Batman Fights Mad Hatter And Has His Reality Questioned

Batman is known for having a colorful and varied rogues gallery. Some villains are extremely dangerous, while others seem a little tame. The Mad Hatter is often seen as just obsessed with his Alice in Wonderland motif. With his expertise in hypnosis and hypnotherapy combined with his mind-controlling tech he places inside hats, he's ready to turn Batman's world upside-down.

Batman has recently tracked down Poison Ivy for help and fought Mister Freeze. He's about to discover who is working behind the scenes against him. We talked to All Star Batman writer Scott Snyder to find out why Mad Hatter was chosen and why he's started incorporating more prose into his comic writing.

GameSpot: Why did you choose the Mad Hatter for this issue, and how come you've been using more prose in your writing?

Scott Snyder: I don't know, man, I've reached a point in my career and my life. I'm older. The point of writing comics is to inspire yourself and to write about things that matter to you or that are personal and that make these characters new to you and exciting and show you how you can be brave in the face of things you're afraid of right this minute.

For me, the last time I wrote prose, right before I got into comics, I had a book deal for a novel. I was working on it, and it was more a literary novel. Then the economy began to contract. To be fair, the book wasn't the most commercial; it was about a barnstormer. I still love the idea. But ultimately the further I worked on it, the more nervous I got that it wasn't going to make them the money back, that they would have to give me if they approved it. It became a really toxic time in my life where I was working on prose and I think probably drinking too much and hating going to work because I was writing under this tremendous pressure in my head that this needed to be a best-seller if I was ever going to pay my mortgage or we just had a kid and I was teaching high school, and I was tutoring, anything I could do to make money.

And that's when comics came along, which I had always wanted to do. I got the chance to pitch, and it really saved my writing life where I got in and was like, "This is what it's like to have fun writing again." I totally had forgotten after the last two years of writing prose, and I loved writing prose up until it became something I was doing under duress for money. Luckily the publishing house, I'm still very good friends with the people I worked with, they were great, dissolved the book deal and allowed me to move into comics entirely because I was having such a good time.

The point I'm trying to make is that I haven't gone back to prose since then, and the last two years I started dabbling with it both in Batman issues and in American Vampire. I decided with A.D. After Death that we'd go whole into it and make it half prose, at least half. There were a couple points along the way, working on it, that I had real anxiety, and got really borderline depressed about it, but certainly anxiety where I couldn't sleep. I had constant panic attacks, and I couldn't really eat. Every time I sat down to the computer, this voice in my head was like, "Oh you're going to write that line? That sucks." And then you'd get a panic attack, and you'd walk around the house. You sit back down, "Oh you're going to write that? That's even worse than the first line." Get back up, walk around the house, try and calm down.

But you know, you have to push through it. And for me, just finishing AD, and I'm deeply proud of it. I think it's one of the better things I've ever done, and it's personal and all that. Just finishing it feels so good because it's about for me this point in my career, the same as All Star. And with an issue like this, [it] speaks to that. It's about trying to do things that make you exciting to yourself, and make these characters exciting to you, never doing anything that feels like you're doing it for the money, you're spinning your wheels or any of it.

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So this issue in particular speaks to a lot of that feeling I just described and anxiety. I wanted Mad Hatter to be a character who says, "Look, you think you know what the world is like. You think what you're seeing is true. But what if I start to tell you it's not? And it's not real." And the voice in your head that suddenly was so encouraging a minute ago, saying, "Oh you can do this, you know you can," turns on you and says, "No, you can't." And not only that but, "You're a loser, everything you believe is false, you're never going to make it," and just won't leave you alone. And becomes alien and menacing in your head.

And that's why I chose to do this issue in first-person narration entirely. I've never tried that before. And I've done third-person where it's like a storybook, which is what I did with Jock because that gives it a distance feel, and Mr. Freeze, it gives it like a remote kind of distance cold narration. But first-person is really intimate. So this one I wanted to do that way to show how it feels when you're facing something that feels like it's telling you everything you believe about yourself is untrue, everything that you hope for will never happen, all that's in your head, and your head is the worst place to be for that. And then you get to the other side and there's this feeling of astonishment and relief.

And so the issue is largely designed as a kind of trip down the rabbit hole with the Alice in Wonderland stuff, in that regard, where it starts in first-person and then moves to second person, where he's saying, "Oh, I do this. I'm after them. This is what I see." And then it kind of switches in the middle where he's like, "You do this Batman. You get him. You can do this, dah, dah, dah." And then it switches almost so that Hatter is speaking in his mind, and the font changes, and he's like, "This is what you're seeing, this is you." Batman's dialogue is in quotes in his own mind, and then as Batman starts to win again, it goes backwards through that progression back to the first-person again.

