Jordie Bellaire knows how to tell a story with color.

"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].

You take the thing that is the worst thing that could have happened to you, the worst challenge in your life, and you turn it into fuel. You don't give up. And that's what Gotham is about.

A post-9/11, modern take being Batman training people to be the heroes they know they can be on their own.

If I know what something's about, and I can always have that touchstone, I feel like I can reach for really ridiculous humor and also go really dark in terms of the things I'm afraid of.

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?

[Bruce] sees a lot of himself in [Batman], you know? You could argue that something even worse than what happened to Bruce happened to [Duke's] parents, who are now Joker-ized*. They're not just gone or irretrievably lost. And I'm NOT curing them, so you can put that out there! There's no relief from that.