Den Of Geek, talking to John Ridley, saw him talk about the origins of The Next Batman. Tim Fox – now Jace Fox – who will be getting his own series in Batman: Second Son, appearing in Batman: Black And White and Future State: Gotham.
I was working on The Other History and the second series of The American Way and I just felt very fortunate to be doing any of that. And at first I got these emails that Dan DiDio wanted to talk to me but I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. But there was some weird thing where they were having trouble emailing it and this was prior to the pandemic, so finally they got all frustrated and were like, "Dan wants to have lunch with you." We sat down and he said,
"Oh we want you to write Batman." That would have been tremendously cool in itself, but they said, "We want to approach Batman in a different way. We want Batman to be a character of color. But he's going to be Batman. It's not going to be an Elseworlds story, it's not going to be, you know, the Dark Knight having his back broken.
It's not going to be temporary."