James Tynion IV on the Rebirth of Detective Comics

James Tynion IV has spent much of the last few years in Gotham City — but recently, he’s been handed the keys to the oldest and most storied house in town: Detective Comics.

The series in which Batman made his first appearance will return to its original numbering with tomorrow’s Detective Comics #934, and Tynion will write the book with a mission statement of broadening the Bat-family, which had been considerably pared down following DC’s 2011 The New 52 relaunch.

Tynion joined us to talk about the series, which sees Batman and Batwoman putting together a training program for the younger heroes of Gotham City, and then pits them against an army of would-be defenders of Gotham.

Detective Comics #934 is available at your local comic shop tomorrow, or you can preorder it on ComiXology.

I did see your tweet the other day when you received your comps that from this point forward for the rest of your life you’re a Detective Comics writer. I’m guessing you’re excited to be coming on board?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It’s a strange place because I’ve been working with DC Comics for four years now, and the large majority, it has been in and around Gotham City and these characters. A lot of it has always been me playing with secondary characters and not getting a chance to really grab the reigns and shape a corner of Gotham City to really make it my own and as a singular voice, in a singular writer.

The opportunity to do that finally with Detective Comics and really show what are my deep passions in Gotham City and what are the things that I want to draw out in the series, that’s really what … It is really special and seeing those comps show up for the first time, seeing Detective Comics #934, going back to the classic number with my name on it, it meant the world to me. I couldn’t be happier.

The last time you and I smoke it was just at the beginning of Batman and Robin Eternal, and you were talking about how excited you were to be bringing Cassandra and Spoiler back to the fore a little bit so that these were characters that were valid and viable again in DC, who’s obviously been missing from most of the New 52. Now DC as a whole has essentially taken that model and said, “Yeah, we’re going to do that across the board in rebirth, and we’re going to see a lot more folks coming back.” Is it vindicating?

I mean, I don’t think I can take credit for anything beyond what’s happening in Gotham City, but I think that yeah, as a fan, there are characters I love more than any other characters. I think every comic book fan has those characters that matter to them, that have mattered to them since they first started reading.

To me, it’s the next generation of bat characters. It is Tim Drake. It is Stephanie Brown. It is Cassandra Cain. Honestly, one of the things that in putting the books together, you always want to be writing the book that you want to read more than anything else in the world. When we started on Batman Eternal, I knew that one of the things that Scott Snyder and I had talked about right from the beginning was we wanted to find a place for Stephanie Brown back in the mix, and she had a perfect role to play in that story.

In the next year, in Batman and Robin Eternal, the story was built around the relationship between Cassandra Cain and Harper Row and seeing the roles that these characters had and really ingraining them back into Gotham.

Those stories, because they were ingrained back in Gotham, we didn’t get to really see Steph and Cass in action in Gotham. I’m thrilled I’m the person who gets to carry them forward. I’m the person who actually gets to tell the stories that will drive these characters into the next five, ten years and beyond. I wanted to recreate, not recreate, but create a real home for them. Detective Comics feels like the perfect home for them.

Is it cool to be able to take all those generational thing of redefining Gotham as a whole and do it in a book that is so steeped in history and has its own special meaning for a lot of readers?

Yes. Absolutely, yes. When I heard that they were going to bring the classic numbering back, because I think I’m allowed to say that when we first started talking about the book, similar to the other rebirthed titles I thought this is going to be a number one like many of the other books in the line, but when the decision was made to start this run at 934, there was something really special about that.

Even just personally to me, obviously, as I think a lot of people who have been following my Batman work know I work very closely with Scott Snyder, and he was the last person who wrote Detective Comics in the classic numbering, and before the New 52, and coming back on the other side of the New 52 to the classic numbering, and find that in the intervening four years, five years, I’ve managed to build up to the point where I can take the reins. That’s very vindicating for myself.

