[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.

One of the things that's great is that Batman is a character that lends himself to very personal stories.

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

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.

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.

[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.

"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].