Ed Brubaker on Batman: Caped Crusader, Streaming Comics, & Comics Adaptations!

Ed Brubaker is one of my favorite writers in comics (I counted: I have 13 of his works in my top 500 favorite comics of all time!). I still kind of can’t believe I got to interview him for nearly two hours!

You can hear our full conversation on Comic Book Herald’s interviews on the podcast.

But since some people prefer the ancient art of “reading,” we’ve also transcribed a segment of the interview below, focused on the status of Batman: Caped Crusader, adapting comics for Hollywood, and some insights into digital comic book streaming. The transcription has been slightly edited for clarity. Read and enjoy!

Brubaker and Martin on Friday

CBH: You’ve mentioned all the graphic novels with Sean [Phillips] have been going really well – Panel Syndicate has this “pay what you want” model, right? Was very in vogue for a bit. I think Radiohead in music was like “okay, is this the future” kind of thing. It seems like Panel Syndicate does well for itself. How does Friday do for all of you on the “pay what you want” model?

Brubaker: Um. I think it does well enough to just sort of make it viable for Marcos to really fund him and Munsta to be able to draw the book, which you know, considering how long it’s taking them to draw every chapter, because Marcos told me when we first started that he wasn’t going to work on a deadline because he was at a point in his career where he didn’t want to be unhappy with a page of art that he was sending off. Which is like, insane, because I don’t think any artist will ever be not unhappy with pages in the batches they’re sending off, but when he told me that, I was like “oh that’s kind of badass that he’s just kind of like ‘I’m doing this as long as it takes me to do it.’”

And I think it’s the best art of his entire career, like when he sent me the first designs of Friday, I was like “holy shit! This is going to be humongous.” But honestly, I’m not much of a follower of the digital space, but everybody that I talk to who’s more on the business side or another creator who’s much more up on the business stuff seems to think the sort of bloom has come off the rose of digital, like, several years ago and it sort of flatlined at a certain point. And even Amazon bought Comixology and tried to figure out how to really make it. You think that would have busted wide open and it would be the biggest thing in the world because it’s Amazon.

CBH: If anything, it regressed. Weirdly.

Brubaker: And I’ve noticed that a lot of my favorite cartoonists, you can’t even get their work digitally. You can only buy it in print and hardbacks and softbacks, and I’m like “yeah, because it’s just such a more pleasurable experience to read a comic.” When I used to have an iPad–which I got rid of like eight or ten years ago because I’m just like, “I’m never using this thing”–but I remember when I would read comics on it, I would stop and check my email like three pages into a comic and I would never do that when I was reading a print comic. My whole life, I would have my stack of comics or graphic novels or whatever and just sort them in the order you want to read them in like a total comic book nerd. And my biggest fights with my brother from my entire childhood was on comic book day when I’d come home and he’d come sit next to me like, “what’d you get?” and he’d start messing up my pile.

CBH: Unforgivable.

Brubaker: Exactly. Total big brother behavior. Like, “no! I’m reading that last! Don’t read that one!” But yeah, I feel like that’s the joy of comics to some degree, and I’m not super into the collectable side of comics. Like, all the variant covers and all of that stuff. But there’s another part of me that’s like, “if that’s helping keep stores alive and it’s helping keep the industry and print alive, then more power to them, then.” But, yeah, there’s some part of me that’s always a little bit like “was digital really a big improvement for us or was it just a way for Marvel and DC to put all our work online and not have to pay us anything?” You know, with the subscription sites where they make like millions of dollars a year on subscription fees and don’t give the creators a dime for that stuff because how do you monetize that? Who knows what they read? And like, how do you monetize that they read three pages of one thing and ten pages of another? Eventually, it’s like, “oh the accounting is so complicated, we’re just never going to do it.”

CBH: Uh huh. Uh huh. Which is never a good answer. So you get literally nothing out of that?

Brubaker: Oh, for like the subscription models? No. No.

CBH: Yeah.

Brubaker: All subscription services other than Netflix, like, the streaming services we’ve all sort of subscribed to, but in general the subscription services for books or music or film or TV, or whatever, the amount of money that goes to the artist is either nothing or so much less than they would have made before those services were offering them to subscribers. So you have these multi-billion dollar companies raking in all these subscriber fees and, I mean, there’s a really good argument that we just spent ten years moving from cable to streaming, and all we really did was go in this giant circle. So you have to go buy like, a package of streaming stuff and all that we really did was get rid of residuals for people who create TV shows and movies. Like the company is more powerful and more consolidated and they own the platform. They own every aspect from creation to delivery. And a lot of them, even, are talking about trying to start publishing and like, they want your publishing rights and stuff when they adapt your thing into a TV show or a movie. They also want to buy your publishing rights, or just get them for free, even if they aren’t a publisher. Like, someone like Netflix will float that as like something they could do and like, “you don’t have a publishing company? Like, what do you want the rights for?”

