Usually, a sequel to 1 of the biggest movies of all time would be carefully concocted in a Hollywood boardroom to maximize four-quadrant potential. John Jackson Miller wrote his continuation of Tim Burton’s mega-hit Batman over the last year in his memorabilia-filled office in central Wisconsin.
Miller has been reasoning about how to follow up Burton’s Batman since he reviewed the movie for the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s campus newspaper, The regular Beacon, in 1989. Burton’s shadowy, spooky take on Batman was a mega-hit that changed superhero storytelling — and the weirdo sequel, Batman Returns, blurred the definition of “comic book movie” even further. Miller was among those full activated by Batman (he went on to compose comics, then sidestepped into the planet of tie-in novels), but he always had questions about where the communicative of the 1989 movie would have actually gone if Burton and Returns author Daniel Waters hadn’t jumped so far into the future (and into a more elevated tone). What actually happened to Bruce Wayne after Joker’s attack? What happened to Gotham? Was the Joker even dead?
In Batman: Resurrection, a fresh officially licensed fresh out now, Miller answers his own long-burning questions. Bruce Wayne (the Michael Keaton one) is reeling from his fight with Jack Napier, aka Joker. Clayface has emerged. And as Miller explores the aftermath of the Joker’s terrifying reign over Gotham, new-but-familiar faces enter the Burtonverse. Polygon talked to Miller about picking up the mantle of a beloved property, the lengths he went to be actual to Burton’s imagination for the universe, and what it meant to compose a book that felt cinematic adequate to be an actual movie sequel.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Polygon: This is simply a high-stakes book for you — you love Batman! So how do you strip distant all the individual excitement to narrow in on a large story? How do you start?
John Jackson Miller: Well, I had questions about various game elements and reveals that happened in the movie. The movie is not perfect. The movie has a number of lines that are either blown or clipped, or that were put together in the editing process, that don’t precisely sync up right — in particular, 1 game component having to do with the events in the cathedral. I noticed them years ago, back in the beginning, and I [thought], There may be a springboard to do something, due to the fact that evidently this communicative is not going to end just like that. Bruce Wayne is not going to end just like that. For Gotham City, this has been a very traumatic experience. quite a few things have changed, quite a few people have been changed, quite a few lives have changed.
When I got the chance to compose this book — it came from my editor on Star Wars: The surviving Force, Tom Hoeler — he knew that I had seen the movie 12 times, and he said, “OK, what would you do?” I knew that I did not want to step on the toes of [Batman screenwriter] Sam Hamm and Joe Quinones [the artist who worked with Hamm on the Batman ’89 sequel comic book]. I knew that they were working out well in advance of Batman Returns, but […] we put hundreds of stories in between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, and The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. And there’s only 3 years between Star Wars and Empire. There’s even little time in between the next 2 films. And so I said I wanted to be right there, I wanted to hug the first movie.
We ended up going respective months after. We’re not specific, but I wanted to be in the shadows of the Joker. The possible we hold out is that Batman might not have seen what he thought he saw, that body on the pavement might not be the individual that we thought it was. I wanted to actually put that out there, due to the fact that Batman is very invested in that question. And I wanted to have Gotham City respond as well.
My favourite chapters are where we have everybody who was in town, people that we never saw, [comment]. What did Max Shrek think of the Joker? What did Selena Kyle think of the Joker? What did people associated with the Penguin think of the Joker? So setting the fresh erstwhile I did gave me the chance to draw upon these another players that were inactive alive and inactive available.
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
How did you approach writing the actual book? Were you channeling pulp-novel prose, or was it more like writing in a planet like Star Wars and Star Trek?
Well, the outline process is always the hardest part. I always compose truly long outlines, almost a 10th of the book sometimes. I’ve gone as long as 20,000 words with 1 book — not recommended. It’s not the way you should do it, but erstwhile you’re doing something which is simply a carefully calibrated puzzle where everything links together, you want to have this stuff thought out before you hit the page. And on Batman, by me having to go through an editor as well as a licenser, I gotta have what I plan to do more or little mapped out.
But the temper […] Michael [Uslan, rights holder on the 1989 Batman] and I had a conversation erstwhile we first met years ago. I wasn’t even writing comics at the time. He said that he felt the first movie was Batman in the ’30s. That was erstwhile Batman carried a gun. That was very noir. And then the second movie [Batman Returns] is the ’40s, and that’s erstwhile you begin to get the rogues’ gallery, and it’s inactive comparatively dark. And then he looked at Forever as the ’50s, where now we have Robin and it’s getting lighter. And the ’60s is Batman & Robin, that’s evidently erstwhile we get the campy feel of the tv show, and besides what’s going on in the comics themselves at the time.
This [conversation] was before Batman Begins. And so he says logically, you’d most likely anticipate the next 1 to be the Detective Batman from the ’70s, and possibly the ’80s would be the Dark Knight — but I mean, if you think about it, the Nolan films work that way. And I guess the [Robert] Pattinson movie works out to be what, Cataclysm or something like that.
That thought was there in my head in the beginning. I needed to stick with the notion of Batman in his very early career, Batman in the ’30s, early ’40s, Batman where the villains are reality-based. I made sure, especially with the supervillain character that we introduced in this book, that everything we did was based on the equivalent minute we saw on screen in terms of what technology was like, what reality was like.
