This October, two dynamic duos are reuniting for a brand-new Gotham story: Mark Waid and Chris Samnee forces to bring DC readers Robin: Year One. ScreenRant sat down with co-plotter and writer Waid to learn more about his collaboriation with Samnee, Batman and Robin's relationship, new characters, and so much more.

Waid and Samnee, who are known for their collaborations on Daredevil and Black Widow, but now they're turning their sights on one of the most iconic partnerships in superhero history: Batman and Robin. Batman and Robin: Year One tells an early story not just about Gotham's dynamic duo, but about the growing pains of the father and son duo, Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson.

ScreenRant spoke with Waid about the story and particularly its first issue, which arrives on October 16th. In the conversation, which is lightly edited for clarity, Waid reveals not only the story's place in current DC continuity, but also more about the story's villains, its various "frictions," and what it's been like moving between big DC event stories and this more intimate family tale.

Mark Waid Discusses Reuniting with Chris Samnee for Batman and Robin: Year One

Preview Pages by Chris Samnee; Variant Cover by Karl Kerschl

ScreenRant: What's it been like reuniting with Chris Samnee, especially for characters as culturally iconic as Batman and Robin?

Mark Waid: It's been terrific. I mean, the beauty of it is we just fell into lockstep immediately. No having to get used to each other or anything again, we just have a good system by which we’ll talk out a plot over the phone and get the beats, and then I will sit down and write - not what I would normally do as a page by page plot so much as just, here's a few pages of the stuff we talked about, sort of put in order in with speech. And then he will go and do the layouts, and so he's doing more than just drawing. He's co-plotting as well.

SR: So has that changed your process in working together at all?

MW: Not really? It's because, again, he's just so good at not only the choreography - but actually, I guess it has, in the sense that he really has a very, very strong vision about what he sees this book looking like. And so he's got a little bit more of the reins when it comes to the actual storytelling, which is fine by me.

Though this is Samnee's first foray into an official Gotham book, each year he runs and participates in the "Batober" October art challenge on Instagram, creating a single Batman-themed image each day of the month. As he recently posted on Insatgram, Batober 2024 is a "go" on October 1st!

SR: It must be exciting to work with someone who does have such a strong vision of what the book will look like and what the story will look like.

MW: Yeah!

Batman and Robin Take a Back Seat to Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson

Variant Cover by Mikel Janín

SR: Correct me if I'm wrong, but the story is just as much about Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, father and son, as it is about Batman and Robin, superhero dynamic duo. In your eyes, how is Bruce and Dick's relationship different from Batman and Robin’s? And why was it important to you to explore that father and son dynamic in this origin story retelling?

MW: Because I thought that we would get some dynamic friction out of it. I think the trope is always that Dick and Bruce got along from day one. That's always been the status quo for those characters and every time we've retold that story. And when we started thinking about it, I mean, Bruce doesn't have any experience as a parent. He barely has any experience as a kid. And Alfred can only do so much.

Dick could just fall easily down a well of despair.

Everything has changed for Dick - everything about his life has been completely upended. So of course there's going to be some friction there. A lot of it comes from the fact that they have a common experience. They have that death of their parents, and Bruce handled it in a way that any 12 year-old would: he put on a costume and he went out to punch faces. And he sees that in Dick, and it's a matter of trying to get Dick to channel that anger and that energy in a more productive way. Because otherwise, like Bruce could easily have done, he could have just fallen. Dick could just fall easily down a well of despair.

SR: I'm really interested in the phrase you started that answer with, “dynamic friction,” which I think is such a great phrase both for its echoes of the dynamic duo and also as a storytelling device. How do you use dynamic friction, whatever that means to you, for this story and as a storyteller with many years of experience?

MW: It's just much more interesting to put together characters that aren't completely sympatico with each other. It's not just that it gives you moments of tension; it also is a way of exacerbating who they are, because they are going to show their true colors under moments of stress. So with Batman and Robin, it's strictly business, but again, it's a matter of trying to get that kid to listen.

But at the same time, it's also a matter of Batman trying to figure out how to lead, because not only has he never had a partner, he's never thought about having a partner. Conversely, Dick's entire life has been about having a partner - life and death every night. So on the Batman and Robin front, that's the friction there. And then on the Bruce and Dick front, it really is just: “I don't know how to raise a kid.” And especially one as freewheeling and is coming from such an unstructured environment as Dick did. And Dick's attitude is, “I don't really know what I'm doing here either.”

