Cully Hamner has had quite the career at DC Comics from designing new and different takes on characters like Jaime Reyes’s Blue Beetle to working on the costume designs of The New 52. This year, Hamner, Tony Patrick and Scott Snyder have been collaborating on the three-issue miniseries “Batman & The Signal” spinning out of “Dark Nights: Metal.” The series follows Duke Thomas, one of Batman’s proteges from Snyder and Greg Capullo’s “Batman” run, as he comes into his own. Hamner and I got to talk at C2E2 earlier this month about the design process for the series and the last issue, which is out today.
Well Cully thank you for taking the time to talk to me and taking the time to do this.
Cully Hamner: No problem.
So you’ve had quite a career now in comics. You’ve done “Red,” you co-created Jaime Reyes’s Blue Beetle, you worked with Greg Rucka on “The Question,” you worked on a lot of the redesigns with The New 52, and now you’re doing “Batman & The Signal.” That seems like a long list of creating brand new things.
CH: I’m very old. I’m very, very old.
[Laughs] You’re not that old. I didn’t mean to imply.
CH: You don’t have to I’m aware. [Laughs] I feel it every day.
What’s it like getting to work on so many brand brand new things at DC?
CH: It’s fun! It’s nice to have that kind of trust, you know? It’s nice that people think of me for these things. I mean look I just want to work, that’s all I really wanna do. I think that’s all any freelancer, any writer or artist, wants to do. It’s nice that I have enough of a relationship with everyone at DC that they try to keep me busy. I started working there, going back to being very old, I started working there in 1991. That was my first job at DC. I’ve seen a lot of turnaround in staff and somehow I’ve managed as a freelancer to kind of hang on through a lot of that. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people, and I guess they just sort of think of me for these things. It’s just a blast.
When I was learning about comics when I was really young and kind of learning to read from comics, I mean I read everything as I got a little older, but my formative stuff was DC stuff. So it’s a kick for me to be the age that I am and look back at myself at four or five years old, and think that kid grew up to actually work for this company that he was obsessed with when he was young.
That’s really cool. Well you’re bringing a lot of that creative power, or you’ve brought a lot of that creative power, I know you’ve finished drawing the issues, to “Batman & The Signal.” You redesigned the costume for Duke. What was that process like? What inspirations did you draw on drawing the costume?
CH: Well a lot of it was, a lot of the conceptual stuff was there already, cause Greg [Capullo] had designed the, I guess what you’d call, the prototype, what it ended up as. So you had the broad strokes. You had the helmet you had the yellow and you had the dark parts and everything. What I wanted to do was maybe drag it a little bit more into being part of the Bat brand, you know? He already had some version of the ears on the helmet. I kind of wanted to maybe point them a little bit more and make them a little bit more like a bat shape, but still keep them looking like a sort of motorcycle helmet thing he had going. I still wanted to have the idea that it was somewhat armored and somewhat technical. But I still wanted to have the same colors, which are kind of like, you know, if you think about the concept of the book, you’ve got sort of a day for night kind of thing. Gotham is perpetually a nighttime kind of a thing, so we’ve got this situation where actually half the time, 12 hours a day of Gotham is during the day. So that’s Duke’s kind of domain, and I wanted that to reflect in the costume. But you know I also wanted to have him in a way kind of have him a reverse of Batman. So the parts of Batman’s costume that are dark are light on Duke’s costume, and the parts of Batman’s costume that are light are dark on Duke’s costume.
Continued belowI love that huge white Bat-symbol
CH: Yeah the big white Bat-symbol with the black outline around it is specifically a kind of a mirror image, literally and figuratively, of what Capullo is doing on his Bat design that’s got that sort of yellow sort of halo around the Bat. It’s really cool and what I tried to do even more was…the white area that you see in that Bat is actually reflective. So if you’ll notice in that very first page in the first issue, the very first panel is a little dream sequence, but you’ve got Robin pointing his finger at Duke but he’s reflected in the Bat symbol on his chest. You’ll notice that Laura [Martin] tried to play with that, with light reflecting off his chest. My thinking in that was he might, you know, use it to confuse an opponent. But also it really is what he is, he reflects the light in Gotham. Very literal in a way.
Well playing off that day and nighttime theme, y’all have also given Duke a supporting cast in this comic from his former gang of Robins, to Detective Aisi. What went into designing those characters and having this parallel daytime cast for Duke?
CH: Well I mean for the most part they’d already been designed. Izzy and Rico had already been designed. I got to come up with his cousin Jay who he lives with. I got to come up with the villain Gnomon. The main one that I got to come up with was Aisi who when she first was conceptualized, mainly by Tony [Patrick], was a man. I remembered saying, You know what there are no, at least so far in this book (this was before Izzy and Rico became major parts of the cast) none of the major characters who are protagonists are women. How about we make this character a woman? And Tony was like yeah I see where you’re going on that. So we decided to make her a woman. I kind of wanted to make her, as a cop, I wanted to make her kind of buff, she’s in shape. She’s missing an arm, that was Tony. I gave her tattoos, that sort of thing, and it just sort of worked out. She’s a cool character I like her.
What’s different about getting to draw Gotham in the day rather than the night?
CH: Well you know it’s funny. I was just saying to somebody else, when you think about Gotham, you’re thinking about a city perpetually in the night. So you’re thinking about the light coming up from the street. You’re thinking about light coming from inside the buildings. During the day you don’t have that. You have the light coming from down, from the sky. You have the light hitting the buildings, the buildings aren’t lit from within they’re reflective. Even old buildings you’ll see the other buildings reflected in the windows, I tried to do a little bit of that. But you know there are still shadows in the daytime. You go to any large American city, you’re gonna see a lot of contrast, a lot of big long shadows in the afternoon. You’re going to see that. Metaphorically that means that there are bad guys at play in Gotham during the day, just as there are in the night. They may be different bad guys, but they’re there. You can hide in the light as easily as you can hide in the night.
So you got to work with Tony Patrick and Scott Snyder on this series. What’s it like getting to work with a well-established Bat-writer and someone who is a new up and comer at DC?
CH: It’s two completely different experiences, because Scott is just the guy who knows what he’s doing. I mean he is the guy who really just has everything under control and Tony is the guy who is new to everything, everything is a new experience. “Oh I want to know what that’s about,” “I wanna touch this,” I wanna see this.” He’s the guy you know that would walk wide-eyed through a house and be picking up statuary and lamps and going “What’s this?” Everything is a new experience so he just has a different perspective on everything, whereas Scott is just the pro. Scott is somebody I wanted to work with for a long time, and would still love to work with again. I think that it was a lot of fun trying to kind of feel each other out on this book because none of us had ever worked together before. It was really interesting, really interesting. I hope we get to do it again some time.
Continued belowVery cool. Well so the first two issues are out, issue #3 comes out at the end of this month. Is there anything you’d like to tease about the last issue of the series? About what’s coming?
CH: Well it all goes down in this book. It’s like there’s a lot that kind of breaks loose. The very first line in the plot that Tony gave me was “Complete pandemonium.” And that’s exactly what happens in this book, it’s complete pandemonium. There’s craziness happening. But you know, Duke saves the day. We got some Batman in there, probably the most Batman in this issue than in the other issues. It’s a cool wind down I think. I don’t know if I’d call it a wind down actually, it’s a wind up if anything else. It’s a really cool ending to this thing I think.
Issue #3 is out today!
