. Certainly artistically, I have no doubt in my mind that Jim, Scott, and Alex outdid themselves.”
Although the band is back together for their 23-years-later sequel, Lee notes that the cast of characters “resemble the iconic versions of themselves, but we changed surface elements — melding the work that was done 20 years ago with the work we’re doing today.”
“We’re trying to do new kinds of shots, new angles, new color schemes,” Lee says. “We’re challenging ourselves across the board, because we know there are high expectations. It’s also a great way to motivate ourselves, to do hopefully our best creative work.”
In the two decades since Batman: Hush, the titular villain has appeared in everything from A.J. Lieberman’s Batman: Gotham Knights run and the Paul Dini-penned Batman: Heart of Hush to the live-action Batwoman series and the Batman: Arkham video games. Now that the mystery surrounding Hush’s identity is long out of the bag, H2SH is more of a revenge story.
“So much of what we did in the first story was to play with, ‘Who is Hush? What does he want? What’s going on?’” Loeb says. “We’ve now established all that, so in many ways, this is a revenge story. He’s learned so much, and one of the great things about the character is that he’s a master manipulator.”
Loeb continues, “He likes the game of it. It’s like moving pieces on a chessboard. You don’t want to always play the same game. You want to take it in a new direction.”
The game begins in Batman #158, on sale March 26 from DC Comics.
