Grant Morrison on the Dynamic of the Duo

Last month Kevin Smith’s Fat Man on Batman podcast featured a three-part conversation with Grant Morrison as he retires from scripting Batman, Incorporated. Most of the discussion appears in episodes #26 and #27, with five minutes about the imminent death of Damian Wayne moved to the start of #28 to avoid spoilers in a story that DC Comics eagerly spoiled.

About 31:30 into the second installment, Morrison once again explains his approach to the Batman mythos, deciding that every era of stories happened (in some form) to Bruce Wayne:

The feral young Batman from 1938 [sic] who’s out there with guns in his hands, and is fighting vampires and crooks, and I thought, well, imagine that’s Batman when he’s twenty. And then he meets this kid when he’s late twenty-one, and the kid’s this little working-class circus kid, who’s totally cocky, and this introverted young-Norman-Bates Batman is suddenly, “Wait a minute, this is the kid that died in me…this is everything I wanted to be.” And the two become friends, and it’s no creepy, no way, it’s just like, “He’s my best friend, my brother, and he’s everything I wish I could be,” and the kid’s looking at him and saying, “He’s everything I wish I could be.”

I had to transcribe and share that passage.

If you download the whole series, don’t miss the exchange at the end of #27 (starting at 55:50) about Morrison’s accent. Smith admits that he worried about being able to understand the interview. Morrison responds by demonstrating “the hard-core killer Glasgow accent.” Try it at home!