Batman: The Brave & The Bold #19 & 20

When I left DC more than one editor asked “If you come back as a writer, what character would you want to write?” I took the question seriously. At the time the Dawn of DC publishing initiative had just kicked off and all of the major characters were in great hands. I tried to think of a character I like, a character fans love, a character who speaks to things I’m interested in, and one who doesn’t always have a solo book.

“Plastic Man,” I said. “I would like to write Plastic Man.” Then the editor who asked would look at me incredulously for a few seconds, roll the thought around in their brain, and go, “I like that. I think you would do a good job with Plastic Man.”

The legendary cartoonist Jack Cole created Patrick “Eel” O’Brien A.K.A Plastic Man. A criminal who got betrayed by his gang, he then fell into some acid, gained elastic attributes, and recreated himself as a superhero who would go after criminals like himself. All in the hope that one day Plastic Man would do more good than Eel O’Brien had done bad. I loved Plastic Man in the pages of JLA, I loved him on the Batman: The Brave & The Bold Cartoon, and as an editor, I loved him when he was part of The Terrifics. He’s a funny character and he has a crime background. Comedy and crime fiction are both very big parts of my artistic influences. It felt like we’d make a good match.

Ben Meares, a tremendous DC editor, emailed me and asked if I wanted to do a two-part Plastic Man story for Batman: The Brave & The Bold #19 and #20. However, because it was in Brave & The Bold, it had to be a team-up story, Plastic Man had to be working alongside another character. I love team-up stories and pairing Plastic Man with a character would make it easier to show what made him stand apart from the rest of the DCU. I said yes as quickly as I could.

In addition to getting to work on Plastic Man, it was a chance for me to reunite with Ben Meares. Ben was part of the editorial team for my Man-Bat mini-series with Sumit Kumar and edited me on one of my Green Arrow shorts and the Frankenstein short story I did. He’s a fantastic editor, and we get along well. He also just always has the right note. Something that will stop me for a few seconds and make me go “I don’t know if that’s the right move.” but then the more I think the more I realize “Ben couldn’t be more right about that note.” He’s one of the best around. Also, man…Batman: The Brave & The Bold…that’s historically one of DC’s most beloved titles, it’s a credit I was honored to take on.

In putting together ideas for who Plastic Man should team up with, Wonder Woman, who Ben had recommended, became the clear right choice. Wonder Woman will come to Plastic Man because she’s had her lasso of truth stolen from her, and she needs Plastic Man’s expertise on theft and the criminal element of the DCU to get it back. I treated the story as a lost episode of Justice League Unlimited written by Elmore Leonard. All the pieces felt right, and would only feel more right as we went along.

For an artist, Ben recommended the stellar Nikola Čižmešija. Nikola was someone I worked with a lot as an editor during my last two years at DC. He drew Sword of Azrael written by the brilliant Dan Watters, Future State: Gotham by the wonderful Dennis Culver, and a Batman/Zatanna team-up in the pages of Batman: Urban Legends written by the stellar Vita Ayala. I got to see Nikola grow from assignment to assignment into one of the most interesting artists working in the superhero space today. He’s hard-working, his work has an intense energy to it, a wonderful manga-influence, and from project to project it’s clear he has something he’s looking to add to his tool belt as an artist. He also couldn’t be more kind. I was all for the choice, Nikola said yes, and I made it my goal to try to write one of the best comics he has drawn yet.

Our team includes Rex Lokus on colors, Steve Wands on letters, James Reid as our assistant editor, Simone Di Meo on main covers, and variants by the oft-mentioned Riley Rossmo. We have some really special and exciting in store for you guys. I’m so excited to get to tell a Plastic Man story and write Wonder Woman in a longer format. I have only written her once, very briefly in Man-Bat, before this. Issue 19, part one of the story, is on sale on 11/27/24. In October once I Know What You Did Last Crisis is out, I will be talking much more about this story!

And if you are already a Plastic Man fan? You are going to be eating well this fall. In addition to this two-part story, DC Black Label is doing a mini-series called Plastic Man: No More by the incredible creative team of Christopher Cantwell, Alex Lins, and Jacob Edgar. I can’t wait to get my hand on that book. I know it’s going to be amazing.

Breaking Down A Crisis

“Now, I want to say something to you before you start. You’ve read Final Crisis a few times already, you don’t need to go overboard and read it a dozen more times, don’t lose yourself in the text,” my editor Andrew Marino advised before I started cooking up what my Final Crisis inspired story pitches would be for the anthology I Know What You Did Last Crisis (FOC 9/2/24, On Sale 10/2/24).

I did not take that advice. I instead grabbed the Absolute edition of Final Crisis with a package of sticky tabs by my side, and I dove in head first. Did I need to read the story three or four more times? No, Andrew was not mistaken there, but in doing so…I did appreciate the story more than I did when I was younger, and as with a lot of things…Grant was ahead of their time in terms of the storytelling they were trying to pull off.

