This week, the Bat Family changes forever.
At least that’s sort of the whole vibe with Gotham Knights, the new Warner Bros. Interactive game in which, after Batman’s seemingly perished, Nightwing, Batgirl, Robin, and Red Hood team up to defend Gotham City against the Court of Owls.
But what happens before the end?
That’s actually the purview of Batman: Gotham Knights – Gilded City. Written by Evan Narcisse (who consulted on the game’s story), and with art from Abel, the story supposedly follows Batman’s final mission. In it, he deals with a virus that turns Gotham residents into “rabid, yellow-irised maniacs.” At the same time, though, the story shifts back-and-forth to 1847, with a brand-new vigilante named Runaway contending with a similar “mystery infection.” Whether you plan on playing Gotham Knights or not, it’s a great story that explores the mythos of Batman as well as the larger history of power and class struggle at Gotham’s core.
Before issue #1 (of the six-part series) drops October 25, we caught up with Narcisse earlier this week via Zoom. Among other topics and tidbits, we talked about the larger story, the core themes, balancing two timelines, his depiction of Batman, and how the story ties into the game proper.
AIPT: What’s the elevator pitch for Gilded City? And how does it lead directly into Gotham Knights?
Evan Narcisse: I really haven’t thought about it in this context before.
But I guess I would say that a mysterious new virus is sweeping across Gotham City, causing its citizens to act on previously-suppressed urges and dropping the city into chaos. Batman and his allies are trying to fight this virus, and unbeknownst to them, a mysterious vigilante in the 19th century-era of Gotham City had fought a precursor to the virus. Gilded City tells how those two stories are linked, and it shows Batman and his last big case before his untimely death at the beginning of Gotham Knights.
I guess that’d be a long elevator.
AIPT: Likely one from the Belfry.
What was the inspiration for the dueling timelines? And do they stand alone or inform one another?
EN: That was all my decision, knowing that the game was centering on the Court of Owls as the main antagonists for the Orphans. And knowing that made me want to explore the idea that the Court of Owls has been the secret power underneath Gotham almost since its inception. And they’re a villainous contingent with a historical element, and so I just want to lean into the development of Gotham City and what role the Court may have played in it.
That, and the kind of socio-economic tumult that Gotham City’s often portrayed in. Gotham is one of those cities, when you’re a Batman fan, or just a comic fan in general, you ask why do people live there? I wanted to take a look at that, and maybe explore why Gotham was so bad and the ultimate consequences of that deep-rooted rot in Gotham City.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
On the face of it, the Golden Iris virus is just like a lark, right? It’s showing people going crazy because of their desires for graphics cards or high-end handbags or whatever. But really, it’s these mechanisms of economic displacement and, frankly, capitalism run amok. The founding members or founding families of the Court of Owls are the most powerful families in Gotham. So them scheming to loose a virus — that one of the consequences is people go wild for expensive stuff that’s out of their reach — I just want to thread that through the story and pin it on the Court. Because they’re the ones that stand to profit the most from chaos in Gotham City.
I think one of the things that’s really interesting about the members of the Court of Owls, and I think Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo peg this from the outset, is that Batman is one of the elites, but his family chose not to align themselves with the Court. So I think that’s one of the reasons the dual time period setup really intrigued me: showing historically how Gotham has been a place that seemingly beckons people who are looking for a new start, but also has a villainous mechanism in place that seeks to disenfranchise those people and exploit them.
AIPT: I think that whole bit about Gotham is what I really picked up on. Your story, like all good Batman-centric stories, treats Gotham as its own character.
Is it odd writing a comic toward a video game? Do you feel there’s more challenges or opportunities? Do you hope this stands out as just a great comic series that happens to also be connected to a video game?
EN: Well, I definitely hope it’s the latter. I definitely hope people think it’s a good, maybe even great, series that’s connected to the game.
I consulted on the game in my capacity as a narrative design consultant. And that gave me the advantage of knowing the full scope of the story that the people at Warner Brothers Montreal were trying to tell with the Batman Family. So that did present some unique challenges because knowing so many interactions the characters are going to have I’d then have to figure out what kind of scenes to do. I already knew what kind of scenes that Dick and Jason would share, for example, or Babs and Tim, or any other combinations of the characters. So it kind of forced me to find new interactions and new ways to highlight the character dynamics rather than how they were going to be established in the game. So part of it was like, ‘OK, I can provide some runway for the scenes in the interactions that I know are going to happen in the game.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
And part of what I also like is that it lets me find my own character dynamics that I can put in here that I know they’re not going to necessarily get to in the game. There’s a scene between Batman and Nightwing in issue #2 that I knew I would have space to play with, because that territory wasn’t really covered that hard in the game.
