19/11 FAREWELL 5TH WALL!

PIC - Dan Mora 2025 © DC Comics/Marvel Comics

WHO WOULD WIN IN A FIGHT?

I have a new comic out today! Batman/Deadpool has arrived at last and is available from all quality butcher s and fishmongers! Don’t miss out on this must-have paper item which will surely look great next to all your other paper items of a similar kind!

Today, we present the first of several deep dives into the creation of Batman/Deadpool, starting here with the initial accumulation of ideas…

BATMAN/DEADPOOL ANNOTATIONS part 1

I turn a lot of stuff down, but when Marie Javins at DC offered me the chance to write Batman/Deadpool, it struck a chord. Deadpool is, of course, notorious for breaking the so-called ‘4^th wall’ of the page and addressing readers directly, which immediately gave me the idea to pick up on an ancient dangling plot thread from 35 years ago! Suddenly, I was interested!

There were a few rules, which made it even more fun. Batman and Deadpool had to appear obviously. The villain would be from Marvel and there could be a DC guest star. Deadpool vs. Wolverine had done well at the cinema, and people knew the character of Cassandra Nova as the main antagonist in that movie, so she made a perfect choice for the bad guy spot, while Damian Wayne seemed like a no-brainer in the guest slot (both villain and sidekick were created by the current author, which gave the 4^th wall elements an extra appealing spin).

Excitement gripped my imagination! This began to look like something I could work with!

I like the Deadpool movies and I’d enjoyed Deadpool vs Wolverine enough to watch it several times and judge it the best there is at what it does. As a result, I fancied writing some approximation of the Ryan Reynolds Deadpool voice (which ended up skewing a little into Ace Ventura) and having Batman play it cool. Deadpool all exterior, projecting. Batman, interior, calculating.

I wanted to play against any expectation that Batman would take the gruff Logan role here - as in Deadpool vs. Wolverine – while Deadpool baited him with a barrage of Boy Wonder jokes. This was Batman’s side of the historic crossover, so Deadpool could play the fall guy to some extent and provide me with a very different dynamic from the Deadpool/Wolverine relationship onscreen. I decided that Batman’s super-dry sense of humour would actually drive Deadpool to distraction, rather than the other way around.

I immediately began to hear runs of dialogue and banter between the characters. This spontaneous back-and-forth went straight into my notebook to be worked into finished dialogue later (although only the best bits - most of that warm-up dialogue, amusing as it was, didn’t make it to the finished book). The lines that stood out as providing the key to the whole relationship occurred when Deadpool was blabbing on and on and getting no real reaction from Batman, finally giving up – only for Batman to say ‘I fought crime alongside a hyperactive kid for years. My arch-enemy is a murderous disfigured clown. Have you been talking this whole time?’

That sealed the deal for me and I agreed to take the job!

As a general model for tone, I was thinking about the Doctor Who Christmas specials, annual done in ones, that were more ‘general audience all ages’ friendly than regular series episodes.

I decided to lean into the comedic and slapstick aspects of the combo, to broaden the appeal of the story to people who’d only seen Batman, Deadpool, and the others on TV or in movies.

Considered as a classic Batman team-up story, the pairing of Batman and Deadpool got me thinking about the fantastic run of Brave and the Bold stories by Bob Haney and artist Jim Aparo, from the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. Every issue told a new, complete story in 20 or so pages, with a fantastic movie-worthy central premise that happened to partner Batman with the likes of Black Canary, Hawkman, Wildcat, Mister Miracle, or the Atom. You had no idea who or what you’d get! Every story was a well-crafted gem, and there were even some masterpieces. Haney tended to ignore DC ‘continuity’, such as it was back then, in favour of telling a concise and complete story and I decided to use his approach as the template for Batman/Deadpool – hence the division into three chapters. This provided a narrative scaffolding on which new ideas could be arranged.

I hoped to emulate and update that classic Haney storytelling with a dash of 4^th wall breaking and surrealism, figuring this was a comic where I owed it to readers to give them exactly what they’d expect from a ‘Grant Morrison’ comic!

So far so good. These flashes of excitement, an image or line of dialogue, a theme or analogy swirling around the central premise of Batman/Deadpool provided fuel for the fire.

