Quote:
Do you find it difficult when you stop working on a character, like Batman, to let other people take over?
Grant: Och no, I don't, honestly I don't really bother. It's not that proprietorial, once I've done my thing you know. I kind of – no, I was about to say I don't really read them after but I do actually, I always read them! (laughs) I can't help it, when I read Doom Patrol recently and they've brought back Danny the Street as Danny the Brick – aww c'mon Keith [Giffen]! (laughs)
But you are coming back to Batman...
Grant: Yeah, I mean again it's I want to do something a bit different because you know as I've said, comics in the last ten years have tried to imitate movies but movies have now got so good at doing comics that we just look like a poor cousin. So what I've been doing, I was talking to like Chris Burnham on Batman for the final season, these last 12 parts of the Batman Leviathan story is that he's gonna do the lead work you know, I'm just going to do it almost like Marvel style with a really detailed plot and just say break this down. So we were looking at all these, like Paul Gulacy's Master of Kung Fu, and Walt Simonson and things and thinking lets get back to multi-panel pages and slicing time and doing all the things that comics can do. Because we got so into just that wide screen, four panels a page look that it began to take over everything and all it was was an imitation of how it feels to sit in a movie theatre without the audiences heads in front of you.
So I kind of thought now's the time, particularly as the sales are diving and DC are making this great, this mad final flourish to see what happens, it's time to just let the artist take over again. The writers have been running the show for too long, it's ossified into a certain approach. I think it would be really nice to start seeing you know, like I said, things that only comics can do that movies can't do, like that double page spread that Chris Burnham did in Batman Incorporated where it's like across the entire world in slices but everything joins up and all the perspective lines match so it's like one giant image of multiple batmen doing the same thing. More of that stuff, and more of the stuff they were doing in Watchmen and you know, kind of just letting the artists go a bit wilder.
