Transcript of Being Batman

1 You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about science fiction and other fantasy genres. I’m Eric Molinsky. They say you should never meet your heroes because you might be disappointed. But what happens when you’re that told from now on, you need to become your childhood hero -- just don’t disappoint everyone else? I know for a lot of people, that sounds like a metaphor. But that really happened to Scott Snyder. SCOTT: Right now this city, ruined and beautiful it’s ours and ours alone, its fears, super storms, madmen with private ideology come at us with weapons of every magnetite out of nowhere, these are fears haunt our city but we will face them together. Because right now, this is our Gotham, not our fathers or sons, ours, our fears are great but so are our hopes, our ambitions, our resilience, because we’re fighters. Scott Snyder writes Batman. There are lots of DC Comics that feature Batman, but he writes the one with Batman in the title. It’s consistently the best selling title for DC -- and all of comics. To say I’m a Batman fan is an understatement. But I could really never explain why I feel such a connection with Bruce Wayne, or why my obsession started at the end of high school, not when I was a kid. I’ve devoured every version of this character from Frank Miller to Tim Burton to the animated series to Christopher Nolan to the Arkham video games. What’s different about Scott Snyder’s Batman is that he isn’t dark, edgy and tormented. He’s raw and vulnerable, but sometimes kind of charming -- without loosing the darkness. Scott Snyder is a busy man. We had trouble finding a time to meet in Manhattan. So he very generously let me come to his house in the suburbs. In many ways, he’s not your typical comic book geek. Most of the toys in the house are for his kids, not him. His wife is a doctor. SCOTT: She’s great and I call her with all my science questions, which makes her mad. She’ll be in the ER and I’ll be like, this is very important, if Bruce 2 Wayne’s wrist was hit by a mutagen, she’s like click, that’s not my branch of medicine. Scott’s expertise is literature. He has an MFA in fiction from Columbia. He loves to write dense monologues full of existential ideas and arcane trivia, which you can’t cram into a speech bubble. SCOTT: Like I wrote Swamp Thing problem when he talks it’s orange caption much more obvious when you’re talking a blaze orange caption and when you look at page that’s beautiful and green, and there’s orange, orange, organ over, it’s like God this guy does not shut up! The artist he works with now -- Greg Capullo – still gets annoyed at him. SCOTT: He just emailed me this morning, are you serious? I’m like I’ll cut it. You know you’re going to cut it. But I love the ambition of his writing. I recently read an independent comic he wrote called The Wake, which is about a watery apocalypse brought on by giant sea monsters. Afterward, I had this overwhelming feeling that life is so precious and fleeting. I had to go tell my wife that I love her – which is not a feeling I get from reading comic books. SCOTT: I’m constantly obsessed with idea time of how quickly passes. Ever since I was a little kid, my parents tease me because we’d have family get together and tape-record them. I still have these tapes. I don’t know anxiety how quickly pass or something that was less negative and more loving, it’s always been there. ME: I want to ask you, grew up in NY. I grew up suburbs kids in the movies dreamed of big bad exciting city, there’s this anxiety, ‘80s and ‘90s in THAT much more scary dangerous NY influences you? SCOTT: Completely I think my Gotham is the antagonist for me in every arc in Batman. The thing for me growing up in NY in the ‘80s Batman important to me, Dark Knight Returns and Year One when I was 10 and 11. In case you don’t know, Year One was a Batman origin story written by Frank Miller in 1986. He also wrote The Dark Knight Returns, which was 3 about an old Batman who comes way out of retirement. They were both really gritty and really badass. SCOTT: Suddenly Batman was walking a city I recognized. I was not allowed to go to Central Park, not allowed to ride subway, went to Times Square fake ID, so it was a different city and it was dangerous for a kid it was scary weren’t allowed to do things. Suddenly Batman walking city you knew, gangs, prostitutions, graffiti, and it made it viscerally real and relevant. But moving to the suburbs didn’t stop his anxieties. SCOTT: And I went through a period when I got very depressed when moved out here to Long Island, I was used to living in the city, public space and I didn’t anticipate how depressing it would be to be isolated, vision have one car, walk to supermarket along highway half a mile. Walk along highway in winter when no one walks is really depressing, it got worse and worse I got very bad where I was not functioning well. Eventually I started seeing something and got help had periods like this recognized and I began to see in some way that there were parts, things that I was deeply afraid of or react to being alone suddenly understanding in new stage of life when things were past, things were over. He put all those feelings into a book of short stories, but he eventually went back to his first love – comics. His big break at DC was on a storyline for Detective Comics where Dick Grayson – who used to be Robin then went out on his own to become Nightwing – has to be Batman because Bruce Wayne has gone missing. SCOTT: He’s a character who wears his heart on his sleeve feels the way you do writing Batman as Batman, he’s bewildered by it, he’s completely intimidated, giddy, so it was the easiest Batman to write, I can’t believe I’m Batman. Dick, I can’t believe I’m writing Batman. We’re going to get along great! DC approached Scott to write the main Batman title, and they were going to reboot the entire DC universe from scratch – because after 70 years, you needed Wikipedia to follow the plots. So Scott’s first issue of Batman would be Batman #1. SCOTT: I really remember being up in his house late and night I’m going to call in sick, and she was like all year? What are you going to do? You can’t hide, it’s 4 so paralyzing so many stories that matter to me, not just write comics, are Batman stories. EM: I’m realizing what a great match for Bruce Wayne, fear, vulnerability, loosing the family, he’s a father figure to other characters, you’re describing Bruce to some extent and that’s probably why it’s such a good match for you. SCOTT: Thanks, honestly, I cannot think of another character I’m as connected to, feel badly got dream job first where is there to go but down? Other characters I feel affinity but Bruce is the one close to my heart for those reasons, growing up the thing that was so fascinating about him in comics was that he was vulnerable and human, most heroic superhero put his own body on the line all the time for his city and he has no powers. So he’s constantly scarifying himself seen as admirable most heroic and most altruistic thing but does it at expense of thing you would need to be happy, self destructive and pathological so interesting deeply flawed in conception from go, he’s human, he’s just totally vulnerable. Scott decided to make this work, his anxieties had to becomes Bruce Wayne’s. SCOTT: I had to decide – decide, decide – I’m going to write this character like I made him up because if you try to write Frank Miller’s Batman or Grant Morrison’s Batman, you’re going to fair. But if you’re trying to pretend that you invented Batman or The Joker – and you’re a fan -- how do you block these voices out of your head? MONTAGE SCOTT: It’s very hard! I mean the Joker, I was only ready to write him when I knew I had a different take and I had to really think about it for a while and come up with something that was my own and spoke to my own fears and my Joker story came about when we were pregnant with our second kid and I was terrified that I didn’t have – I just wasn’t going to be a good Dad and I remember thinking well Batman has this family like you said, this extended family and I wonder if he feels this way I wish I didn’t worry about these characters, and then I thought, oh, what if a villain came along said I just heard you wish your family was dead well let me do that for you so you can go back to the way things were.

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