London-based writer Dan Watters has quickly been ranking up credits in such titles as his creator owned books Limbo with collaborator Caspar Wijngaard, Coffin Bound with DaNi, as well as several projects for Dynamite, Titan Comics, DC, Vertigo, and Vault Comics.
His latest work, Arkham City: The Order of The World, reunites him with DaNi on an odyssey through the deepest depths and darkest shadows of Gotham City and find all-new reasons to fear the night.
Dan took some time to discuss Arkham City, the genesis of the project, and what he’s currently geeking out over.
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FOG!: What was the genesis of Arkham City? Was this a project that DC came to you with or did you pitch it?
Dan Watters: Honestly, it was a little of both. I’d been talking about another project with my editor, Amedeo Turturro, and kept pitching these reinventions of old, weird, unused characters who I absolutely love. That project went another direction, but she did come back to me and say, ‘you know, we’ve all been wondering what happened to those Arkham patients who escaped the destruction of the asylum…” And one thing led to another and led us to straight to the streets of Arkham City.
The story picks up some time after the Joker’s A-Day attack which left Arkham Asylum in ruins, most of the patients killed or missing, and only a handful of staff (and one doctor, Jocasta Joy) surviving. In the first issue we see several Bat-villains including Mad Hatter, Firefly, Professor Pyg, and the Ten-Eyed Man. Did you select these characters specifically or were there any particular characters that weren’t made available? The variant cover of the first issue shows Azrael. Are there other members of the Bat Family that might make an appearance?
Really what I was interested in is characters who’d kind of fallen through the cracks. That’s what this book is about, on a few different levels. The people who fall through the cracks as far as Gotham is concerned, people scared and suffering and the cycles of pain that produces when help is not offered or does not have the resources to affect real change… and from a creative standpoint, the characters who’ve fallen through the cracks and not been given a real focus of late. Those strange and unusual villains with strange and unusual powers. Every one of them has a story, and every one has their own unique struggle, so I wanted to find out what those are for these people.
As far as the Bat Family is concerned, this book is quite pointedly not about them. It’s about what happens outside of their sphere, when they’re not there to bring their specific moral through-line to the proceedings of Gotham. Azrael is definitely a presence, but he’s another through-the-cracks figure to me. He’s a man literally brainwashed with religious doctrine, dressed in a bright red suit with a flaming sword, and no-one’s offering him much help either.
The Ten-Eyed Man is completely reimagined and is ridiculously creepy. Were there any specific influences behind this interpretation?,,
I don’t know about specific influences, but I was imagining this character who’d been sort of locked in Arkham Asylum for decades, forgotten and lost, and what that place might do to him. We wanted him to almost be the asylum incarnate- it’s its own world, somewhat divorced from reality, and now so is Ten-Eyed Man.
He’s developed his own rituals and rules for living, inscrutable to us, but perfectly sensible to him. I wanted even his body to reflect this. DaNi and I spent a fair bit of time looking at hypermobility and contortionists to find ways for him to move that seem strange but have an interior logic.
Jocasta Joy is an interesting character. Will we see her interacting with any other Rogues throughout the series?
Definitely. Joy was a psychiatrist at Arkham before A-Day, so she developed somewhat intimate relationships with many of these characters as she sought to understand and help them navigate the world around them. We’ll see more and more of that as the series goes on. She’s also torn between knowing that many of these people are dangerous to civilians, but also refusing to see them as anything other than people who’ve been dealt a bad lot by life, regardless of whether they happen to be seven-foot radioactive skeletons or not.
You’ve written several titles for Vertigo, but this is your first proper DC series. Are there any other DC characters that you’d like to write?
There certainly are specific characters I’d like to get my teeth into but, really, I’m interested in finding where the stories are. The DCU has such depth, such weight of history, that I almost feel anything you drill down on will reveal an abundance of riches and joys for a writer. That’s the appeal of this universe to me. It is its own mythology, layers of world that have been built month by month over almost a century.
I love DaNi’s work. She seems to capture elements of Frank Miller, Darwyn Cooke, Elsa Charretier, among others. Do you have any dream collaborators?
There are many fantastic artists out there. The trick is always finding the ones you really work well with- where you can tap into something together and create something truly unique. DaNi is one of my favourite people to work with in that respect, and in any capacity, really. She brings so much to a book like this. We worked together on two volumes of Coffin Bound, and this felt like a real chance to bring the shared sensibility we’ve developed to Gotham City, and add its DNA to the melting pot of the DCU.
What are you currently geeking out over?
I just finished watching Midnight Mass, which was great- such a simple, elegant premise which feels so obvious in hindsight. I love it when someone manages to make something like that.
I’ve also been working my way through most of the works of Haruki Murakami over the last year. He’s one of my very favourite authors. I usually try and read a book or two of his a year, since he has a lot of novels but I didn’t want to run out of them. But I think I only have Killing Commendatore to go, now, after devouring six or seven in the last 12 months.
I’m not entirely sure why, but I did see an article about how the pandemic year felt a bit like living in one of his books, which makes a kind of sense. He has this very stoic surrealism, in which absurd and terrible things can happen but presented very matter-of-factly. In a year of out-of-our-hands turmoil between covid and the train wreck of Brexit here in the UK, I guess that’s something I’ve connected to.
As far as comics are concerned, I’ve been really enjoying That Texas Blood by Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips, the forthcoming What’s The Furthest Place From Here by Matt Rosenberg and Tyler Boss is about to blow people away, and the recently wrapped Many Deaths of Laila Starr by Ram V and Felipe Andrade is pretty much a masterpiece. That’s what comes to the top of my head, anyway.
Arkham City: The Order of The World #1
is now available in comic book stores and ComiXology
