The Dark Knight is going back to basics with a nearly year-long storyline – Zero Year kicking off this week. The upcoming Batman arc by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo focuses on the beginning of Bruce Wayne’s crime fighting career in The New 52.
“It’s not ‘let’s redo the origin,'” Snyder told the AP.
“We tried to preserve as much of Batman’s history as we could,” said the writer. Snyder promised this will be a story no one has told before, including how Bruce “built the cave” and “faced off with his first super villain.” He also says it won’t retread the classic Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli story “Batman: Year One.”
Snyder would not confirm the villain or villains of the arc but in a previous Comics Newsarama interview the writer hinted:
“I don’t want to give it away, but I tried to hint before that, like, Riddler is a character that we’re really going to be focusing on in 2013.”
Snyder reveals why he wants to tell this story:
“It’s definitely me wanting to tell this story. It really came about, I guess, about nine or 10 months ago, when I was thinking about trying to redefine, in my mind, for myself, who Bruce is in our run,” Snyder tells Comics Newsarama.
“I was thinking about who he is to Joker, and reconsidering what we were going to do after Joker. And I was just thinking about where he is emotionally, and who he is.
And I had an idea for a story that would be completely different, that would show a moment or a portion of his life that you’ve never seen before, in a completely different way.
At first I was approaching it a little gingerly, I guess. But what happened was I got more and more questions from people about what Bruce’s origin is in the New 52. I’d get it all the time, all day, on Twitter. I always get one or two tweets a day about, “How does this still work for Year One if this is the case in the 52?”
So there are all these discrepancies between Year One and the Batman that we know. Like Selina Kyle’s origin is different. And James [Gordon] Jr. — a character obviously very close to my heart — would be five years old or six years old in the New 52 if Batman has only been operating for five or six years. And so how is he an adult? And Barbara Gordon being Jim Gordon’s biological daughter.
So what happened is I kept trying to figure out how to do this story around Year One and figure one in.”
Batman #21 arrives this week.
By Editor