It's meant to sort of mirror a bit of that arc I was telling you about that I went through at least when I was really struggling with some doubts about myself and felt very ... when you feel unwell, when you don't feel like you can trust your own mind, because it's attacking you.

Did I even answer it? I don't even think I was answering your question. I was just talking. So you can ask anything you want.

During the fight it seems like Hatter knows a lot of Batman's secrets.

Right.

Is this the case, or is this like a wait and see?

It's meant to be that if you believe Bruce that this is not real, then the reality stops the minute Hatter has infected him. Did he meet Hatter in the past? Yes. Did he reject Hatter's offer of technology? Yes. Did Hatter put a tag in his pocked to try and dope him? Yes. Did he find that? Yes. Everything past that, whether he knows that Bruce is Batman, whether he followed him and saw that he was struggling to take down crime, all of that is likely in Bruce's head if you believe that it's fake. All of that means he doesn't know he's Bruce Wayne, he doesn't know any of it; it's all sort of within Bruce's own mind at that point, if that's the side you're on. That's it.

And you're also bringing in the Blackhawks. Is there any connection to the New 52 series?

A little bit. I didn't want to totally discount that, but it's more of a connection to the secret history of the Blackhawks that ties to who they were in the 50s. It's also a mystery that's going to continue into stuff we're doing over the summer.

So this isn't going to end in the next issue?

No, it actually gets bigger; that mystery gets bigger next issue.

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With Duke Thomas, to you what makes him best suited to be Batman's partner?

I think what makes him best-suited for this moment in particular is that, like in this issue, I think Izzy speaks to it a bit, which is that I think it's a moment where generations of readers coming in want to see heroes that exist independently from the heroes that they love, that they also love that they grew up with that are the main heroes. I think characters like Ms. Marvel and Spider-Gwen really speak to that and have become real staples. At DC, I think the success of a book like Detective Comics that foregrounds a bunch of characters that are relatively young and different Cassandra Cain--and even Batwoman is a new character if you're talking about 10 years versus 20, 30, 40 years, and done in different ways. I think the excitement around creating a character that's called something different like Orphan (Cassandra Cain) has a new take. I think all of that stuff is really exciting.

So for me that idea that Duke is his partner isn't what I'm thinking. It's more Duke is somebody who is looking to find his place in the DCU and in Gotham in a way that almost speaks to the core value of him. He's about the fact that to be a hero, you find a way to do it your way independently of the people that have inspired you. He always said that Robin doesn't need a Batman. So he's trying to find a place in Gotham that's his own and very different than anything anybody else has. And not to be too spoiler-y, but we're trying to hint at it pretty hard for the last year or so in terms of he goes out by day a lot as opposed to the other characters. He seems to have different sorts of connections to Gotham, so in that way we're trying to set him up that he'll have a different role, different geography and stuff.

In your opinion, what makes Batman the world's greatest detective?

I think the fact that he never gives up. The thing I love about Batman, like the core thing about him is that you put him in a situation where somebody says it's impossible to solve this, it's impossible to get out of this, and he always does. And the very core of his existence, he's somebody who you could say, "Okay, the worst thing that could happen to a kid happens to him. The odds are he's going to become disillusioned and become at least a damaged person and become hindered by this." Batman is the opposite. Sure he's crazy. But the way that he comes out of it is he defies all those odds. He comes out as this huge symbol of inspiration and turns himself into kind of the opposite of what you'd expect to happen to somebody that somebody would become if that happened to them.

So to me what makes him the greatest detective is the fact that regardless of the case and the difficulty of it, he will not stop until he figures it out.

What can you tease about issue nine?

It's a culmination of this whole arc. Where basically it's essentially like somebody steps out of the shadows and says, "I was trying to show you three ways the world could end. Through natural disaster," you know like the permafrost melting and spores being released, "through biological weapons," hinted at in the Ivy arc, "or through madness," which is this, the subjective craziness which Hatter says, "We all just want to disappear into our own minds and forget about all of this and create a world that we feel comfortable with whether it's the way we take our news, or the way we create our own perception of the world," that's what he's kind of proposing.

And so this person steps out and says, "Look, you're just the story we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better, but I've shown you how fragile everything is and now I'm going to push it all over the edge." So it's pretty fun. I'm really proud of this arc, honestly. You know to be able to do very, very different types of stories with each villain within one arc and then make it one kind of collected thing, I've never tried it, so it's so exciting just to get to do different things than I have, and to get to work with such different people than I'm used so. So I really love it.

All Star Batman #8 is on sale in stores and online Wednesday, March 15.