SR: I'm gonna just keep picking at your language because I find that fun. “Unstructured environment” feels like a really interesting tension to me in of who Bruce and Dick are. And the Batman mythos at large: the idea of someone who is unstructured suddenly thrust into the world of Batman and the cliché Batman stereotype of someone who is intensely structured down to the aggressive little details. What's it like writing that kind of character tension? Of someone like Dick, this unstructured child, literally a child, versus - or with, versus and with - the structured world of Batman.

MW: Again, Batman's just struggling mightily with this, because in the crime fighting field, the problem is the kid is impetuous. The problem is the kid leads with his face. The problem is that he doesn't listen when Batman says wait. On the home front, it's hard to figure out what structures to place on that kid because Batman, or rather Bruce, after his parents were killed - he had no structure either. It was a self-imposed structure, but there was no one forcing him to live a normal kid's life. And so he was pretty much his own guardian from that moment on, and he used his time and his energy in a very specific way to train to be the world's greatest.

Dick doesn't have that same focus. Dick is just all over the map, and Bruce at first assumes, well, “if I give him all the runway in the world, he'll do what I did.” And he doesn't. So then: “if I overcompensate and be overly strict and put too many guardrails down, then maybe that will help.” And that only makes things worse. So it's really just a give and take throughout the whole twelve issues, the whole miniseries.

Who Is the General? Mark Waid Reveals More About the Villain of Batman and Robin: Year One

Variant Cover by Matteo Scalera

SR: The first issue solicitation teases a new player in Gotham: the General. So what can you tell us about the General? And also I'm curious to know if there’s any connection to Tim Drake's General character from back in the day.

MW: Oh! Not actually, no. Well, you know, not yet. But now that you put that in my head, it's something to think about. No, the General is a crime boss from Miami who was a military leader until he was disgraced. Or, to put it from his point of view, until he was unfairly run out of the service.

Tim Drake, who debuted in 1989, served as Batman's third Robin, while Dick Grayson established himself as Nightwing. The General is one of Tim's early foes; created by Chuck Dixon and Michael Netzer, Ulysses Hadrian Armstrong first appeared in 1992's Detective Comics #654.

He's your Ollie North kind of character, and he's come to Gotham because he's got a secret weapon that he believes can make him the kingpin of Gotham. We get a sense of what that secret weapon is in the second issue, but it really isn't until the last third of the series that you get a sense of the scale of what he's got going.

How Does Batman and Robin: Year One Fit into Current DC Continuity?

Main Cover for DC All In Special #1 by Daniel Sampere

SR: So this book is launching at the same time as all the big DC things that are going on at the end of this year: All In, the Absolute Universe. So I wanted to ask if and where this story fits into DC continuity as it stands now?

MW: Oh yeah, it's definitely in continuity. It is defining continuity now. I'm trying my level best to sort of dance between the raindrops and make sure that I'm not doing any harm to any other previous Dick and Bruce stories. I think we've hit a sweet spot where we can fall in the cracks so we're not undoing anything. But at the same time, this is now official continuity, yeah.

A new era for DC Comics begins on October 2nd, 2024, with the launch of DC All In Special #1 by Scott Snyder, Joshua Williamson, Wes Craig, and Daniel Sampere. The one-shot serves as a soft relaunch of DC's current titles - as well as a hard relaunch of the and reimagined line of Absolute Universe books, such as Absolute Batman by Snyder and Nick Dragotta.

SR: I love that turn of phrase, “dance between the raindrops.”

MW: That's trademark Tom Brevoort [Marvel editor], but that's a good one.

SR: It’s a really good one! What's it like as a writer - especially, you know, as you continue to move on, more and more continuity gets added, especially for characters like Batman and Robin. What is it like, in your writing life, dancing between those raindrops?

MW: I think that for 99% of my peers, it would be frustrating and annoying, and they would have a tendency just to not worry about stuff. I actually enjoy it. I like the challenge. I like the puzzle aspect of trying to fit it in as neatly as I possibly can. It doesn't always work because, again, there have been - and I've told the statistic a thousand times, but I love it ‘cause it's true - there have been more stories told about Batman than about any other character in Western literature. That's a fact. When you put that on the plate, then it's really hard to figure out how to navigate every last little thing that happened. But I’m doing my best! I enjoy it.

SR: It does please a certain kind of mind, right? Like you said, it’s a puzzle.

MW: Exactly!

SR: What's your biggest goal in revisiting this particular time in Bruce and Dick's life, and are there any elements you'll be introducing now that could kind of recontextualize how readers see the characters as they are in this current moment?

