Scott Snyder Talks Detective Comics 1000 Exclusive

Watching The Detective

Detective Comics 1000 is out now and here’s Scott Snyder, who reteamed with his Batman collaborator on a story for this landmark issue, who spoke to Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows about creating the story and taking part in such a significant issue…

Scott Snyder has been associated with Batman for around a decade now and so it was likely he would be contributing to DC’s celebration of Batman’s 80^th anniversary and Detective Comics’ 1000^th issue.

For the writer, his longevity is a fairly simple one, he tells me:“I think for me the enduring core of the character is simply that he’s a hero who takes this terrible tragedy that happened to him and turns it into fuel and motivation to make sure that thing doesn’t happen to anyone else. It’s a really basic story at the end of the day. If you take away the cars, the money, the cool costume and the gadgets it’s really a story about transforming something that’s a meaningless act of violence into an engine of meaning for your own life and I think there’s something deeply inspiring in that,” he explains.

Batman has always been seen as a character who can beat any situation despite the fact that he doesn’t have any actual powers and he sees the humour in this:

“Even the catchphrase ‘Batman always wins’ and the jokes we make about how Batman always plans for everything, he always knows how to get out of any situation and more than with any other superhero there’s comedy around the idea that you can’t beat him. He could be on the starting line of a race with Superman and Flash and they’re both looking at him quizzically and he says ‘What, I’m, Batman?’ or the joke: who would win in a fight: Hulk or Spider-man? Batman wins.”

Snyder has worked with artist Greg Capullo for many years now and so when it was confirmed that they would be teaming up again for this, it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been working together recently anyway as he reveals.

“Greg is family to me now. We talk every couple of days even when we’re not working together on any particular project. So there was no real return for me here because we had been joking around about kids and life the day before we got the assignment. Also more relevantly, we’re also working on our last big Batman story right now for DC Black Label called Last Knight On Earth. So we have been doing a lot of really bold Batman storytelling over the last few months. It’s a tale that takes place fifteen or twenty years in the future and so there’s a lot of elasticity to the DC universe and a lot of surprises. So one of the fun things about this was to be able to go back and do a really classic Batman story. This allowed us to do something that went back to his roots as a detective because if he has any one superpower it’s that he’s the greatest detective on Earth. I loved being able to do something that’s so grounded in material that’s so empirical and rooted in Gotham and its history. It almost felt like a return to home. I really couldn’t be happier when I get to work with Greg and Jonathan Glapion and FCO who did Court of Owls and Metal and so many of those stories with me,” he says.

Snyder knew this would be the tale that kicked off the anniversary issue and so this focused his mind on the sort of approach he would take when writing it.

“I knew that our story was going to be the first one in the issue. That was communicated to me early so I knew I wanted to go into it with something that was really a testament to the legacy and the tradition of detection. So it wasn’t just a Batman story but it would look at how Batman is this incredible figure in this long narrative about what it means to be a detective, that stretches back long before him to the earliest days of humanity. For me I wanted him to be humbled before his own profession and do a story that was celebratory and felt like an introduction to an anthology that would give you all kinds of tales that had to do with the empirical pursuit of answers even in the face of impossible mysteries. Because when you think about him being a detective, he solves these cases that are grounded but ultimately that pursuit isn’t just about case to case it’s about the kind of dogged chase for answers. That’s even when you know that you can solve a particular crime but the motivations behind that crime, the real story behind why somebody would actually do some terrible thing, is often less mysterious. So there are bigger questions when it comes to Batman’s roots. There is his interest in science and technology and all of that so I wanted to do a story that opened up all of that, so as much as we think we understand about Batman being this incredible detective, who’s had 80 years of cases, but what could possibly be left for him? He’s actually at the very beginning of a greater mystery about what it means to be who he is. So I wanted it to feel celebratory and revelatory and also make it very much an introduction to the whole thing,” the writer explains.

Despite the fact that Snyder and Capullo have worked together on a lot of comics over the past decade, he is still keen to create work together that does something they haven’t done before.

“The reason that we get on so well and I think the reason why we keep coming back together to work on things at DC but also projects we have planned for ourselves is that we’re both really our own toughest critic. We always want to be on projects that push us beyond what we thought was possible for ourselves. So we’re always the most exciting versions of ourselves to each other and, as creators, I think we just want to be putting things on the page which are exciting to us and go beyond what we thought we were capable of.”

Batman has a huge legacy and it’s one that has influenced his work on the character. When asked which past Batman story has had the greatest impact on his take on the Dark Knight, he had to think for a minute but he did pick one series.

“That’s really hard because I think Batman’s always been there at different points in my life with some kind of seminal work that changed my life and kept me attracted not only to the mythology and the comic books but to writing itself. The first one I would say was Dark Knight Returns. I was about nine years old when that came out and I hid my four copies which I still have at my parents house. I was living in New York City at that time and that book for me made Batman so immediate even though it’s so wildly speculative. It made Batman relevant and feel real even though the context of things was cartoonishly comicbook in that the problems he was facing whether they were translated or sublimated in comic book language, like the Cold War, urban decay and his own mortality. All of that kind of stuff spoke to me about New York City at that time and about my parents so that book really changed my life.”

Interestingly another Batman project, albeit one from outside of comics, was also a big influence on him too.

“If I had to pick a couple of others, the Batman animated series by Paul Dini, Bruce Timm and Alan Burnett, that was built even more into the DNA of our run. The way that it was able to create such a huge immersive, enveloping mythology that felt both classic and fresh at once was amazing,” he revealed.

In terms of the visual approach, Snyder wanted Capullo to approach their story for Detective Comics 1000 in a slightly different way to their other Batman work.

“I told him that this was really a gumshoe story. It was more about the fun and art of detection than it was about Batman so I wanted it to feel exotic when he’s in places you wouldn’t expect. I wanted it to feel granular and intense when he’s investigating a clue. A lot of the time when we were doing our Batman run, we’d focus on him not just in a way not just because he’s the star of the book but because there’s a tremendous fun and bombast in having him on the page. Here I wanted it almost to feel like the detective story he was in was the star rather than Batman himself and he’s more your conduit, your introduction to something that you’re more attracted to than him which is the mystery itself,” he told me.

Even a decade on, he still feels privileged that he is telling tales of the Batman, whether that’s for one of the regular books or as part of a prestige project like this with the extra pressure that exists being part of a milestone anniversary issue. He tries to sum up his feelings about this into words as we wrap up our chat.

“Regardless of the stage when you step into the Batcave or reach for the cowl and you’re writing Batman it always feels that way. I’m very proud as I don’t think I’ve ever done anything with the character that I let out the door without trying to make sure that it was as good as I could make it. I have put things out which are flawed but it’s never for lack of trying. So you get to work on Batman and Alfred is there waiting for you in the cave and you’re terrified. It’s always intensely intimidating. So I always try and treat it with the same level of respect whether we’re doing an eight or nine page short here or we’re doing Last Knight which is 150 pages long. You always give your all whenever you’re working on Batman. It’s just such a huge thrill and an honour to be included in a book like this not just because the character has meant so much to me but because of the creators involved, artists and writers both, have built so many of the stories together that have made me and inspired me as a creator. I also wanted to thank everybody who has given me the opportunity to still be writing Batman stories ten years after being given my first chance, I can’t even wrap my head around that.”

Detective Comics 1000 is out now from DC. Batman The Last Knight On Earth starts in May also from DC/ Black Label