There's nothing comparative to Damien [the current Robin] or any of the other characters. I love those characters. And this isn't, "This is better than that." I think a couple of people misread what we had said in the first issue about that stuff.

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.

On this global stage, Superman is someone that we can all look up to and he's almost kind of ultimately American.

[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 got fascinated by the idea that our universe itself is comprised mostly of dark matter and dark energy. Things that we can't perceive at all, and we've only discovered that relatively recently. So it's almost as if our universe is the foam on the ocean of things that we can't see, or know, or perceive, and yet we feel the affects of those things right and left.

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.

I always, always got to be the last man standing.