AIPT: I obviously haven’t’ played, but from what I’ve seen there’s lots of things going on. Like, tension and butting heads between Dick and Jason.
EN: Look, I’m not going to act like I’m reinventing the wheel here. This version of the Bat Family has been around for 30-some-odd years. We’ve seen Jason and Dick argue before and we’ve seen Babs and Dick flirt and and even their romantic relationship, depending on when you started reading Batman comic. So I wanted to invoke some of that stuff, but also find some new things to play around with.
There’s a scene in one of the latter issues where Tim expresses a little bit of youngest child angst. He says, ‘Oh, I thought I was the first one Bruce did that with,’ but it turns out he wasn’t. So stuff like that — very much thinking about when you and your family members bicker or argue, what do you argue about? Like, does daddy love? So some of it is that in this game and in this series. But throughout the Bat Family mythos, there’s this thread of who does Bruce really see as the inheritor of his mantle?
That, of course, is an explicit theme in the game. What I wanted to do in the series was to say, at this point in time when the comic series is happening, none of them are even really thinking about that. They’re just trying to find their own way to navigate around Bruce as a mentor and a father figure and deal with each other who have this well-meaning but definitely weird and emotionally cut-off person that they’ve centered their heroic careers around.
AIPT: And speaking of his emotional detachment, how would you characterize your depiction? And does it make it more fun or interesting that you’re talking about his “final” mission?
EN: I think this is a Bruce Wayne and a Batman who views the heroic careers of his protégé as an accomplishment, but he is still hard-headed about how he does things. Like, the level of emotional access and awareness he permits himself to express internally and externally. So he’s proud of them, but it’s hard for him to say that. And there is some estrangement.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
Batman’s too smart a person to not acknowledge his culpability, and the tension between him and his kids. (Let’s call them kids as shorthand.) So he’s too smart not to know that, but he’s wired in such a way that it’s hard to get at it. Like, Dick leaving Gotham for Bludhaven is very much a consequence of that. In the mainline continuity and in this one, too, right. It’s like, ‘You can’t play by my rules, you’re out.’ But he also knows that my rules are kind of messed up.
So that’s the kind of Bruce I was trying to write here. And I will say, I think there are some moments of outright emotional expression in this comic that, to me, feel like a bit of a throwback. I grew up reading Batman in the ’70s and ’80s. Really before this latter day dogma about who he is and how he expresses himself. So you read those old comics by Denny O’Neil and Mike Barr, and Batman’s laughing or even crying when he gets emotional. I think he had a very broad emotional and expressive range back in the day — especially as it pertains to the Bat Family. That’s the place for Bruce to actually give a damn about other people but with the restraints of his own psychology pushing against that.
But if you want a Batman who emotes, I think that Bat Family stories are the best place to do it.
AIPT: And speaking of the Bat Family, you’re introducing a new character, the vigilante Runaway. What can you tell us about him (without spoiling too much, of course)?
EN: I think the main thing for me was thinking about the vigilante in 19th Century Gotham City — again talking about the Court of Owls and the kind of corruption and graft that they dealt in — a character whose mandate is to oppose that. Batman is rich, and he punches from the top down — which is not to say that he’s not justified in doing so, at least within the fictional context of his stories.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
But I wanted a hero who punched from the bottom up. Someone who was a member of the downtrodden. Someone who cares about the people that society cast aside, or in the case of the first action scene in which we see the Runaway, the people who were deemed property back in the day. I wanted a character who embodies that kind of interpretation of justice. So I had a lot of fun coming up with the character. Abel took the raw sketch that I drew and made it sing. I hope people liked the character. I would love to be able to tell more stories with Runaway sometime in the future.
AIPT: With Runaway, I don’t want to say this early he’s the opposite of Batman. However, he does feel like a different answer to the same kind of question, if that makes sense.
EN: Yeah, very much so. That was intentional. I did want Runaway to be kind of oppositional to Batman in some of the elements of the character recipe.
So this is not somebody who has a fancy secret headquarters, or whatever the 19th century version of that would be. Runaway is a character that has to get by on their wits and some weapons but not a whole suite of themed things and paraphernalia. This character uses a machete not a sword because that’s the tools that they have access to. And so little details like that were very much intended to position Runaway in a different part of the socio-economic strata from Batman.
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