MW: That actually is the goal. That is the goal. Whenever I take on a project like this, the goal is to try to show you sides of the character that you either haven't seen or that you have not thought about from that perspective. I think we're getting a lot of that here. I'm discovering things about the characters that I didn't realize as I go. And so is Chris. That really is the goal. I mean, otherwise we may as well just reprint old Batman and Robin stories. But we don't want to do that! We want to show you a different perspective.

Mark Waid Discusses the Difference Between Writing Events and Writing Personal Stories

Absolute Power #1 Main Cover by Dan Mora

SR: Thinking about showing readers a new perspective - at the time that this is going to be launching, we also have all these other big, universe-shattering stories happening, right? Absolute Power is wrapping up, we're going to be getting the Absolute Universe, you're starting Justice League Unlimited - all these big, big lore things. What's your sales pitch for why readers should go back to this smaller-scope Batman and Robin family story?

MW: It's just a more personal story. It's still full of big, flamboyant action and sets up things in the Batman universe that will pay out down the road that you should know about, but mostly my sales pitch is: it is a beautiful looking book, and if Chris doesn't win every award that there is to give next year, then something's wrong.

SR: From your perspective, as a writer, what has it been like moving from those big interconnected - I mean, from Lazarus Planet to what's going on literally right now, you're working on these really big stories that have a lot of moving parts. And not to say that Batman and Robin: Year One won't also have moving parts, but—

MW: But exactly, but it's not as— the world isn’t beating at the story, exactly.

The quiet character stuff is the stuff that comes most naturally to me.

SR: In your process as a writer, what's it like making that switch from something like Absolute Power to Batman and Robin?

MW: It's actually easier for me, because the quiet character stuff is the stuff that comes most naturally to me. So the harder part is making the shift into, you know, Absolute Power or the bigger stories where I'm telling big, like I said, world-shaking events, but even still - finding the heart, finding the quiet moments there, the moments of character interaction that's— I mean, the most fun in comics to me is just taking characters that I've not seen together or have rarely seen together, and putting them together in a scene and just trying to figure out what their interaction, what their relationship is going to be like. I just enjoy that more than anything.

Absolute Power, the key summer DC event series for 2024, is by Waid and Dan Mora. That same Waid and Mora team has been taking big swings in a number of DC titles, including Batman / Superman: World's Finest and Shazam!. The two will also be teaming up for this fall's Justice League Unlimited series as part of the DC All In initiative.

SR: Have you had any of those moments working on Batman or Robin, finding those new characters to see together?

MW: Not yet, but by about the back half of the series is when you start to see more of that, yes.

Why Is Robin Such an Essential DC Character?

Variant Cover by Karl Kerschl

SR: In my many years reading about Batman, I always hear creators talking about what Batman in particular means to them. But I rarely hear people talk about what Robin means to them. Robin's one of my favorite characters, since I was a kid. So for you, as opposed to Batman, what does Robin as a character mean to you?

MW: Robin has always been a favorite, even way more than Batman. When I was a kid, I would dress up as Robin with a little yellow windbreaker tied around my neck so I could make a makeshift cape. I love Dick Grayson. I think that he is fun, but serious. I think that he is energetic, but has his quiet, introspective moments. Everything I love about Dick Grayson actually is what Tom Taylor's doing over in Nightwing [with Bruno Redondo]. And that character means a lot to me. Next to Superman, he may be my favorite character in the DC Universe.

SR: You spent some time with him, too, in Batman / Superman: World’s Finest [with Dan Mora] and World’s Finest: Teen Titans [with Emanuela Lupacchino]. What's it been like working, for a good few years now, with Dick Grayson so closely?

MW: It's great. Once I realized he was the secret sauce in World’s Finest that had been missing for a while— we'd done a bunch of Batman / Superman books in the last few years, but not Batman and Robin and Superman books. And putting Robin in World's Finest made all the difference in the world, because now we have somebody who can make the jokes. We have somebody who can give a more surprised and alarmed perspective because they've not been through it as much as Batman and Superman have.

That character to me is irreplaceable. I realized last night that I was about to write an entire issue without him, and then I just kicked myself and realized, “no, no, that's ridiculous.” And once I realized that, the whole plot came together for me.

Thanks again to Mark Waid for taking the time to speak with ScreenRant about Batman and Robin - and Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. Batman and Robin: Year One #1 is available October 16th, 2024 from DC Comics.

Source: Chris Samnee