Interview: Scott Snyder Ends The Year with ALL-STAR BATMAN

Whew. It’s been a crazy year.

As we wrap up 2016, we also see Scott Snyder and John Romita Jr. wrapping up the first arc on All-Star Batman, ending the tumultuous road trip Batman shared with his old adversary and friend Two-Face. Snyder sat down with Comicosity in the last days of the year to chat about the big picture of the title, the balance of personal and political in Batman comics, and what we have to look forward to in 2017.

Matt Santori: I want to start off by talking about the very end of issue #4. That comic came out at a very particular time and seemed to end with a fairly prescient image. Talk to me about how that experience was for you and where you’re at with its conclusion in issue #5.

Scott Snyder: Thanks for asking that. The art was conceived well before the political season geared up. I had been thinking about it for a long time. Ultimately, it always begins with something personal.

Interior art for #4 by John Romita Jr., Danny Miki, and Dean White

It’s about what Two-Face says: We’re always a collection of our worst impulses. We can try to be the hero, and pretend to be a good person, but deep down we’re really selfish. That is many ways is the voice in my head when I get to a very bad place psychologically at different times. It began with that.

And it also began with something personal, when a particular person in our family that we hoped would overcome some personal demons did not. So, it was a very dark place it came from. I wanted to write a story where Two-Face was scary, first and foremost, and saying, “We’re all these dark, bad people behind closed doors. That’s our real face.”

And I wanted Batman to believe the opposite, saying, “I only look at the good. In my head, I don’t want to look at the dark side of the coin.” It gives him this incredible sense of confidence to just push and push down the road.

But as the story goes, Batman starts to realize that seeing the ugliness, the suffering, or the reasons why someone is behaving darkly at that moment doesn’t negate the fact that they’ll probably come around to be heroic, when push comes to shove. And that it makes people more admirable in the end.

Interior art for #5 by John Romita Jr., Danny Miki, and Dean White

This is something he learns in this story, but it also took on more meaning as the year progressed. My politics are well known if you follow me. I’m a liberal guy, and always have been — New York City third generation. But that said, the story isn’t necessarily partisan at all. What I was trying to get across in this moment is that, regardless of what side of a debate you’re on, what’s really frightening and depressing about this year is how destructive the discourse got and how political issues become personal issues. How they become discriminatory — racist, sexist, or homophobic, on all kinds of sides.

So, if the story speaks to that all, what Batman’s saying here is — regardless of what you believe is the right thing to do in life — we can be better than this.

Interior art for #5 by John Romita Jr., Danny Miki, and Dean White

MS: A lot of the crux of the conclusion of the story in issue #5 is this idea of being the hero or the villain, and not just in terms of Two-Face, but in regard to Batman as well. What makes Batman the hero in this particular scenario.

SS: Yeah, when he starts out, Batman is going to do something almost kind of myopic, with his opinion opposed on someone else. Yes, Harvey wants to be turned into just Harvey, but to do that is to artificially wipe out Two-Face. As much as I presume any of us would do that, there’s still something questionable about it in some way.

Where I think he lands in the end is in saying, “I can’t save you.” in the same way that Batman can’t save any of us in the real world. “I believe in you to save yourself. I’ll fight alongside you, but I can’t fight for you. You have to be a better person at the end of the day, and if you can’t be, then you can’t be. I’ll always be there whenever you need inspiration or need help.”

That to me was a very emotional scene to write, quite honestly. I certainly fall into a place fairly often where I get really angry about things — small things or big things. And it’s always easier to go with your darkest impulses first, which is what I think Harvey is saying, that it’s inevitable that we’re all going to land there.

Interior art for #5 by John Romita Jr., Danny Miki, and Dean White

Having that idea come from Harvey and not Two-Face himself, letting him surrender to that, was hard to write, too. Because I knew how much that would break Bruce.

It’s funny because this was a story that on one hand, I wanted to make totally kinetic and over the top and bombastic. Kind of zany and circus-like. I really like that aspect of Batman, and all of the fun of it. But I also was concerned about whether it would get too dark. So, it was a really interesting story to write.

The art that John Romita produced, alongside Dean White and Danny Miki, just nailed it. I couldn’t have been working with better partners. I was constantly talking to all of them about the tone of each scene, with them giving up ideas. I feel like it was really collaborative and better than I ever expected. Just one of those magic experiences.

