Snyder and Romita Talk All-Star Batman

Next month, the superstar creative team of Scott Snyder and John Romita, Jr. will take Batman out of Gotham and on the road in All-Star Batman, a new series written by Snyder and featuring a rotating team of artists, the first of whom is Romita.

Coming off a five-year run on Batman with artist Greg Capullo, what does Scott Snyder do for an encore? How do he and Romita follow on one of the most acclaimed runs ever on one of the greatest characters in comics?

Snyder and Romita joined ComicBook.com to talk about All-Star Batman.

Scott, what is your approach going into All Star? Obviously, you very much established your own feel for the Batman book when you were there with Greg, but I know that you're going to distinguish this book from that significantly and the rotating art teams are going to be part of that.

Scott Snyder: Yeah, hugely. Coming off of the run with Greg, I knew there were still big stories that I wanted to do, especially with the villains, that I hadn't had a chance to write. There was some talk at DC about, "Do you want to continue on Batman?", "Do you want to try and work with one single artist?"

For me, I wasn't sure about how available John was and ultimately he was someone I was dying to work with. When I found he was, it became about what is the way I can do a villain, here, with John that no one has seen us do that would really not only reinvent that villain and reinvent Batman as a book for me to be writing.

The first thing was sort of coming up with a way of doing Two-Face that was different. I had this idea of making him a guy who was a lord of secret information, someone who essentially uses all the mechanisms in place to track crime when he was DA to sort of exploit crime. Any thing you do behind closed doors, that you don't want anyone to see, he knows about. He revels in this, in this idea that you have a monstrous side of your face that you don't want to show the world. He is a very scary character.

Then, it became about, how do we tell a story that we haven't seen before, so I thought about setting it in Gotham. I realized, why don't we just do it on the road and make it something that is about the state of the state? The state of something bigger than Gotham.

Especially now, with everything going on. It became this incredibly fun, sort of new environment to play in where it's Batman on the road, high-octane, twisted story with him chained to Two-Face house upstate, sort of ... get a final cure for his friend. It's loaded with villains, loaded with trucks, motorcycles, chainsaws, with anything you can think of. I knew I had something really different, something personal I was passionate about.

That's why it would be a perfect story for someone like John who clearly brings tremendous passion to everything he does and kind of has that dynamism to his art. So I felt we had some magic when I pitched it to him and now looking at the pages and the art, I couldn't be happier and more honored to be working with him and Danny and Dean on the book, just wait until you see what they're doing. It's so different.

The one thing I would say is James [Tynion IV] is doing that kind of Batman family book, and it's terrific for that. I love those characters. Tom is doing the big explosive Gotham stories, and this is sort of Batman like you've never seen him before, with some of his biggest enemies done in ways you didn't know he could be done. This is us flexing, and trying things that you would never expect. I'm really thrilled.

Now John, from your perspective, taking Batman out of Gotham ... Is that freeing? Or are you a little bit disappointed you don't get to do your version of Gotham City?

John Romita, Jr: There's two ways to look at it. I've been admiring Greg's run with Scott in a big hardcover. I've been looking at it and using it actually, when I was doing Last Crusade for some of the nuances on some of the characters. I had looked at what Greg had done, and I had photocopied a lot of scenes from Gotham and so on. I was loaded for bear, and Greg said, "We're going out in the country."

A little happy, a little disappointed, I was ready to go. I had been lifting weights just so I could handle the weight of this story. Then we're out in the country. It's getting referenced on trucks and chainsaws and it just had me cracking up. When he sat me down and told me the scope of the story, it just was very cool. I had the little kid in me get excited. I think my voice raised an octave standing in this local tavern, and I said, "Wow, this is cool!" I suddenly became a little kid again. That shows you the quality of the story, and you have to ramp up your game to meet the story when somebody proposes it to you.

It's interesting looking at a story line like this. I never necessarily thought of Gotham as being as integral to Batman as it has been portrayed lately, but this is the first chance that I've seen anybody specifically take him out of Gotham and have that be a part of the high concept.

Romita: So what do you have to say about Scott Snyder?

Snyder: I think part of the concept for me was that Gotham was such a central character in the run, that to do another story there would have been easy. I was so used to Gotham. One of the other things to touch on is that John did such an amazing job on the Dark Knight: Last Crusade story, and I was looking at his pages he was sending. I was seeing his Gotham, and how terrific it was, but I kind of felt like the challenge of this book would be to do a thing that neither of us had done, and do surprise people on every level.

So for me, I've never seen a Batman road trip story, where it was Batman and Two-Face chained together, or any villain, sort of traveling the country. At one point I was like, "We're gonna go all the way across the country," and I really tried to make it something that could work all the way to the west coast.

Then the impossibilities of it kept weighing on me, and I was like, "At some point, you would call the Justice League in here." You know what I mean? One of them would fly over, and be like, "Can we just give you an invisible jet or something like that? Please, stop driving." Or whatever.

