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.

The hope that they have legs. That's the biggest fear you always have creating new people. You love them, but then they kind of dissipate. Sometimes you don't get to write them as much as you'd like, like me and Harper Row.

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.

Duke is a character who believes that heroism and the Robin mantle can exist entirely separate from Batman himself.

Beware The Court of Owls, that watches all the time, ruling Gotham from a shadowed perch, behind granite and lime. They watch you at your hearth, they watch you in your bed speak not a whispered word of them or they'll send the Talon for your head.

This one's like that because it's about these things that I think weigh heavily on me in terms of my own failings and the things that I worry about and my personal demons. Is the sum of my personal demons greater than the things that I like about myself? Is this moment - because it's a particulary high tension, scary moment for all of us in terms of the global climate - going to bring out the best or the worst in us?

[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.