Life in Spandex: thedeadairchannel017

The writer Alex Paknadel likes to insist to me that Gotham City is Chicago. I tell him he's wrong, that it's bloody called Gotham, and Gotham does and always has meant bloody New York.

It's a nickname born of Gotham in England, a village immortalized by the poem "Three Wise Men of Gotham." The titular wise men are not actually wise, of course. They are madmen. Dubbing the city Gotham was calling it a city of the mad, and anyone who's ridden the E Train at night would probably concede that's fair enough. I incorporated the poem into Arkham City: The Order of the World, my miniseries with DaNi which explored the city through the eyes of asylum escapees.

Alex and I are both right, of course. It's a magical city that becomes a different tool in different hands. It can and should mean different things to different writers. I tend to want to write about New York.

This sort of statement sparks backlash from the most literal of readers. "But New York exists in the DCU. The Titans are based there. It's even had its own, separate Batman. Has Watters even ever read a single comic ever." To which I say silence, imaginary-strawman-overly-literal reader I just made up.

Of course it's not the real New York. It's a couldabeen mirror of the city, one in which municipal fears and boogeymen are writ flesh and blood. Here is the place in which urban decay turns men into sewer crocodiles and poverty drives the desperate into crime and then into acid vats, to emerge bleached bone-white with a new appetite for acid-spitting novelty lapel flowers.

Gotham haunts New York. When portrayed right, it feels like a true and honest representation of the city. That's what keeps us going back there. What makes it one of the greatest backdrops in fiction.

I find it interesting that when certain books of mine through DC have been announced-Arkham City, Sword of Azrael, etc- there's a small contingent who grumble about "too many bat books." Neither were bat books. They were Gotham books (tentatively so in Azrael's case, which primarily took place in Europe, though Nikola and I started our Azrael journey with a very Gotham story,) and Gotham is a city where every myth of cities is true. He who is tired of Gotham is tired of life, or at least of life in spandex.

I think I've kept forgetting to mention this here: with Skybound, I'm returning to GI Joe very briefly for one of their Silent Missions issues. These are very much artist led but DaNi asked me to script her issue, and I take every opportunity I can to work with DaNi. This is 20 silent pages of Jinx on mission, which take place in real time. A page a second. Our Coffin Bound compatriot Brad Simpson joins us on colors, and definitely dragged some tools from that tool box to make this story sing. Out April 9th.

I've just agreed to another single issue- a chapter in an anthology for one of my favourite storytelling machines of all time. I wrapped issue 11 of Batman: Dark Patterns last week, meaning I have one more to write next month. I'll admit, I've been slow with these last few issues as it's sad for this project to come to an end, but I can't tarry too much since Hayden is an artistic behemoth who's always right on my heels despite drawing two books a month. They must be stopped, but I suspect they can't be.

We've just revealed the preview pages to next week's issue 4, which starts the second story- a whole new case for Batman and Gordon- so if you missed out on the first few issues, you could pretty much treat this as a new #1.

The villain of the arc has already been shown off in the solicits for the arc. Where we invented the Wound Man from scratch for the first case of Batman: Dark Patterns, we thought it would be good to go with a classic for the second:

But we can comfortably promise this is Scarface as you've never seen him before.

Also in solicits: Nightwing 126. This is the second chapter of two that we somehow wrangled Francesco Francavilla into drawing. I jump to attention every time a page of this appears in my inbox. This is a truly beautiful two-parter:

As this Nightwing run has developed it's begun to evolve as far as subgenre is concerned. Our first six issue arc has been close to what I'd think of as a 'classic' Nightwing arc- the kind of Bludhaven story that's been told since the character began having solo adventures in the 90s. The second short two issue arc is very much a noir tale, going deep into that side of the character's roots. The issues following that? Well, you'll have to wait and see, at least for the solicits, but it's very much something different again. We are dealing with one of the oldest characters in superhero comics, and I can't help but do some archaeology on him as I add to his story's tapestry. Half way through writing this newsletter I learned it was the 85th anniversary of the character's first appearance this week, which feels serendipitous with the issue I'm currently working on. Happy Birthday, Dick Grayson.

Last week I finished reading The Great When, the latest book by novelist and recovering comicker Alan Moore.

I found it an interesting read; portal fiction in a post-war setting with flair and characters as entertaining and rounded as one would expect from Moore. The plot itself is expertly crafted- it very much ticks through story like clockwork, everything falling into place exactly where it's supposed to. Though I almost miss a certain roughness- an ambulatory strangeness- you can find in most of his work, from V for Vendetta to Jerusalem. That sense of "I'm interested in this right now, so you're going to stare at it with me for a bit and I'm going to make it interesting to you too" is cut away in favour of a briskness. The book doesn't really stop moving.

That's not to say there isn't plenty of flavour in the stew. Historical figures such as Austin Osman Spare show up as major characters, and the sequences inside titular Great When crackle with evocative imagery. But this does feel like Moore abandoning a form of Modernism he's been trying to capture- in places Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem felt like love letters to James Joyce- to create a more straightforward fantasy novel. But then again, those weren't always the most successful parts of his work to me. This is apparently book 1 of 5; there's a good chance this is a solid foundation on which something grander will be built, which is impossible to see now, but will feel inevitable by the sequence's end. I enjoyed this very much.

Having devoured a couple of crime novels before this, I'm currently shifting to non-fiction.

Shifting back and forth between two scripts next week for two things that are unannounced, but are well underway as far as production is concerned. Also mulling over forthcoming Nightwing arcs as the organism that is the DC universe stirs slightly underfoot.

Right now things are very much ticking along in terms of workload; I'm managing a script a week almost exactly, and projects are seeming to flow into each other serendipitously. It can be hard to know exactly when you might be overcommitting yourself in this job. The time from agreeing to a gig to actually getting the greenlight to start scripting can be anywhere between 24 hours to six months in my experience, so you're working with guesstimates. But it's looking like one or two projects are about ready to get underway just as the bulk of my side of the work on Dark Patterns is finishing.

It always works out like that, except for all those bloody times it doesn't. I read an article this week about a corpse found with his brain turned to glass after being caught in the eruption of Mt Vesuvius, and am starting to feel like I understand how that would feel.

Thank God it's Friday, and all that.

This has been thedeadairchannel. An evocation from the desk of Dan Watters. Please do subscribe.