Whereas, if it's only a 400 mile trip, you're like, "I can get there, I can get there, I can do it."
So in that way, it's a very ambitious story and I'm really excited to be doing something so different. I feel very grateful and lucky to be working with this guys. It's a whole new life on Batman. Honestly, I go to work so invigorated every day where I did with Greg, too, but this just feels like a completely different book. You know?

Romita: First, I got sick. I actually felt a little safer saying, "Oh, there's going to be a couple shots where we're out on a freeway, and I won't have to do a million buildings in the background. Then I hear, "Well, there's tractor trailers and diners full of people, and they're attack the trailers." I'm like, "Oh gee, now I have to draw tractor trailers." There's always a way for a writer to make the artist's life more difficult. [inaudible 00:08:28] Because if it were out in the middle of the Gobi Desert, it would be boring.

Snyder: Well, I'll try to make it nighttime, so it's really dark everywhere.

Romita: Actually, one of the pages I'm working on, we're on the back of a freight train. So, there's no easy panels.

Snyder: Yeah, that was pretty exposed, that part.

Well, one of the things you said, Scott, was working with different villains that you haven't had a chance to do. After that long, mythic run on Batman, what do you do after you've kind of hit all the bases you want to in terms of the villains?

I think part of the agenda is working with artists I've always wanted to work with on characters I've always wanted to work with, and see where we are at the end. I would work with John on anything at any time past the story already. We have a great rapport. I would happily come back and do more Batman, or anything together.

But, on the backups, it's almost like every story is a singular stake on a villain, and the anchor is really drawn on Sean Murphy. For me, the back up that go along with the story kind of tell of the tale of Duke, and he sort of becomes the hero he's going to be. That becomes through-line that kind of links everything.

Even though every volume, like what John and I are doing is completely stand alone, these back ups sort of link it as one sort of large year in Batman's life that way.

I'm really excited about the first set of backups, too. John and I are doing the story that happens after Two-Face is captured, which is sort of the big feature, and they're doing a story that leads up to Two-Face's arrival in Gotham. So you can almost think of it like two stories that avoid the story you usually see. Which is great; the story that comes before the attack on Gotham and the one that comes after.

That's actually kind of fun. It reminds me of the kind of thing Giffen and DeMatteis used to do on JLI.

Snyder: Yeah.

Now, with John, obviously you've done basically everything. When I talked to you at New York Comic Con, and you were 15 seconds away from announcing Last Crusade, you said the only big things left on your bucket list were creator on stuff, Fantastic 4, and Batman. So how gratifying is it to jump, not only right into Batman, but to jump right in and work with Frank Miller, Scott Snyder and Brian Azzarello?

Romita: Yeah, I'm living a blessed career at this point, correct. The best thing about it is you get what you've always imagined you're going to do, and that's Batman. But it doesn't fall on your wishes. In other words, you expected something great when you wanted to do it, hoping something great would come out, then you get a chance to work with "A-Teams".

Yes, that is a blessing. But, there's a fear in this, and it always comes back to a running back as he's crossing the goal line, saying, "Oh Lord, don't let me screw this up." That's the feeling I have.

Now that I've got what I wanted, now I have to hold onto the ball, and don't fumble. That's always what's in the back of my head, and I can't stop it. That's what spurs me to work harder. Now there's a big eye, a big microscope on me, on the project, and I can't mess it up. Which is a good thing, but I'm my own worst enemy, I guess you could call it.

You actually mentioned Duke, and I hadn't realized until I talked to Tom the other day, that Duke was going to be essentially what you were going to be dealing with him in All-Star. Going way back, in the time machine to about a year ago, right before "Rebirth" was announced, you told me that in some interview that you'd done all this stuff. You rattled off some things, but you mentioned you wanted to introduce a new Robin and a new Nightwing, at some point. Is that sort of the itch that you're scratching with you Duke story?

Snyder: Well, no. I mean, of course it would be great to be able to introduce a new Robin, and I had a lot of focus on doing a new Nightwing character, but a lot of that comes down to what Warner Brothers allows and where they're investing capital. Not financial capital, necessarily, but even creative capital at any one time. You can't really say, "Hey, I'm making a new Robin." It's a big deal. For me, it's really about, Duke became a character that people really responded to. When we did "We are Robin", I saw so much love for him. When that series ended, I thought it would be really disingenuous to say, "Okay, he got to Robin for a bit in this side book, now he's going to go back to the fray."

In some way, and sort of hang up his costume. So, I talked to the other Batman writers and Tom had some great ideas and so did James, and Tim Seeley. And we decided he has a good future in the "Bat World" and that he has a role that hasn't been filled yet. It became, "Where can we build that story?" For me, they're building it too, it's not just me, but I have back ups. I felt it would be a good chance to put him in the books centrally and devote some time to a new concept that's about this wheel of training that Batman secretly has put all the Robins characters through. Whether or not they know it. So, it's a lot of fun, the back ups have that concept, it's called "The Cursed Wheel."