I specifically did not want the shambling-mound Clayface of the comics, for example, due to the fact that that’s not something you would see in either of those first 2 movies. However, you do see the effects of Smilex changing somebody’s face radically. You see a variety of things that fit the Tim Burton macabre horror movie thing. And so I worked very hard to fundamentally imagine: What would it be like if Tim Burton did it? What would it be like if Michael Keaton is playing this? What would be in a movie like this if you actually had a Christmas ’89 movie come out, which is about as many months as it is between the movie and the events of this novel? evidently it wouldn’t be an all-out superhero movie with people reading people’s minds and freezing Gotham City or anything like that.
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
Clayface is at the center of the story, but there’s more lurking in the shadows — no spoilers! — that you draw from classical comics, which gives the book a pulp flavor.
It was interesting triangulating this thing, due to the fact that I was reluctant to add any component that didn’t be in the comics in ’89. I know that in the Batman ’89 comics, they’ve forged ahead. They’ve got Harley Quinn, they’ve got later characters. But my feeling was that Bane, for example, would never have fit into the aesthetic of Tim Burton-era movies, due to the fact that that character was from another age, not from the Golden Age Batman era. You look at the fashions in Gotham City as well, there’s a Gotham City architecture that does not look like 1989 does anywhere else. People are wearing fedoras and trench coats — they’re inactive dressing as if it’s the 1940s. The newsroom inactive looks like a newsroom in the 1940s. And yet the characters who are either main characters or on the edge of being main characters have more advanced technology.
Obviously Batman has the most advanced technology of all. Bruce Wayne has multiple tv screens and tape recorders and everything else like that. But look at the scenes with the press, they’ve got people with old-timey cameras, and Alexander Knox has a mini tape recorder. This is an artistic choice in the films to separate out the players from everybody else. And so I went with that. In the technology that you see in this movie — I call it a film, it’s not a film, it’s a fresh — I am always trying to set it in that hybrid ’40s-’80s planet and not go past it, either for anything that exists in the comics or anything that exists in real life.
To the point of that blurriness of it feeling like you wrote a movie, you are inactive writing for an actor, Michael Keaton. Are there any moments where you got to truly thin into his circumstantial take on Batman/Bruce Wayne?
The moments that we have with Bruce and Alfred are just… My editor said he didn’t want them to end. You’ve got this guy who is operating on five, six, 7 levels at the same time, and yet he’s besides clearly exhausted. He’s not unaware of how weird the planet has turned. He’s not unaware of how he’s had something to do with it. And we have Alfred here, who is just kind of riding the wave of everything that’s happening and trying to aid him put any position into everything.
I think it’s not incorrect to say that what goes incorrect for everybody else whose life is touched by weirdness in the Burton movies, whether it’s Penguin or Catwoman or even the Joker, is they don’t have an Alfred, they don’t have individual who can actually ground them, and erstwhile necessary, intervene, as in the case with [Alfred] bringing in Vicki Vale.
We have moments with her as well in this book. I didn’t want to show the first breakup. I wanted to show that the breakup is inactive ongoing, that it’s a rolling thing. And of course, as the book opens, she’s conveniently out of town and we find out that it’s not so convenient, that it is simply a choice on her part. But I wanted to have these moments where I hope that readers could visualize these scenes.
My occupation doing tie-in novels is to aid you imagine the movie that doesn’t exist, or pretend this is an adaptation of something that hasn’t been filmed. And to grow beyond it, to get into the moments that they would never have time to show you in a film. I think there’s this 1 scene with Bruce and Vicki basically, it becomes very clear that they can’t have an argument about them that doesn’t end up dragging in everything else in Gotham City and Batman and everything. And it’s just not something where he’s going to always be able to detach in a way that’s going to be satisfactory for her.
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
I don’t think I’m spoiling anything to say this won’t be your last Batman book. Batman: Resurrection is already set for a sequel, as teased in the final pages of the novel.
We’ve clearly set something up for the second act. And again, this was something which was intended in the beginning — that there would be the second act. And so all along in the writing, I was setting that up. In much the same way, the branches are there in the first movie for things to happen in the second or 3rd or fourth. And I think that it truly did aid me ground and focus the first book a lot better, due to the fact that I didn’t have this feeling that this could be the only 1 ever, that I’ve got to have all thought I’ve always had about Batman here. This allowed me to clarify and focus and winnow down.
And if you know who my main antagonist is in the second book, as you may have already guessed by reading the first book, you may have a notion of why it’s a lot more complicated this time to plot.
I don’t envy you at all having this task in front of you, but it besides sounds like a dream.
There are dream projects and then projects you never dream were even possible. And in all the interviews over the years where they’ve asked me what franchise would I like to work on or do a tie-in for, I never even asked for Tim Burton’s Batman, due to the fact that I didn’t think that would be possible, that you could subdivide the licence like that.
Batman ’89 and before that, Batman ’66 at DC paved the way for this being able to happen. And I’m thankful for that, and I’m thankful that they brought me in on it. And I truly do feel that the horizons on a task like this, as people now see that there’s another 1 coming, are a lot broader than for the typical comic book or superhero novel. That genre has always had kind of a ceiling. Those are books that tended to sale to fans of the comics. The young adult novels had a higher ceiling. This is simply a comics novel, but it is besides a movie tie-in, and I think that puts us in another orbit.
