Interview: Marc Andreyko Challenges the Unknown with BATWOMAN

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The entire Bat-office is being turned on its head at DC Comics in October and Batwoman is no exception. In the wake of today’s Futures End special, the other Dark Knight is getting a new supporting cast for her book — her own team — as the Unknowns make their debut. Writer Marc Andreyko took time out to chat with Comicosity about the experience writing for Kate today and five years in the future, as well as the return of her sister Elizabeth in the co-starring role of Red Alice, alongside Jason Blood, Ragman, and Clayface.

Matt Santori: In looking at last month’s #34, it’s really interesting how you set up a cliffhanger at the end of the issue that could lead both into today’s Batwoman: Futures End #1 and next month’s Batwoman #35. From a writing standpoint, how did you find negotiating these two divergent story narratives?

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Cover art by Rafael Garres

Marc Andreyko: I’m a big believer, when you do event books and have issues tie into them, you really want them to be relevant to what’s happening now. It’s like, “You don’t want to do a red sky tie-in.” As a kid, reading Crisis on Infinite Earths, every book crossed over or tied into that series, but some of them were no more than a panel with someone saying, “Oh look! The sky is red!”

Going back to when I was doing Manhunter, with the Identity Crisis tie-in, it was relevant and had stakes and repercussions. People spend their hard-earned dollars and you want to feel like you’re getting something.

I definitely dropped hints here as to where we are going — the seismic shift of the book — as well put our characters into the most difficult positions possible.

MSG: And the issue gives some really big hints about where Batwoman is going — as Kate will be joining up with a new team. How did that direction come about?

MA: Last March I was in New York, and I had a meeting with Rachel Drucker and Mark Doyle. We were talking about the whole Bat-Universe and how to give the books all a distinctive identity. We were just spit-balling and someone said, “Oh! A team book!” and I said, “No!”

But then I thought, “What about a supernatural team book?” I ran through some of the characters I wanted to use, and for almost all of them, they said yes.

Now, that shifts things. Batwoman will occupy the corner of Gotham that deals with lots of evil — supernatural evil and sometimes human evil that’s just as bad, if not worse. It’s sort of a tip of the hat to all the great work that Greg Rucka, J.H. Williams III, and Haden Blackman did for the book, but also an evolution of the book. It’s making Batwoman less of a lone wolf and forcing her to interact with other people.

It also reflects on her history with the military. She’s good in a group. We haven’t had a chance to see her like that, and she’s been doing this long enough that she feels confident that she knows how to lead. She may be wrong, but that’s how she feels.

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Cover art by Rafael Albuquerque

MSG: Among the characters Kate is going to be working with is her sister, now called Red Alice. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to bring Alice back into the book?

MA: When Elizabeth returns, it’s going to throw Kate for a loop. We’ll see eventually how Alice got there. And with her history of mental illness, how safe is she?

MSG: That’s a really interesting topic that’s come up a bit recently, the depiction of mental illness among Bat-villains. Now you have a hero with a history of mental illness. How do you plan on writing to that given some of the sensitivity around those depictions?

MA: As you’ve seen earlier in the book, when Kate goes to therapy, I don’t want to use this in the B-movie sense. I want to put as much reality in the exploration of that as well, while still acknowledging that I’m writing a super-hero comic book. I’m not making it a thesis on multiple personality disorder or anything, but I want to make sure that I’m covering ground based on reality. I don’t want to do a disservice to it.

I think that mental illness in comics tends to be shown primarily with characters like the Joker, but I want to explore how trauma affects heroes, and how they can get past the damage, then.

With Alice, it’s also a great ticking bomb in the Alfred Hitchcock tradition. If you see two people talking in a room, and the room explodes, you get one reaction from the audience. But if you see two people talking in a room and angle the camera under the table to see that there’s a bomb waiting to go off, it’s all the more tense.

Red Alice may or may not be as stable as she appears to be.

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Cover art by Rafael Albuquerque

MSG: In the Futures End issue, we’re also getting a preview of the other team members who will be joining Kate and Elizabeth. How did you go about choosing the roster for the Unknowns — particularly members that seems to have roots in Jewish symbolism?

MA: A lot of these characters were already awesome and ones that I wanted to write.

As someone who was raised Catholic, the mythos of religion is always interesting to delve into. Are the characters all going to be sitting around for a Passover seder in a special issue? Probably not. But like anything else — someone’s sexual orientation, gender, economic status — it’s a facet of who they are, so definitely.

MSG: With the next issue being poised, like most of the Bat-books in October, as a new jumping on point, what can new readers expect going in?

MA: The next issue, #35, is crazy. The one spoiler I can give you for that is that it takes place completely in outer space. It will be interesting.

At the same time as all this supernatural team stuff, there will still be the ramifications of Kate’s seemingly selfless act in breaking up with Maggie — how that effects her and Maggie. There will be some real human stories as well, alongside the backdrop of this intense super-hero stuff.

Our new artist, Georges Jeanty, has really risen to the occasion. I just got the lettering on his first full issue and it’s really, really fun. It’s work from Georges that we haven’t really seen before. I’m very excited!

 

The Unknowns debut in next month’s Batwoman #35, written by Marc Andreyko and drawn by Georges Jeanty, arriving in stores and online October 15 from DC Comics.

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