But everybody wants to be Marvel and DC, you know? Because they see those behemoths and all. Like, it’s weird to me that I grew up in an era where you had to kind of hide the fact that you were a comic fan when I was a kid, like it was considered super uncool to be into comics. I’ve never quite understood the generation that grew up where like girls were into comics and videogames that weren’t thrilled about that, because I would have killed to know a single girl who liked comics or videogames, like my wife was the first girl I ever met who watched Bladerunner. I almost proposed to her that day! But yeah, like, the whole world has changed and Marvel is like the biggest thing in pop culture of all time. Stan Lee is the most influential person of the 20th century, it turns out in a weird way. Or, the 21st century, so far. It’s really bizarre to me. And people get so mad when someone like Martin Scorsese rags on those movies.

CBH: It’s so goofy. I know. It is! Like, can we just win? Graciously? Like things are good. Things are good. Just enjoy it.

Brubaker: And most of the stuff, that’s the crazy thing about it, is how enjoyable so much of it is. Like, even the stuff where I feel like “okay, I didn’t need to see that many explosions in act three or whatever.” But it’s like, they’re making weird, quirky ones. Like, I loved the Shang-Chi movie, actually. That was super fun. And Aquafina in a Marvel movie? Like, what the hell?

CBH: Yep. Yeah that was a good time. I liked that movie. Like, the more off the beaten path stuff, I think they can do too. Take some chances. Get a little weird. I think that’ll be a good thing for it.

Brubaker: And those, for as much as I can complain about not having made enough money off any of that stuff getting adapted, Marvel movies have opened so many doors. Like, I go into meetings and people know who I am because of The Winter Soldier. And my other comics and stuff because every place in Hollywood, you know, is run by the guy who used to be the assistant of the guy who would read the comics for them back in the day and now those guys are all in charge. The people who used to read a thing and tell their boss about the comic that they need to have a meeting with the guy about, and in the meeting they’re like “so you’re some comic book guy?” Now those people don’t exist anymore at all.

 

CBH: You gotta actually know it. Interesting. So how’s the adaptation side of things going? Like, I know you’re keeping busy. I know there’s been a lot of your works that have been picked up, but what’s the most exciting, most top-of-mind stuff you’ve got going down?

Brubaker: Well, I’ve got two. I’m at early stages at adapting two different of our recent books into movies, actually. One that’s actually already getting set up somewhere and another one that I’m working with one of my favorite film makers, who’s actually like an Oscar winning screen writer and director. Like, “wait. What?” Like, I’m aware of his work as a person, but I had no idea. And he’s not a comic book person. Someone just gave him this one book of ours and he flipped for it. And so, I’m working pretty much now, dividing half of my time between writing comics for Sean and Marcos and writing Hollywood stuff right now.

But I’m optimistic on these ones more than I’ve been on other times right now, but with the Hollywood stuff, even when I was doing the TV show on Amazon with Refn and it was greenlit, like I thought it was greenlit and we were being paid to write all the scripts and we were putting up our production office and hiring people and everything. And I remember one day when we had the list of actors that needed to be cast in the show and for the main role, we had to have a movie star. And I was like “well, what if we can’t get a movie star? Can we just get a really good actor that’s not that big?” And they were like “No.” And I was like “Well, what happens if we don’t?” then “oh, then they’ll just pull the plug on the show.” So if he hadn’t signed Miles Teller to do that show, they just wouldn’t have made that show. But they’ve spent all this money and like, yeah, that’s just what they do. Especially at that point, I think.

Now, I don’t think they care as much about movie stars there. Like the guy playing Jack Reacher, Reacher was one of their biggest watched things and that guy was in like, two TV shows before that. Like, he’s not a movie star, and everybody loved him. So, but yeah, I think it’s interesting to see the changing market right now. Like, I work on that Batman show with Bruce Timm for the last year and like a month ago, HBO Max pulled the plug on the show! Well, they didn’t pull the plug, they just said “We’re not going to air on HBO Max. We’re going to shop it instead.” Like they didn’t even pause production, even. Like, we’re making the show. No production has yet been paused, but there’s been no official announcement about where it’s going to be.

