Scott Snyder talks with CBR about his epic start to Batman and what’s in store for fan. Also within the article an exclusive look at the cover to Batman #5:

CBR News: This first issue has a ton of stuff going on: you open up in Arkham Asylum with all his main villains, we see the upper crust rich Bruce Wayne world and we get the huge mystery at the end. Was this first issue your way of trying to hit every single aspect of the Batman mythos to set the stage for new readers?

Scott Snyder: Yeah, one part of it was just to try and celebrate all of the things about Batman, to introduce new readers to all the things I personally love about him from his rogues gallery to the mansion to Alfred to the Bat Cave to the cool cars and tech! It is meant to be a celebration of all things Batman, but it’s also hopefully organic to the story. It begins in this place where Bruce is feeling really confident about being back from some of the events of “Batman Incorporated,” which you don’t have to have read to hop on, but feeling that he’s back in Gotham and tougher than ever and has the city locked down as the city of the Bat, the city of Batman. He’s just feeling great about his place in the city as its protector. We wanted that to be the starting point emotionally for him because it is going to be a big story about breaking him down in terms of undermining the sense he has that he knows Gotham better than anybody and that Gotham is his oldest friend. We wanted to undermine that and have the city suddenly seem, or little by little at least, seem like a stranger and an enemy.

That sort of goes along with that speech Harvey Bullock gives about Bruce Wayne not understanding Gotham.

Yeah, that’s what that was supposed to do, it really is meant to be this story about how Bruce considers the city his ally and has almost become comfortable there. But with Gotham, the minute you become comfortable is when it turns on you and bares its teeth. That is Harvey kind of articulating one of the main themes of the entire run.

In your run on “Detective Comics” you had the Black Mirror idea, with Dick taking on newer, vicious villains and reflecting back his fears. Is that something you are also playing with here, or because you’re bringing in a secret society that predates Batman and things from Gotham’s past, is this less of a Black Mirror and more symbols clashing in Gotham?

I guess it’s a bit of both in that, to me, what Gotham does is it really challenges its heroes by going for the jugular and bringing their worst fears to life. For Dick that meant changing itself so that it could show him it wasn’t Bruce’s Gotham anymore, it was going to be a Gotham populated with villains and enemies that spoke to his particular weaknesses: his sense of compassion and his empathy and all the things that are part of his skill set and his strengths as a character.

So for Bruce I wanted to do something similar. I think that’s what Gotham always does for its heroes; it challenges them by bringing their greatest fears to life. For Bruce, I think one of the fears I’m really interested in is this sense of competence he has. What Gotham does is try to convince you that the things you consider your great strengths as a hero are your weaknesses, your weak spots. For Bruce that really is his confidence and his sense of knowledge and wisdom about the city, his confidence as its protector. So it is doing something similar to him, in an abstract way, that it did to Dick in that it’s trying to show him that this thing he considers a great asset, his sense of capability and his familiarity with the city, is actually just an illusion. The city is something that is 400 years old. Even if he’s been Batman for a number of years and he knows the city better than anybody, his whole time as its protector or guardian in his mind is one tiny slice of this long chronology and long history this city has. So what if there is a symbol and what if there is an organization that’s been there and laid claim to the city long before the Bat and is sort of a warring symbol that’s built into the architecture: the Owl and the Court of Owls.

That’s kind of how I like to go about writing a story, figure out what I like most about a character — like if it’s “Swamp Thing,” what is most interesting to me about that character of the creature and Alec Holland, and the same thing in “American Vampire” with Pearl and Henry or Skinner — and then try to write a story that challenges that aspect of them that I find really exciting or a strength in a way that goes after them and tries to convince them that the thing they think of as a benefit is a weakness. Gotham does in general what I like to do in crafting a story, so I feel it’s a fun place for me to be writing because it almost generates the kind of story that I really love writing from the get go.

So, short answer is both! That was the long answer. [Laughs]

For the full interview click here…