Grant wrote the story of Final Crisis to be read the same way we watch terrible things unfold in the 24-hour news era. Clipped, chaotic, fractured pieces that as things go along start to take more definition and become part of a clearer tapestry told by dozens of perspectives. Being able to sit with the work more patiently, instead of reading the book monthly, it was easier to see that, and appreciate it. We are also living in a post-social media world so as Grant predicted, we often take in real-life stories through multiple platforms until they take one (hopefully only one) shape.

Once I had read through it a few times and felt confident about my grasp of the text and shape of the story, I had to zero in on the elements I could focus on in a short story. When I say this is an event storyline? That is no joke. There are all the ideas Grant came up with for the main series, and the tie-in issues that they wrote, but then there are several tie-ins by other creative teams. Here’s the list of what I identified as the bigger pieces of the event.

1. The return of the villain Libra, and his hostile takeover of the Secret Society of Super Villains.

2. The return of Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash.

3. The defeat or murder of core members of the Justice League: Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Martian Manhunter.

4. The world’s strongest female superheroes and supervillains are being turned into brainwashed warriors known as Female Furies.

5. The rise of Darkseid, and the fall of the Old Gods.

6. The Green Lantern Corps is blocked from planet Earth.

7. The three incarnations of the Legion of Super-Heroes clashing.

8. The collusion of the Monitors.

9. Earth falls to Anti-Life with a small superhero rebellion being Earth’s last line of defense.

10. The Rogues (Flash’s villains) on the run.

11. Spectre’s Rampage, Cain, and the Crime Bible.

So…a lot. A credit to Grant and the other creators who contributed to this event, its scope was truly massive. However, I had ten pages to work with. I needed to zero in on something that excited me, but also fit the asks of the assignment. Not only did the story have to be set during the event, but it needed to be scary/horror-adjacent as this was for a Halloween anthology.

What do you do once you have done all your homework and run out of those sticky tags that you started with? You meditate, trust your instincts, and you write up your ideas.

As discussed in previous installments of this Newsletter, I always try to come up with as many ideas as I can. Not only because I think it shows engagement with the assignment, but because you never know what idea will appeal to your editor the most, even if it’s the pitch you threw into the mix just to have one more on the sheet. Looking through my original pitch document for this project I pitched six story ideas for this.

The story pitch that won focused on the first part of Final Crisis I identified, the return of the villain Libra and his takeover of the Secret Society of Super-Villains.

Libra’s involvement in Final Crisis was heavily promoted as the storyline was coming up. Grant talked a great deal about how Libra was a character they loved from a few old issues of Justice League of America. And the redesign they did for the character, especially this Frank Quitely cover I have posted above that’s never left my mind was…creepy. There was something deeply off-putting about this character. Even alongside the greatest DC villains of all time, Libra felt off-putting.

In the story, he is a prophet for evil. Telling the Secret Society of Super-Villains that if they trust him, he can provide anything they want, and finally balance the scales of good and evil back in evil’s direction. And to Libra’s credit, he does. He kills Martian Manhunter in front of the Secret Society and sets into motion the downfall of the Justice League. All the supervillains fall in line behind him, and you can see it drives the traditional leader of all the villains, the great Lex Luthor, mad. We get a few great scenes but then the story goes away from Lex and Libra until the very end of the story.

That was my in, and it also felt true to Grant. Grant is one of the best writers of Lex Luthor there has ever been. Writing more of Lex in this hellish Twilight Zone situation where Superman was finally defeated, but he wasn’t responsible for it? And he had to bow down to not a fellow man of science, but some strange prophet? A story of Lex losing his mind and losing his faith in himself started to come into focus. The untold cold war between Lex Luthor and Libra. That’s the pitch that won the day, and that’s the story you will be reading on 10/2/24.

TMNT: Black, White, & Green Trade Paperback Release

November is going to be a very fun month! In addition to Batman: The Brave & The Bold #19 coming out, on 11/12/24 (11/13/24 in comic stores) the collected edition for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Black, White, & Green comes out. This collected edition (sometimes referred to as a graphic novel for my non-comic readers) will have Riley Rossmo and I’s Sin Sewer story in addition to all fifteen of the other short stories from the four-issue mini-series. And if you didn’t read the whole mini-series, you are in for a TREAT. There are stories by incredible comic creators Declan Shalvey, Paulina Ganucheau, Dave Baker, Jesse Lonergan, Lorenzo Hall, Gigi Dutreix, Tyler Boss, Mikey Way, Nikola Čižmešija, Lee Loughridge, Javier Rodriguez, Gavin Smith, Dom Reardon, Jock, Alexis Zirrit, Carlos Giffoni, Cameron Chittock, Michael Shelfer, Jeremy Holt, Sebastian Priz, Lee Garbett, Erica Henderson, and Patrick Gleason.

I am so excited to get my copies of the trade paperback, it is such an honor to be included amongst this group of creators and to get to be in a book with them forever (for as long as this book stays in print).

You will be able to get this one at comic stores, bookstores, and wherever books are sold. Not a bad holiday gift for your loved ones!

Next week, I am going to run an interview with the fantastic artist of the I Know What You Did Last Crisis short story, the wonderful Sid Kotian. And hopefully, I will also be able to show off at least one page of his tremendous artwork from this story.

Stay safe!

—Dave Wielgosz