CBH: So weird.

Brubaker: But yeah. I feel like it’s really sent a shockwave through Hollywood and now I think other platforms are starting to look at how much they’ve been spending on stuff. Because they all went into crazy spend mode and we all talked about this in Hollywood, that there were these things being built and they were doing vertical integration and all that stuff and that they were trying to consolidate and own everything and being more in charge of their distribution and all the stuff that they’ve done, but we all expected to happen slower. And I think the pandemic made it all go a bit faster and maybe that’s made it blow up a bit sooner too. Because with like, the Zaslav stuff at Warner, like it all just felt a little bit crazy until they announced the James Gunn thing the other day, where like, okay, now people are calming down. They put one of the best Marvel guys–who also did one of the best DC stuff so far probably, the recent stuff.

CBH: Yeah, yeah. I hear you.

Brubaker: It’s like, oh okay. Now I’m excited about what they’re going to do next. Like for the first time, but you know, my show got kind of washed out in the midst of that, so people hopefully will eventually see our show and I think on the same schedule they would have seen it before. It’s weird to me that Warner Brothers was willing to sell Batman somewhere else at this moment in this market and now because of that, I think other places are going to start reevaluating their choices and being like “well, could we get more for Star Trek if we sold it to Netflix or Amazon or somewhere else?”

CBH: Right.

Brubaker: And like, Criterion? Why don’t we license Criterion? Why don’t we license the old Star Trek to Criterion with the original cuts? You know, or something like why are they not monetizing this stuff as much as humanly possible is kind of what Zaslav is thinking, I think.

CBH: It’s so funny too because like you said, now it’s like a decade ago because everyone was trying to get all their stuff in-house and trying to declare “this is our catalog.”

Brubaker: And it’s funny because through the Writer’s Guild, you get these emails and it’s all about the packaging, packaging, packaging for a while and now it’s like “hey, where did residuals go?” And it’s like, yeah that’s the problem. In the old days when you used to work in TV, if they reran your episode of TV, you basically got your entire payment for that episode again. So people who worked in TV in the 70s and 80s are still making bank on Syndication money and stuff and like, those guys who got money on Seinfeld, like, fucking Steve Bannon got a piece of Seinfeld because he works for some network that helped syndicate it or something. Like, those guys, they never need to work ever again and they’re still working anyway.

But those days are so gone. Like it’s been so long since an outside studio could own a thing and anyone would buy it really. Like, I’ll be curious. I’ll be hoping for that breaking apart and going back to the way it used to be where studios could develop the stuff and own it and partner instead of everybody only wanting to buy from themselves. It’s just a weird time in Hollywood and I’m really curious to see where it’s going to go next, but yeah, I spent a few years. Unfortunately, I was on overall deal at Legendary when I was trying to develop a couple of my projects and then I’d work on a couple other things for them during that, but right when we were about to go out with this huge thing where we had like, a huge director attached and, you know, everyone was really excited about this package for one of my books, the pandemic hit and we sort of just sat there for months trying to figure out well, do we go out? What’s going on? And the occasional thing was selling and everyone was still saying, “well, we still want to hear pitches.”

But of course, everybody was sort of going about their own business but no one was really buying for the most part. It was not business as usual, so that kind of sucked the momentum out of my hope for getting something done because I really felt like “okay, I’ve got a guy who everything he attaches to gets made, right now and he wants to do this,” and it was like a mini series thing, so he was going to direct all three episodes. And then that’s just gone now. But I’m optimistic about the new stuff. Like, I feel like both of them have elements, like I have a movie star attached to one of them that is somebody who I really love as a person and an actor, who I’ve been envisioning for the character since I started writing it. People can probably guess who that is, but yeah. There’s elements in these with the director and the star, director on one and star on the other, that it’s like, you start building those elements and you get a better chance of actually getting it made. But yeah, you’re just pushing that rock up the hill. The amount of scripts I’ve read that don’t get made. I mean, Charlie Kaufman can’t get everything he writes made and he’s the greatest screenwriter who ever lived, probably. So, you know, the Martin McDonaghs of the world are few and far between.

CBH: Well, fingers crossed that some of these things see the light of day.