Next, I decided to include a bunch of Easter Eggs to refer to previous DC/Marvel crossovers going back to the original Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man from 1976.

I’d remembered that there a few restrictions on how the characters were presented in that original ground-breaking crossover - the figures of Superman and Spider-Man had to be equal in size on the cover, for instance, and Superman and Spider-Man appear in the same number of panels. They both have the same amount of dialogue. The same goes for Clark Kent and Peter Parker, villains, Luthor and Doctor Octopus, J. Jonah Jameson and Perry White, Lois Lane and Mary Jane etc…

As a formal exercise, it seemed like another way to keep things interesting for me and for the reader, so I decided to do something similar - Batman and Deadpool appear on an equal number of pages!

The page count was initially a slightly challenging – for this kind of story – 24 pages, which Marie Javins was able to extend to 27, giving me a little room to breathe.

I generally use 5-panels, rather than traditional page grids. Sometimes I do one, two and three for big impactful images and moments, but my default page is five panels. 5 can be stacked, taking the 4 horizontal panels of the widescreen comics of the early naughts into panoramic aspect ratios and can be useful for wide desert shots or cityscapes.

Sometimes to suggest rapid video editing, I’ll do many more than five panels on a page. Jack Kirby favored four and six panels. Tom King has made the Steve Ditko/Watchmen 9-panel grid his own.

I do thumbnail layout versions of all my comics and the basic 5-panel storytelling approach has always appealed on a visual page layout basis. It’s versatile without adding too much or having too little, so I decided to use it again here.

In my figurative stew pot now bobbed a few intriguing ingredients - Bob Haney, Brave and the Bold, the Deadpool movies, Superman vs. Spider-Man, the 4^th wall, the introduction and death of ‘The Writer’ in Suicide Squad #58 from 1991, a pinch of mild satire, imagery inspired by Backrooms and Pool rooms liminal videos, I’d been watching online, along with ‘rubber hose’ animation from the 1920s and ‘30s.

I had the kindling, all I had to do was start the fire!

PICTURES OF MATCHSTICK MEN

I usually come up with the cover ideas for my books and this was no different.

I came up with two ideas – for the Dan Mora one, I suggested Batman and Deadpool doing Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, battling before an enthusiastic crowd of cheering angels. The conceit was to have been provided by a cover blurb reading ‘BATGOD vs. MARVEL JESUS!’ until we were told that God and Jesus were off limits!

At my request, the Frank Quitely cover is an homage to the illustration Longhorns Dance by Jim French, which depicts two gay cowboys, naked from the waist down except for gunbelts, boots ‘n’ spurs. The drawing appeared in French’s gay magazine Man Power in 1974 and was appropriated in 1975 by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren who détourned it a little to create an infamous T-shirt design!

More to come next week!..

RECOVERY POSITION

Thanks for all the messages of condolence. Much appreciated. I’m still feeling odd about this one, world turned inside out, cold winds a-blowing hence the truncated nature of this week’s offering.

Dee See – I’ve watched a couple of those ‘Grant Morrison is possessed by the Devil’ videos, which all seem to be recorded by dodgy Anton LaVey-looking characters giving off major demon vibes. I love when they colour my eyes in red, and when the comments have those quivering Christian boys claiming to have witnessed Satan himself speak through me in their terrifying world of occult paranoia. They’re especially amusing to read after I’ve just fed a bunch of squeaking motherless kittens and devilishly ensured the tiny horrors have warm beds for the night! How Satan must cheer!

Jwparrishiii – 40 was great for me! Life really did seem to begin again! I advise having a big party! 50 was a weird one though – I went into a total funk and couldn’t enjoy anything!

Sean – I really like The Mystery Play, though I remember not really enjoying writing it. My head had gone elsewhere at the time, and Mystery Play felt too heavy and serious, lacking in humour. In hindsight, I’m really glad I did it, as I don’t have anything else much like it in my oeuvre. It would make a good TV show! Charlie XCX is okay, so I’m not entirely surprised by the John Cale collaboration. It’s pretty good, and sounds like something Momus would do…

Be here on Friday for Chapter 5 of Luvkraft vs. Kutulu, entitled When Wearing Humans Don’t Forget…