DC Comics Teases Ghost-Maker and A Happy Batman In That Blue & Silver Suit As Joker War Begins In Batman #95, Batgirl #47 and Detective Comics #1024! Spoilers follow.
Writer James Tynion IV dished on the Joker War, that officially begins this week with Batman #95. Here are the highlights.
“I wanted to do a story that really flipped the dynamic, and the core, high-concept conceit is I wanted Batman’s fortune to be ripped away from him and given to the Joker. I wanted Joker to have all of the Batmobiles, Bat-planes, Bat-gadgets, and Batman to have none of them. And that’s the dynamic I wanted for a story.”
“I wanted to really explore the fact that, you know, Joker [has] this whole group of people around him in the same way that Batman has his family around him. At the moment, Joker has successfully hit a bunch of fracture points that has separated Batman away from his family. And some of those fracture points, Bruce hit himself. But now Joker has this big family all around him. He has Punchline, he has this whole gang of clowns and in masks and all of that. And Bruce doesn’t have anyone around him, and that’s where Joker War starts. And then we’re going to see that change over the course of the story, as Batman realizes who he needs to reach out to to win. So, definitely the building of a Joker family was something that … I definitely have a Post-it note somewhere in this office that says ‘Joker Famly’ underlined three times from like last October or something like that.”
“So honestly this suit is really thematically important for the issue, and for this entire arc. This is the Batman that Batman has been building himself towards, that he thinks is sort of his own happy ending. And this story is very much about Joker seeing the happy ending that Batman wanted to build for himself and destroying all of the pieces that would be necessary to build himself that happy ending. So that suit is an aspirational suit that we’re going to see ripped away. You’ll see it for the first time in #95, you’ll see it in the future in #96. And then it’s going to come back in a big way towards the end in a way that isn’t going to necessarily be the utopian situation that [Batman] was hoping to put that suit on in. So, that’s a big piece of what we were trying to build.”
“I do think that people want something new, and that’s part of why, in a meta sense, that’s what I’m doing with this story. I’m trying to create new characters, bring them into the Gotham mythos, expand the Gotham mythos, change some of the core pillars of the Gotham mythos. This is a lot of what Joker War does. It raises Gotham so that new stories can be built off of it, and that’s been one of the most exciting things in that mix is just being able to create a whole bunch of new story and threads that are going to pay off, not only later this year, but into next year.”
“Ghost-Maker is a character who we’ll see a little bit of right at the end of Batman #100, but will come in in a big way in November and beyond. This is a character who I’ve been excited about for a really long time. He’s definitely going to show up as an adversary to Bruce, but he is not necessarily a villain per se. He is someone that Bruce has known since he was a young man traveling around the world training to become Batman. And now, basically Bruce’s rival from when he was 15 years old has come back to Gotham City because he doesn’t think Bruce is doing a very good job. That’s the sort of core conceit, is creating this rival from youth that we’re going to see come in in a big way in the present.”
Here’s the checklist for Joker War.
Batman #95 hits stands this week with Joker War Part 1. Below are the teaser and preview pages.
Also out this week is a Joker War tie-in in the pages of Detective Comics #1024 that includes a returning Owlman. Below is a look at the interior pages via a teaser / preview.
Plus another Joker War tie-in this week in Batgirl #47.
The look to Ghost-Maker has yet to be revealed.