Brubaker: Yeah, I’m sure. That’s the thing is I’ve just gotten jaded about it, like sometimes when someone calls about one of my books, like inquiring about the rights, I just get depressed like “oh now we’re going to have to go through this whole dance again and then it’s never going to get made.” So I’ve been doing it for long enough now that it’s kind of like it really has to be, like, if George Clooney called me up, I’d be falling all over myself because I’m such a fan of his and would love for him to work on any of my stuff, but it’s like, most times when people call me up about stuff, I’m like “okay sure, set up the meeting.” I just treat it like it’s any other work but it’s just so different from comics because everything happening in comics comes out. It’s such a different world because it’s like, I thought that maybe my ego and whatever ability I have as a screen writer, as just a creative force and whatever coming from comics into film or TV, that I would be able to sort of just, you know, bring it over and just have that same kind of luck. And boy. It is very hard.

CBH: You don’t seem alone in that, when you look across the comics’ board.

Brubaker: No! No, that’s the thing. There’s a great Vince Gilligan quote when he was talking about when they were making the pilot for Better Call Saul, I think and he wasn’t sure if it was going to be any good, and he said “you know, when you’re making an episode of TV, you never know if it’s going to turn out good or bad and it’s just as hard to make a bad one as it is to make a good one.” Like, you’re doing all the exact same things and then it cuts together and you’re like “oh, this didn’t work.” So that’s the other thing with film and TV, is that even when someone adapts your book, like there’s great film makers who have just made terrible adaptations of stuff. And then you have something like A Simple Plan, where it’s Sam Raimi and it’s like the least Sam Raimi movie of all time. And it’s a great movie, somehow. Yeah, it’s just weird. It’s just a gamble. You want your adaptation to be like Fight Club, you know? Like, “wow. That worked.” It was perfect, and then for the most part I think you’re lucky if it gets made at all. If it’s good on top of that, holy shit.

CBH: Right? Small miracle.

Brubaker: And then you don’t like it anyway when you’re that close to it. I’m sure Lee Child sat and everyone loved The Reacher show for the most part, I think it was a huge hit and I’m sure Lee Child was sitting there like critiquing it in his head if he watched it at all. Probably he watched ten minutes of it and was like “that’s enough.” You know, because that’s how people are! It’s weird. It’s like, I couldn’t read Catwoman after I left it. I’ve read some of Chip Zdarsky’s Daredevil and I read Ta-Nehisi’s Captain America because he was a friend of mine and we were talking about it while he was working on it. But generally once I leave a book or a character when I was working at Marvel and DC, you just don’t look at what happens with the character after that because you’re just too close to it, so there’s no way you can be objective.

CBH: You feel like too, is it too much that your head keeps doing the thing of like “oh, I would have done this. I wouldn’t have done that.”

Brubaker: Oh yes! It’s like “oh I never would have done that.” Like when I worked at Marvel and we were doing all the Captain America/Winter Soldier stuff in the book, I basically had domain over Winter Soldier. For a while, no one else could use the character at all and then when I freed it up so that people could use the character, they had to run every script by me and Tom Brevoort and we would give them notes and I would sometimes give dialogue notes and what changes made and stuff because I was so protective and ornery of that character at the time. And it was nice that they let me do that but the second I was gone, the first couple things that I looked at that had the Winter Soldier in them, even by friends of mine, people I like, I was just like “oh, I wouldn’t have done that,” or “oh no, that conflicts with a thing I put like five issues ago.” You know, it’s like stuff only I would care about or notice and one point I think he was like, riding a motorcycle and he’s like Space Ghost Rider or something, and I was like “what?!” I definitely wouldn’t have done that and I’m like, I don’t know who did that but I’m sure it felt like the logical next step to them at the moment.

CBH: Sure. Sure. No that makes sense. Okay, so you mentioned that we don’t know when it’s going to come out, where it’s going to come out, the Batman: Caped Crusader thing. I know a lot of fans were super excited about it because Bruce Timm.

Brubaker: I am willing to bet like a hundred bucks. I’ll bet you a hundred bucks right now that it actually comes out.

CBH: I believe it will, so I can’t take that bet, but I wanted to hear you make that bet.

Brubaker: It would be crazy, right? If the new Bruce Timm cartoon did not come out. But yeah, I’ve seen Animatics for like half the season and the voice recording for the whole season is done and it’s like, we’re deep into it.

CBH: How do you feel about it? As far as like, the vision and what about it is unique? What about it to you feels like a special potential project?

