What was Bruce Wayne like as an eighteen year old, before he took up the cowl? In January of 2018, Marie Liu released the second volume of the standalone DC Comics prose novels in the DC Icons anthology series, Batman: Nightwalker. Now, DC Comics is releasing graphic novel adaptations of the prose works, starting with the early days of the Caped Crusader himself. As luck would have it, the book released the day before New York Comic Con 2019.
Writer Stuart Moore and illustrator Chris Wildgoose emerged from the shadows to talk with us about the process of adapting this particular version of the Dark Knight’s early years.
This is the first adaptation of one of the novels in the four part DC Icons novel anthology. How do you describe the way you that the series influences this particular take on Bruce Wayne? And how closely did you two work with Marie Lu on this graphic novel? Was it direct collaboration, or did you mostly use the novel as a basis while writing it?
Stuart Moore: It wasn’t a very close collaboration with her. She had written the novel, and I think that pretty much was her part of it. She did give us feedback at the various stages, and she was very encouraging and helpful. That was a long question. But the part that stuck me is, this version of Batman, one of the things I think is interesting about it, is it’s about 18-year-old Bruce Wayne, and he’s actually a really nice kid. And I think it’s sort of a friendlier version of Batman than we’ve seen sometimes. And at first that I wondered about that. I wonder if that was a good idea. But I really got to like it. And I think it’s part of the reason people responding to it the way they are.
Chris Wildgoose: Key to that is his friends and his interactions with Diane and Harvey. It’s just got that softer side to it. Like there’s a bit in the car chase at the beginning, where Diane calls him up, and he just comes out of that detective mode. And he just chats to her, nicely in the middle of this like car chase, which is that softer side. And we get to give him a vulnerability in this as well. He doesn’t exactly know what he’s doing. And you see these moments where he’s like, “Oh, my God, I’m doing something that’s a bit over my head.” And you don’t see that later on when he’s Bruce Wayne and Batman. He’s always on top of it.
Stuart, how did you distinguish this 18-year-old Bruce Wayne from his eventual identity? You explained part of it, but there’s a lot of overlap. How was it working on him as a late teenager different considering how you did work on “Batman in Noir Alley?”
SM: A lot of the broad strokes were already laid down by Marie before before we came on. But a lot of it is what Chris just said. He’s still learning what he’s doing. He’s still perfecting his craft, but he’s also not quite as hard bitten as the older Batman that we know. He has lived through the trauma of the death of his parents and we see how that’s affected him. But he hasn’t quite seen the lowest sides of humanity the way you will as an older person. And actually where he’s sentenced to community service to work in Arkham Asylum is his first glimpse of some of the depth that humanity can fall to. So he’s a little more innocent. He’s not quite the constantly scowling grim-jawed avenger yet, and that’s an interesting thing. That’s an interesting point to examine him in.
Chris, how did you decide on this particular highly animated style for “Batman: Nightwalker,” particularly after your work on “Batgirl” and “Gotham Academy?”
CW: It’s just my style that I do. I do quite clean line stuff and my characters tend to have quite big eyes. It’s just the way I do it. I tried to make Gotham itself a little bit grimier and darker than I usually do in my backgrounds and stuff, but I definitely feel like the general backgrounds are darker than my “Batgirl” stuff, but that’s largely to do with it being black and white in itself. I don’t know. I don’t really make it consciously that clean. That’s just what I do.
Continued belowSW: Put more trash on the streets then you would do normally. It’s beautiful stuff. The sense of atmosphere you conveyed is amazing.
Though it is an adaptation of Marie Lu’s novel, are there any other inspirations for how you interpreted this take on early Batman myth, be it DC Comics stories or other outside unrelated media or history?
SM: I avoided watching Gotham actually because I didn’t want to be influenced by that. That treads on some of the same ground a little more remotely. That’s a tough one. Other than that, I don’t have a good answer for that.
CW: So I’m slightly the opposite whereas took some I took some reference from Gotham itself. Young Bruce Wayne looks the same in every medium. It’s hard to not make him look like the one from the TV show. Which he wasn’t based on that guy. He was based on… I forget the actor’s name but he was the main actor in Ender’s Game and…
Asa Butterfield?
CW: Yes, that’s it. That’s who I was aiming for. But Lucius Fox, he’s completely based off the the actor from Gotham. He was the one that sort of wanted him to look like because it’s younger Lucius Fox, like it is on the show.
Are there any elements of the prose novel you think feel are particularly enhanced through transition to a graphic novel?
SM: Elements of the novel that I think were enhanced. Chris did a lot of beautiful character work which this story absolutely required because, and this is partly because of its origins as a novel, it’s very dialogue heavy. And while there is action in it, there are also a lot of talking head sequences that hopefully we managed to keep lively and moving around. The one thing I did and, Chris, I don’t even know if you were aware of this, you probably were in on some of the early email trails, but the only major change I had to make in the plot was I had to get Bruce and the woman who becomes his foil and romantic interest in the same room earlier. In the novel, there were several scenes that took place with them talking through a door, and that worked absolutely fine in that medium. But in comics form, you would have murdered me, and you would have been right, if you had to just draw them on either side of the door. So So I did shift things around to make that happen a little sooner. That’s the only major shift I really had to make from the from the structure of the novel.
CW: Well, what he said.
“Batman: Nightwalker” is available wherever comic books are sold.
