The Empire of the Tiny Onion: Thinking Bat Thoughts

THINKING BAT THOUGHTS 10: A Farewell To Gotham City

James Tynion IV — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 23:30:17 GMT

So, the original plan here was for me to get into my last year on Batman while the last issues were hitting the stands… But it was a bit of a chaotic fall and early winter, and I couldn’t pull my thoughts together in time. BUT NOW IT’S TIME FOR ALL MY THOUGHTS!

Flash back to May 2020. Right when I was told that my Batman run was going to be continuing in…

THINKING BAT THOUGHTS 9: Making New Characters In a Superhero Universe

James Tynion IV — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 21:15:21 GMT

So… Earlier this week, two things happened. I turned in the lettering notes on my last Batman issue (Technically, this was the BATMAN ANNUAL 2021 with Ricardo Lopez Ortiz). And then I moved my BATMAN folder from my active projects folder to my inactive projects folder. Honestly… This was more emotionally charged than I would have expected. I know you all have a month’s worth of Batbooks left from me to read, but as of this moment, I can’t really honestly say “I am the writer of Batman.” Now it’s “I was the writer of Batman.”

THINKING BAT THOUGHTS 8: How To Sell A Batman Comic

James Tynion IV — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 14:30:03 GMT

My BATMAN run launched with Issue #86 at the start of January to decent sales. There was a modest uptick from #85, but only a very small one. It was fine.

Let me give you a piece of advice if you’re launching a comic book series… There are probably no worse months to do it than in December or January. In December, retailers are focused on holiday shopper…

THINKING BAT THOUGHTS 7: Catching The Lightning

James Tynion IV — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 14:30:53 GMT

So, to this point the primary focus of “Thinking Bat Thoughts” has been a kind of day to day progression of the tumultuous early days while I developed my Batman run. And sure, there was a kind of cascading effect from those early days for the rest of my run… I was always a few steps behind the eight ball with the Batman schedule and racing to get thing…

THINKING BAT THOUGHTS 6: Going To War

James Tynion IV — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 16:38:50 GMT

Okay, so… It’s November 2019. Tony Daniel is wrapping the first issue of my Batman run, which we are beginning to understand is going to be his last given the change of the series from a monthly to a twice monthly title. Guillem March is hard at work on the second issue. I have turned in a number of outlines in, but I am not getting the feedback I need to nail down the pieces for the first arc on the book. But the trouble was, all eyes internally at DC were focused on building what would come on the other side of my run, and trying to get their attention to shift where we needed it was incredibly difficult.

THINKING BAT THOUGHTS 5: Designing The Designer

James Tynion IV — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 17:10:47 GMT

So, where we left things last, I had turned in my first pitch document. It was rough around the edges, but the big ideas were exciting to me and I was feeling good about it.

Tony Daniel had started drawing the first issue, and I was thinking about the future. My primary focus was going to be bringing this era of Batman to a close to get ready for the 5G…

THINKING BAT THOUGHTS 4: Batman Rebuild

James Tynion IV — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 18:30:29 GMT

I think this next section requires a bit of context, because you need to understand something crucial about writing superhero comics.

Pitching in corporate comics is a bartering process.

Sure, you might get to a point in your career where that’s not so much the case anymore, but when you’re working on a major title like BATMAN, you come into that proces…

THINKING BAT THOUGHTS 3: The Death of the Joker

James Tynion IV — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 20:30:00 GMT

Okay… So. It’s the start of the summer of 2019, and everyone is buzzing about something that may or may not be called 5G.

When you give a bunch of creative people a small part of a truth without a lot of facts, they’re going to start coming up with their own answers, and I was no different. I had a version of 5G that lived in my head that basically repr…

THINKING BAT THOUGHTS 2: The Five Eras of Batman Continuity

James Tynion IV — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 15:19:14 GMT

When I got the job writing back-up stories for the Snyder/Capullo Batman run, I spent a lot of time thinking about the gig as one part apprenticeship, one part graduate program. I remember this was right around the time that the Ira Glass quote about “The Gap” was floating around the internet a lot, and there was a lot of discussion saying that it takes…

THINKING BAT THOUGHTS 1: Batman Begins

James Tynion IV — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 15:57:25 GMT

I still remember the moment it actually hit me that I was actually going to be a comic book writer.

I was 23 years old, just a year and half out of college, working as a copywriter for a small digital ad agency in Manhattan, when I got a message from my friend and mentor Scott Snyder asking if I could talk on the phone. I was a smoker then, so I excused…