Brubaker: Well, it’s funny because I just wanted to do one episode initially. Like, I reached out to Bruce, who I’ve known for like, I don’t know how long. I think I met him through Darwyn way back in the day, like twenty years ago through Darwyn Cooke at Wonder Con or something. And, you know, we’re always friendly but not friends or anything and then I ran into him at a dinner at the last San Diego before the pandemic and we talked a little bit more and I think, just at some point, they announced the show and like a month or so later, I emailed him because I assumed when they announced the show that they were far into it before they even announced it, and they have a pitch document that sort of covered Bruce and James’s take on what they wanted the show to be and he had sort of pitched that to JJ Abrams and Matt Reeves, who were very excited by it. So that’s what got the show sold originally, so I reached out like, “hey, I don’t know if you’re freelancing episodes or how you’re doing it, but if you want to throw me one, it’s kind of like a bucket list thing for me.” Like, I loved The Batman. I don’t think I would have written Batman the comic if I hadn’t watched those cartoons because at a point when those cartoons were coming out, I wasn’t reading superhero comics anymore. I didn’t think I had any ideas for superhero comics or that I had any interest in them. And I remember the first season of that show being so good and there was an episode that was like, the first Scarecrow episode. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the old one.

CBH: Oh yeah.

Brubaker: So there’s this first Scarecrow episode and Bruce is dosed with the Scarecrow gas or whatever and he remembers his parents and he sees them walking into a tunnel and the tunnel becomes a gun sight and the a bullet fires out of it and then blood starts pouring out of the gun. Apparently, they later changed the blood to a different color but the version I saw was like a friend’s videotape of the first airing and it was blood. And I was a bit stoned at the time when we were watching it too, and I couldn’t believe this was a three o’clock in the afternoon kid’s cartoon. And there were network censors then and stuff that we didn’t have almost at all working on this show. Our show is PG because we wanted it to be a thing for parents and kids to watch together because we’d been finding talking to people and friends that we knew had watched the show when they were kids, they all have kids now and so when HBO Max launched, one of the first things they were excited about was that they could watch those old Batman cartoons again with their kids.

CBH: I am like, desperately waiting for my five year old to be old enough where I’m like, “we can do the original Batmans.” I’m so excited for that moment.

Brubaker: Seven is where they will apparently. My friend’s son is seven and they sent me a video of him and his eleven year old sister when they first–she worked on the show too, my friend Halley worked on the show–and her boyfriend’s kids were so excited that she was finally writing something that they would be able to watch, that she started showing them the old cartoons. And she sent me a video, and they were eating dinner and they were just staring at the TV and eating and they were just watching the old Batman cartoons and they made them watch them in order from the very beginning. And they’re still watching every day. They watch like two episodes or something.

CBH: That sounds amazing.

Brubaker: And it’s the only thing that makes them not want to look at phones or go play, you know, Fortnite or something. It really held their attention, which was really amazing to think of. That’s what cartoons are. When I was a kid, I woke up early for Saturday morning cartoons, so I get that. But yeah, that cartoon is powerful. So Bruce, I sent him that email and he emailed back like the next day if I could get on the phone to talk to him about it, and he could tell me the sort of gist of the show and then it came out in that conversation that he didn’t have a show runner or head writer yet and that they were going to do it a little bit different then they’d done back in the old days where they just had a story editor who was in charge and they would sit and work out what the episodes were and then just give outlines to writers and then they’d just have to rewrite whatever they got back. But they wanted to do like a full, like a small writing room where we actually broke the whole season and everybody wrote episodes and so he offered me that job and I just thought I was coming off of this other thing where I was really disappointed we hadn’t sold anything because we were out on the pandemic and I just thought “well, this show is greenlit. So it won’t be wasted effort.” And it’ll be working with Bruce Timm and it’s virtual meetings, so it’s not a huge time commitment every day because no one wants to be on Zoom for longer than two or three hours. So I just thought it would be fun and I helped him, like, I brought in my friend Halley Gross, who I worked with on Westworld and Too Old To Die Young, and she’s written on a bunch of TV shows and she co-wrote the second The Last of Us game.

CBH: Oh! Great game.

Brubaker: Yeah. She’s just a really great friend of mine and I love working with her and I brought her in and I think Bad Robot or Sixth in Idaho found–well, they didn’t find them because they were already working in Hollywood–but these twins, the Ebo Twins who had a movie that just came out that they wrote and directed and they were very new to the industry and younger. And we got them, and this guy called Jace Ritchie, who’s more of like an animation writer who’s worked for Disney and Warner Brothers on all sorts of kids stuff. So he was like our more veteran guy who had a lot of insight on the production end of it too. But yeah, we would just meet every day for like hours and everyone who was there said it was the most fun job they’d had in Hollywood.

