New York Comic-Con 2013 is underway, and here come the announcements. USA Today revealed that there’s a new weekly series coming from DC called Batman Eternal, featuring Batman writer Scott Snyder, who they refer to as the “showrunner,” and his fellow Bat-writers James Tynion IV, John Layman, Ray Fawkes and Tim Seeley, with artist Jason Fabok. Snyder says it will “set the stage for a new Gotham and new characters and a new set of stories that will take Batman into 2015” and “We want this to be a place where you get to tell a story about anything you want in Gotham, so long as we’re also moving this big story forward in the background. You’ll see bombastic arcs as well but there’ll be plenty of room for Ray to explore some of the darker, more mystical aspects of Gotham that he loves or Tim to explore some of the crime we haven’t seen before.”
“We’re five guys doing our best to give you an exciting Gotham that’s changing under the feet of its characters,” he says. “You’ll see some humungous newsworthy stuff in it, I promise.”
Snyder will also be contributing to the special 96-page Detective Comics #27 issue due out January 8, to commemorate the fact that the original Detective Comics #27 marked the first appearance of Batman. That will be an all-star anthology issue which will even include an artistic contribution from The Dark Knight Returns legend Frank Miller, famous for his work with The Goddamned Batman. Brad Meltzer and Bryan Hitch will be doing a modern retelling of Batman’s origin (uh… isn’t Snyder doing that with Zero Year right now?), Snyder will work a piece up with his partner on The Wake Sean Murphy, and it will include other notable teams like Peter J. Tomasi and Guillem March, Paul Dini and Dustin Nguyen, and Gregg Hurwitz and Neal Adams. It will also be the last hurrah for John Layman and Jason Fabok before the new Detective Comics writing team of Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellatto come over from The Flash.
“We want to bring him closer to his roots and be more of a street-level type of hero,” Manapul said about their Bat-plans. “His superheroics will still be present, but the investigative part of Batman will be at the forefront …We’ve always written stories about hope, and it will be very interesting to see what comes out when we walk through the sullen streets of Gotham City.”
“Stylistically, we will use the tools in our toolbox to capture what we think the Bat-universe looks and feels like,” Buccellato notes. “Gotham won’t look like Central City, so you won’t be seeing all the bright reds, oranges and yellows that defined Flash’s world.”
Here’s a look at some Manapul art you can expect – all images courtesy of DC Entertainment.
