It's one of the worst nightmare situations we could create for a young character, having the people who are supposed to believe in you keep telling you you're nothing.

"The Cursed Wheel," which Declan [Shalvey] is starting here, is the one constant. It's a story in the backups that will go through the whole year and be the one consistent narrative. It anchors the entire [book].

What Batman is saying is that, "I want to try something new that's more about this era and this moment." And I do think that it speaks to a modern take [as opposed] to a 90s take or a 2000s take being maybe the older program about having a sidekick.

With this particular series [The Cursed Wheel] I'm going farther in that direction than I've tried before in terms of the elasticity of the mythology.

[Duke] is the same way that Harper Row is a character who doesn't want to know who you are beneath the mask, and that makes her interesting. She'll show up and help Batman, but she never wants to know if he's Bruce Wayne.

It's one of the worst nightmare situations we could create for a young character, having the people who are supposed to believe in you keep telling you you're nothing.

Having that North Star for every story [about Batman] is really key for me. It allows me to go farther and farther off the reservation.