We were laughing, coming up with Batman ideas and Bruce would shoot down our ideas and we’d argue with them. It was a lot of fun, but I will say, the main thing about the show is that there’s definitely moments in the show where I’m like “oh, I wrote that,” or “oh that’s cool. I remember helping us do that.” But it’s very much Bruce’s vision that he and James came up with together but I think it really goes back a lot to what Bruce really wanted the original show to be. It’s PG, so it’s not an adult-adult, but it’s definitely more adult, you know? And it’s different. It’s not a continuation of the old or like a reboot of Batman as like a forties pulp character, so it’s really exciting. When he told me what it was and there was a thing he’d come up with that was a take on a part of Batman that I’d never seen before, and I was like “holy shit!” So, yeah. I don’t think he could have come back to Batman and doing a Batman show like that unless they sort of let him do whatever he wanted, kind of. So I was just there and we were all there to help Bruce figure out how to make the show he wanted to make and then write the scripts and get notes from Bruce. But most of the scripts were written by the people in the writing room. Everybody wrote two episodes and then we freelanced out a couple to Mark Bernard and Greg Rucka wrote episodes, so it was a lot of fun to bring Greg in. I couldn’t not bring Greg in. Greg basically brought me in, helped bring me into Batman. If the two of us hadn’t decided to bail on doing Batman and the Outsiders and insist on doing Gotham Central, I think neither of us would have the careers we have right now, I think.

CBH: That was a big one, yeah.

Brubaker: It was really just our passion project and we really wanted to do it and we were working on this other thing that we hated and we were like “why are we doing this?”

CBH: That was going to be Batman and the Outsiders? I didn’t know that.

Brubaker: It started as them wanting us to do Batman and the Outsiders and us wanting to do the cops and not that. And then we just finally were like “look, we really really really want to do this other thing and we want Michael Lark to draw it.” And lucking Powers had hit like a year before that and was a huge success, so we were able to point to that as like “look! Imagine that book but with the Joker in it!” Or the Mad Hatter or, we could have a whole episode about the Bat Signal.

CBH: Exactly. That’s an all-time Gotham book. People love that book still.

Brubaker: Yeah. I think that book, I met Chris Nolan at an event one time and he was being taken down the line and introduced to people and everyone was like very shy around him. It was one of those times when someone walks into a room and the entire hush goes through the room. I literally heard it and turned and was like “oh my god, Chris Nolan’s here.” And the event we were at was to see him be interviewed but no one thought he’d actually come into the greeting room and like, socialize with people or whatever. And he’s notoriously shy and like, he’s so shy that other people become shy around him I think, maybe. And he was going down the line and when he got introduced to me, he actually was like “oh! Oh! Oh my god! Nice to meet you!” and he gave me like a double handshake, and then he told my friend who was interviewing him later that he was a big Gotham Central fan and he’d read all of them around the Batman movies.

CBH: That’s amazing.

Brubaker: So I was just like “oh, that’s insane,” you know?

CBH: That’s super cool.

Brubaker: But yeah, literally the guy sitting next to me was like one of the guys from Doctor Who, who didn’t get that reaction. In your face, Doctor Who guy!

CBH: Well, he hasn’t done a season of Who yet, so maybe then.

Brubaker: Yeah, maybe that’ll be his next movie. His take on it. Oppenheimer was secretly a Doctor Who movie.

CBH: Listen. I’d be there. I’d buy it. So everything you’re saying about this Batman show sounds like, oh my gosh, we have to see this. I’m super curious about what this angle is.

Brubaker: Oh man. If I could just pull out my phone and show you art, I would, but I think Bruce would kill me and then sue me. But yeah, it looks–oh my god it looks–so amazing too. All the animation tests and stuff that I’ve seen are just–and I haven’t even seen it with all the final lighting effects and stuff that they’re going to do on it, so hopefully I think it’ll end up looking kind of like it’ll remind you of the old show but it’ll look like it was made today, but there’s like no–well, I want to tell you more about it but I don’t want to spoil the show. I can’t reveal anything from it. It’d get me in trouble, unfortunately.

CBH: No, totally understand.

Brubaker: I’d love to give you the episodes.

CBH: Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. That’d be incredible.

*Dave passes out from nerd excitement*

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