BATMAN #41
Written by SCOTT SNYDER
Art by GREG CAPULLO and DANNY MIKI
Cover by GREG CAPULLO
On sale JUNE 10 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T

The all-new Batman makes his debut! Who is he, and what happens next? Find out here as a new era begins in Gotham City!

Newsarama: Scott, we’ve heard a lot about the three big ongoing things being the Darkseid War in Justice League, plus a “new status quo” in Batman and Superman. So what is this new status quo that we’ve never seen in 75 years of Batman?

Snyder: Well, it’s true that you’ve never seen it. It’s definitely the wackiest thing we’ve every tried. It’s basically the story where I thought, “If I ever do a story out of continuity, I’d love to do this. But there’s no way I can change the mythology to a degree that I could get to this story.” But…here we are. And the thing I love is that it will allow me to explore the characters from angles that are entirely new. There are two characters the story really focuses on, and they’re both in positions where radical, radical changes affect their status quo. And this will allow me to explore the Bat-world in really, really vibrant perspectives.

I’m going into, I guess, my sixth year in Gotham, and things have been so much fun, especially in the last year with [Editor] Mark [Doyle]. And DC is now so progressive with their line and the changes in June that I really feel that right now, it’s the time for us to try something pretty unconventional and risky with the book, because otherwise, we just fall back on playing it safe. This is us saying, “We’re just getting started, and it’s Batman #1.” I promise you, if you get to the end of our 8-page Free Comic Book Day thing and if you don’t think it’s the craziest thing we’ve ever tried…well, I can’t give you your money back because it’s free, but I promise it is unequivocally the craziest thing we’ve ever tried. Period. It just is.

Nrama: And that’s a totally safe bet to make when it’s free!

Snyder: Yeah, but think about this: We’re now stuck with it for the status going forward. We’ll see how it works.

Nrama: I get that you don’t want to say, “Here’s the master plan,” but you mention two characters. Can we safely assume that one of these two characters is Bruce Wayne?

Snyder: I don’t want to say. [Laughs] I don’t want to say! I know this is a new level of coy, but I will say that the mythology will be radically reinterpreted and stretched in a different way. [2014’s] “Endgame” was designed to be my last story on Batman, but if I stayed after “Endgame,” it needed to be transformative, where everything was put aside and reinvented. It’s going to be a new cast. I can say we’re going to bring in characters you haven’t seen in Batman before. We’re also going to play a lot with a lot of the other books—characters from We Are Robin and Batgirl are in the book. You’re going to see Harper and Cullen, characters we’ve created. And there will be a really different feel to it. We actually toyed with the idea of just calling it “All-New Batman” for a while, because it is that different. I can also tell you it’s going to be all-new villains. I want to go back to the spirit we had when we were creating Court of Owls, where there’s new villains, new threats, new cast.

Nrama: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but watch me do it anyway: Is what you’re talking about a situation of “People will either love this or hate this?”

Snyder: Oh, yeah. [Laughs] Yeah. But I’ve always been that way with this! Look, when we announced we were doing [the 2013-2014] “Zero Year,” nobody was dying for an 11-issue long origin story. I got a lot of angry mail. Same thing when we did Joker without his face, when we introduced a brother to Batman on reinterpreted James Gordon Jr. I got a lot of angry hate stuff about that, about how dark it made Jim Gordon, about how we ruined “Year One,” and so on. So I’ve never been afraid of controversy. But I really believe that the audience now is part of a changing zeitgeist. Five or six years ago, they were more about great fanboy moments and getting re-combinations of classic team-ups. And I love a lot of those stories, and there should be a place for those stories. But I think our audience now, on all the Bat-books, is receptive to creators coming in and doing their own work in a way that’s true to the core of the characters, but still visionary, singular or passionate in ways that are progressive or unconventional.

Right, and that new Batman is their child. Because of course male Kryptonians can procreate, carry a baby, and give birth.

I wonder who else will get new costumes.

the hashtag #changethecover drew dozens of posts on Twitter and Tumblr asking DC to not release the variant.