In a larger sense, it’s also incredibly powerful to be in a book that has so much legacy. I remember, one of my discussions right at the beginning with the Bat Group and with Geoff Johns was that the most remembered runs on Detective had been the runs that tried something a little different. I think in recent times there was the “Black Mirror” which starred Dick Grayson rather than Bruce as Batman. Before that, it was the Rucka Batwoman run, and bringing all of those characters back into Detective, and being able to do something in the book that really hasn’t been done before, and start a new era. That’s something that I want to be very clear.

This isn’t just going back to classic. This is brand new villains. In issue 2, we’re going to see their new base right in the heart of Gotham City. Basically one of the coolest things I’ve ever done is sit down and it’s just like, “Okay, if I was to build a secondary Batcave from scratch, what would it look like?” When I saw the first design from Eddy Barrows, I was running around my house showing my roommates like, “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. This is the coolest thing that’s ever existed, and I get to introduce it.”

Every issue is going to do something new, and different, and exciting with these characters in a way that you would never expect in this book. I think the fear with the Detective Comics is that it can become just the other Batman title, and I never wanted this to just be the other Batman title. This is a unique book, and it’s going to be a book that drives major things forward in the Batman mythos that’ll echo across the entire DC Universe. Everyone will see what I mean by the end of this first arc, but there’s a lot of big stuff coming. I’m happy to say the Detective Comics is right at the heart of it.

You touched on something, too. It’s easy, because especially the first issue you have Jean-Paul Valley, and you have all of these characters who hadn’t played a significant role in years. It’s easy to be reductive and say, “They’re going back to the pre-52,” but there’s something really inherently fresh about the almost X-Men feel of Batman training. I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. I mean it in like, reading this first issue, it feels like there’s an infusion of youth and energy.

I really appreciate that. I think a lot of the credit there goes to our incredible art team. Eddy Barrows, I think he’s doing the work of his career on this book. It’s gorgeous. Every page that comes in is gorgeous. The whole team, Eber Ferreira on inks and Adriana Lucas on colors, is just destroying it. You guys haven’t even seen the pages that are coming in from later in the art by Alvaro Martinez and the entire crew working with him. Every page, they’re making my work look good. It’s so much fun seeing the pages come in for this book. You have no idea. This is the book I wanted to exist more than anything. This is something that I think the Bat books have needed. Not that they need it, but it’s something that I’ve wanted, and I think people will be surprised.

I think once this has existed for a while, people will be surprised that this hasn’t always been the status quo of these characters in the DC Universe. That’s really want I wanted to go for, because with DC, and I think a big part of rebirth in general, is the idea of new classic. It’s the idea of it’s reclaiming the core essence of these characters and how people understand them, but it’s still bringing new story and new direction.

Everything’s barreling forward in a way that embraces the past but also is racing towards the future. The ideal in this book is that thirty years from now, if there were to be a reboot of DC comics that the elements I introduced in this series are going to be the ones that fans are clamoring to be included in such a thing. That’s the goal. You want to be creating a new classic era, and that’s what I wanted to do with this book. Knock on wood, I think we’re doing a pretty good job. I can’t wait for people to see it.

What can you tease about the villains of this first arc, and I’ll remove this bit as needed so as not to spoil or whatever, but my immediate feeling is that we just got done with the Jim Gordon Robot Batman, and now we have this army of robotic Batmen, and I have to wonder if the fine folks at Powers Corp are somehow involved with that.

That’s a really interesting direction. That isn’t the direction we’re going in. You will see where they’re from. This group, from the solicits and stuff, they’re a group called The Call, and basically they are a militaristic vigilante group that has strong goals in the DC Universe and have existed for a while. This is something that was been around.

The core idea with the colony is imagine you are running a covert branch of the military, and you see in a matter of weeks that a single man in a costume who’s just been trained to be a perfect warrior manages to retake one of the largest American cities from a terrorist. I’m taking of the events of Zero Year. Don’t you think that once they see a working model wouldn’t they try to replicate that model, and make more of it, and level that model up?

This is an army of Batmen that has been operating covertly for a while, and is now in Gotham City, and is finally going to be put face-to-face with the real Bat family. There are repercussions that are going to come from this arc that echo across the DC Universe.