Batman is the one you go to for answers and Clark Kent is the one you go to to really do the right thing. He stands as a shining example of what to do in any situation.

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.

- If I tell you, will you let met go? - You bet, partner. [...] - You promised! - Nope. I said "you bet." You did ... and you lost.

[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.

I was on Batman with "Superheavy" or "Zero Year" where there was a lot of fun and bombast, but it was also personal. [In All-Star], I wanted to take that to its complete extreme, like the end of the Earth extreme, where it's over-the-top humorous, yet at the same time really deeply about what I think is of this particular moment in time, at least for me. The things I'm terrified of and the things I'm hopeful about. My life is the page.

I really wanted to make sure that if we set Duke up, that he's set up the right way and he's his own hero for the right reasons.

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