In DC’s Pennyworth comic, readers get to see Batman’s beloved butler as they’ve never really gotten to see him before as the comic digs into Alfred’s past, especially his adventures as an English spy. And while even as a spy Alfred is the epitome of capability and cool, albeit with a few flaws and lessons to learn, there’s one thing he absolutely isn’t and that’s James Bond. According to writer Scott Bryan Wilson, it was really important to him to make sure that Pennyworth didn’t look or feel like James Bond. The comic is very much its own, fresh thing – perhaps with a little bit of Miami Vice thrown in for eagle-eyed readers.
“That was actually the first thing I said when I pitched. I was like ‘This is not James Bond. It’s not going to be James Bond. It’s not going to look like James Bond.’ It’s both too high a standard, but it’s also too familiar. And I don’t think it really fits in the DC Universe. It just didn’t feel right to me. And I just wanted to do something kind of different. I feel like if you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s James Bond,’ then you’re putting yourself in a corner with reader expectations.”
While James Bond was never a consideration for Pennyworth, Wilson did reveal that there originally was talk about giving the story a Miami Vice type of vibe. Ultimately, that did not end up being the direction the book went, but Wilson teased that readers might just catch some of that Miami Vice influence if they look carefully.
“I think we specifically had originally, we were talking about it like, ‘this is going to be like a neon kind of 80s Miami Vice kind of cocaine cool.’ That was kind of the original sort of vibe we were thinking about. But I said, ‘All right, let’s find sort of a happy medium between those things. This isn’t James Bond, but this also isn’t smuggling cocaine off the Florida Keys kind of stuff,’ as awesome as that would be. But there’s a reference to it in issue five, to that original pitch, so maybe an eagle-eyed reader will sort of spot the Miami Vice cocaine influence.”
You can check out the description of Pennyworth # 5 below.
“The continuing untold early Cold War adventures of Alfred Pennyworth, British spy! Alfred is reunited with one old friend, confronts another, and takes a meeting with his MI6 handler…or it could all be just a hallucination as he runs out of time and freezes to death, alone in the vast emptiness of the frigid north.”
Pennyworth #5 goes on sale on December 14th.
Pennyworth Writer Says the Comic isn’t a James Bond Story
