Scott Snyder Sheds Light on Batman's Night of the Owls

A few days ago, DC Comics revealed that both Batman and Detective Comics would start featuring back-up tales as of issue #8. For Batman proper, writer Scott Snyder would be taking advantage of these extra pages to delve a little deeper into the ongoing mystery of his year-long Batman epic, along with the help of his American Vampire cohort, Rafael Albuquerque. In addition, there's a Bat-family crossover coming – deemed "Night of the Owls" – and as Snyder confirms in this interview, it's going to be pretty huge.

We talked with Snyder about exploring the history of the Owls, Gotham, and what "Night of the Owls" will mean for the rest of the Bat-books.

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IGN Comics: Is the content of the new backup story something that you would've incorporated into the primary Batman story you've been telling, or was the material specifically formed for the new backup?

Scott Snyder: Well, I guess it's a little bit of both. It was stories that I definitely wanted to get to tell, so if I could've done it in Batman, I would've done it in Batman. There were stories I had in mind maybe for an annual or for a stand-alone, if we wanted to do one after the Court of Owls in some way. It was material that had been in my mind for a while that I was worried I wouldn't get to, so I'm very excited to have the forum to tell it.

I feel like there is so much potential in them [back-ups] that I get really excited to use them as a different sort of format. So even though these stories are things that I probably would've tried to tell in the feature at some point if I didn't have the back-ups, the idea of doing them in back-ups opens up a whole new opportunity to tell underbelly secrets of what you're seeing in the actual feature in the same issue. I've tried to re-tailor them to correlate with issue that they come out in, kind of like I did with Detective, so they inform the things you're seeing in the feature but also tell their own story.

IGN: Like you mentioned, and I don't know if people that are only reading Black Mirror in hardcover realize this, but the Gordon feature started as a back-up.

Snyder: Yeah, exactly.

IGN: DC has experimented with this before. Was there ever a chance that the back-up feature in Batman would be something other than a continuation of your story, or was it always intended as an expansion of the main narrative?

Snyder: They told us that they were going to be including some back-ups in the back of books like Batman and Detective, and they said, "We know you've got a lot of work and we can have someone else do a story and include it." My feeling was that I'm so excited about the story we're telling and I have this other material in mind, so let's do it in here ourselves. Let's just make the book even bigger and, I think, better for having it in there. But make it one big singular story.

So there was an opportunity there to get out of doing them [laughs] but I didn't want to. I didn't feel like we'd be stretching the story at all to have these back-ups be focused on the same material that's in the feature.



IGN: So you're working with a co-writer on this along with your American Vampire co-creator, Rafael Albuquerque. When did you find out that Rafael would be coming on board?

Snyder: Really recently. [laughs] I had to figure out the schedule with him for American Vampire and we just lucked out. What happened was, he takes a couple of issues off between the big arcs to do his own thing or recharge his batteries. So the announcements of the back-ups at DC internally just happened to coincide with our issues #26 and #27 of American Vampire that are going to be done by a new artist that I'm really excited about. So Rafael happened to have this time off – right now and the month coming up.

When I figured out that I'd be able to do them and began writing them with my friend, I called Rafael up – we talk all the time anyway about American Vampire, so I talk to him at least a few times a week – so I said, "Listen, there's an opportunity to do this, it happens to fall within your schedule, but do you think you can do it?" He was all gung-ho about it, so it just came together really quickly in the last couple of weeks.

IGN: That's awesome. Who are you co-writing with?

Snyder: I'm co-writing with a rising star, a really new writer to everybody named James Tynion IV. He's someone I met when I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence. I was teaching fiction and now I teach comics there, and he was someone whose stuff I really enjoyed from the beginning. He kept up with me afterwards when I got into comics and was sending me scripts and stories and he began writing for other publications in journalism/commentator mode.

So when it came down to the idea of doing the back-ups, for me it really wasn't something I wanted to give to someone else at all and certainly not something I wanted to relinquish any creative hand in. But at the same time, I did want to come in and make it so that it maybe wasn't too air tight and singular.

I like being able to work with other people, like I do with Scott Tuft on Severed, or like I did on Gates of Gotham, when I was just "story by" with Kyle Higgins and Ryan Parrott and Trevor McCarthy. Batman itself is so intensely my story about what I think is exciting about Batman and the villain that I think is really scary to him, and I'm in my head so much with that story; it's very personal. And so with the back-up, I thought it would be a breath of fresh air and it would help me evolve as a writer, to bring someone else in to co-write. That's the way it's been, on both Gates of Gotham and Severed, was that I learned a lot by seeing someone else's style come out on the page alongside mine.

On the other hand, I felt like – probably more importantly in the spirit of the 52 and the sense that DC is following an initiative to be progressive and try new things – it makes sense to give a new person a chance, you know? To give someone that hasn't done a lot of stuff a chance with a big stage and a spotlight and be able to make it so they're not performing without a net entirely, so that you can write with them, but also give them a chance to find their voice and to get their shot. It's exciting on all of those fronts to be working with both him and Rafael.


IGN: Can you talk a little bit about the actual back-up and how it ties to the Court of Owls story that you've been telling?

Snyder: The first four are going to tie to that stuff. It'll be every back-up that comes out during that storyline, which runs 11 issues. So #8-11 will all be by Rafael and be co-written with James and will be about different aspects of the Court of Owls. The first one, issue #8, is the only one that takes place in the present that is very much a continuation of the story you're seeing in the feature.

It'll really show you the scope of the attacks that the Court of Owls is launching against both Gotham and the Bat-family. The back-up will really be the place where you see the breadth of their strike. It'll be a lot of fun in that way, and you'll see Rafael get to draw everything from Batman in a big way. I'm very excited to get to see him use some of the stuff that Greg's designed and also some of the classic stuff and be able to explode on the book.



And from #9-11, we're going to go back into the past of the Court of Owls and tell a story I've been really wanting to tell for a while, which is their history with the Wayne family. And, accordingly, their history with the Pennyworth family. It's really a story about how the Waynes came into conflict with the Court, when Bruce was very young. It takes place about 30 years ago when Jarvis, Alfred's father, is the caretaker for the Manor. The story is framed by him desperately trying to explain why he thinks the entire house is doomed and why he needs to get out before he dies. It's called "The Fall of the House of Wayne," and it will have big revelations about the Wayne's relationship to the Court and to Gotham itself.

I'm excited; it's fun to tell a story that takes place in deep history and have it coincide with a story where, at that point in our story, the fireworks are all going off in a really big way. It will be fun to have a story that is a good counterpoint to that, which is much more a gothic mystery in the past. It really digs deep into the history and emotional material that's behind the whole thing; that fuels the whole story.

And just as a side note really quick, I know that this is a mystery that's been building for a long time in Batman. There's been a lot of the Court leading Batman foreword and Batman finding clues that misdirect him and take him to new places, but as was true with Black Mirror or any long arc of American Vampire, the fun is you build slowly and then you try and pay off as big as you can because you've set all the stuff up. And with the coming issue, issue #5, everything begins to explode. It will be a big, big, dark, fun run from #5 to #11. It won't let up.

Head to Page 2 to find out what books the coming Batman crossover will hit!