I’m as proud of this arc as anything I’ve ever done on Batman, and a lot of that comes down to their contributions.

Cover art for #5 by John Romita Jr.

MS: This is the last issue you’re working with John on, so can you reflect back on that a little bit, as well as look forward to who you have on deck to work with in future issues.

SS: Yeah! I mean, working with John was great. I’m always nervous about working with someone that well-established because a) I’m in awe, and b) you’re always worried they’re going to be like: I’ve already done everything I’ve wanted to do, so I’m just going to have fun or phone it in. I never thought that about John given what I’d heard about him, but when I met him, he was like, “I want to do something that reinvigorates me, and makes people sit up and say they didn’t know I could do that.”

That’s really inspiring, when you get someone who’s essentially a rock star acting like a hungry young artist wanting to reinvent themselves. That experience is just so energizing. We’re already making plans to work together again. It’s was a joy.

Now, with issue #6, the Mr. Freeze story with Jock and Francesco Francavilla, it’s almost written like prose. Jock wanted to do something that felt like a cold, distant transmission from the Arctic. So, there’s no balloons or captions. It’s all exposed and placed right on the art. It gives Mr. Freeze this feeling of an inhuman radio transmission from the apocalypse-sort of feel, taking place in Alaska.

Cover art by Jock

Then with the #7, the Poison Ivy story with Tula Lotay, it takes place in Death Valley, where Batman goes to get a cure for what happens in the Mr. Freeze issue. So, even though they seem like one-shots, they’re actually connected and culminate in issue #9 with Alfua Richardson. The Ivy story is a hot story with very little narration. It’s set out in the desert and really fun.

I love this series so much. I’ve never had so much fun on a super-hero comic. And that doesn’t say anything about my partnership with Greg [Capullo] on Batman, which is so much fun and I couldn’t have loved more. But the pressure and grind of that series — abstractly outside of our work on the book — was always there. How are the sales? How did it do?

Even though I still do that myself, which is kind of the joke at DC. They took all the pressure away, so now I put it on myself. But I also feel unleashed by this series. I can work with different artists and change my writing style. I can experiment. The irony of it is that the more latitude I take, the more it seems people are responding to it. You’re used to seeing the opposite.

Response has been just so positive to this murderous row of villains and artists changing from one arc to the next. It is one big story, as you’ll see, but it’s also built around creative experimentation and creative energy. It’s not necessarily the same kinds of mandates that you have on the main comic.

Cover art by Tula Lotay

MS: I think that’s interesting because, while they’re not necessarily in thematic opposition to each other, the personal and political I was asking about earlier dances a bit in both your and Tom King’s current work on Batman. Whereas I usually think of Tom’s work as more innately political than yours — with titles like Sheriff of Babylon or Omega Men — his stories are coming across as much more personal, where I usually associate that intense feeling more with your work on Wytches or Batman itself. Both are richer for it, I think.

SS: Thanks! Yeah, Tom has become an incredibly close friend, and we talk several times a week. Even for me, this next big arc — while they are individual stories — has this sort of end-of-the-world feel. It begins with Freeze getting a hold of his ice core that begins a cataclysm that Batman has to stop. But for some reason, his attempt to stop it doesn’t work, and you get this necrotic spreading across the Northwest that continues to spread across the Pacific Northwest like impending doom throughout the arc.

It’s not overtly political in the sense that I’m laying out my politics the way I might on Twitter or in private. That said, there’s a way of telling a story about the anxieties we’re all feeling and approaching them bravely, like a hero. Batman will say, “I’m not going to tell you how to solve these things, but I am going say you need to approach it with fortitude, open-mindedness, bravery — all of these sorts of things.”

Cover art by Giuseppe Camuncoli

I’m putting him up against fears that are really in the zeitgeist at the moment, and that’s why you can see all the things people are terrified of right now in Two-Face. Everything feels fragile. And that fragility inspires more fear and more anger and more of a sense of taking what’s mine and drawing it nearer to me.

On the surface, Two-Face going over Niagara Falls in a gambling ship is a bunch of fun stuff, but at the end of the day, I hope it’s also about things that are in the air and that are personal.

 

The next issue of All-Star Batman hits this Wednesday with its final chapter of Scott Snyder working with John Romita Jr.

 

 

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