The San Diego Comic-Con was the perfect place to talk to Batman One Bad Day: Riddler creators Tom King and Mitch Gerads.
With Paul Dano's portrayal as the Riddler in The Batman, Bruce Wayne's smartest enemy is finally getting his moment in the spotlight. More than just his cinematic appearance though, Riddler has also become a major threat to Batman in the comic over the last few years. His appearance in the recent blockbuster event The War of Riddles and Jokes had huge implications for the entire Batfamily, with its effects still being felt today. Playing on that increased prominence, Batman One Bad Day: Riddler along with a handful of other One Bad Day books themed around other prominent Batman villains. The new book comes from acclaimed creators Tom King and Mitch Gerads, who previously became comic superstars with their work on Mister Miracle.
With the new book releasing this month, Screen Rant caught up with King and Gerads to discuss their new project and just what make Edward Nygma such a memorable Batman villain.
How's your ComiCon been going?
Mitch Gerads: I had all these thoughts in my head of what this year was going to be like, you know, post-COVID and everything. But it's really been like riding a bike, everything's fine, I knew where I was going, and I knew where things were. I pretty much didn't miss a step.
Tom King: I very distinctly halfway through COVID feeling like my dream in life was just to get to a Comic-Con because, and have a few of my friends drinking and talking about comics. But it seemed just so far away. A stupid dream. People dream of riches and lands far away. But I was like, I want to be in a hotel. And there's something beautiful about actually achieving that one small, but wonderful dream again,
Has the pandemic affected your workflow at all?
Mitch Gerads: It made me busier. Which is a good problem to have, I guess. I mean, ostensibly, nothing changed too dramatically, because I work from home and I'm at my office when I draw, and very kindly no one ever told me to stop drawing. Not not too much difference. I just had more time to do stuff, or at least more of an excuse to not leave the house.
Tom King: Complete change. 100% because we got very lucky that Jim Lee called me right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I was like, "What are we gonna do with the whole world shut down?" Jim was like, "Just keep writing." So it became get ahead, get ahead, get ahead. And because of that, I kept writing and I got ahead enough that I could switch how I do series and things where instead of writing, when when you're on doubleshot, Batman, which I was for four or five years, it was you write issue 28, then you write issue 36, then you write issue 17, then you write a special. It's a scattershot way of writing. I still think Brad Meltzer told me when he wrote, he would write all series all at once. So I completely switched it starting with Rorschach. We're working on a novel flow of issues in a row and that's how I've been doing everything. So you know, like, Human Target I wrote all together and the new series Gotham Year One is all written together. So yeah, that's changed. Or like, this series that we're working on now is what, 64 pages?
Mitch Gerads: Plus you also have kids at home.
Tom King: I do have kids at home. Yeah. My wife and I have a schedule that I took the mornings. So like I had them until basically two o'clock in the afternoon and then she'd switch in and I'd work in the afternoons. My wife's a full-time lawyer so you know I would be sort of locking my room between two o'clock to seven o'clock.
Creating a story centered around The Riddler comes with the expectation that there will be some amount of riddles. In this book though Riddler seems to be moving away from riddles. Can you talk about moving Riddler away from his namesake?
Tom King: There are tons of actual riddles in this book. There are a lot of good fun little riddles. What's my favorite one? I think it goes "What word is most often spelled incorrectly?" It's "Incorrectly" is often spelled incorrectly. Because it's spelled incorrectly. I didn't make that up. That's an old old riddle. That's like, on greeting cards in the 30s.
But what attracted me to this is looking at every Riddler story over the past 70 some odd years. There was a sameness to them. I'm not at all saying that they're bad. I mean, I wrote some of those issues, so I'm guilty of it too. But like basically in any medium from cartoons, to movies, to comics, the Riddler has a riddle that he doesn't think Batman will ever solve. And then Batman solves it and because Batman is smart and he knows like the Riddle of the Sphinx and then Riddler says "Oh no," and he falls onto the giant typewriter.
Mitch and I literally did research and watched all the animated cartoons, and that story seems to me to be told and I'm getting a little tired of it. So I there was a Paul Dini Riddler run on The Detective which I really liked where he kind of was Batman for a little while. That always appealed to me. The idea that Riddler was holding himself, back almost pulling on his own reins, and the riddles were just a kind of crutch. He was giving Batman the key to catching him and he was saying "I could defeat you. But here's a riddle. So you can see if you can catch me because it's fun. It's fun to play." This story is what happens when he's like, "Riddles aren't fun to me anymore. I don't want to play this game anymore. I'm actually smarter than you and if it wasn't for the riddles, I could beat you." So what happens when he drops that? Batman actually has to confront someone who is smarter than him so what does that mean? What happens when he goes up to Batman and says, "Hi, Bruce. How you doing? Here's where Dick lives, here's what Barbara lives, here's where Cassandra lives. I have bombs in all of their houses. Anyways, you want to get a cup of coffee?" To me, that's a new Riddler. The title of our thing is called Dreadful Reins. It's the reins of power.
Given the One Bad Day moniker, that's inherently inviting comparisons to The Killing Joke. Does having that legacy add any pressure?
Tom King: I wrote Rorschach, so it's something I've already confronted. I came into comics almost as an Alan Moore clone, like, trying to be Alan Moore very much in my own way. You know the joke with Omega Men was like "Who Omegas the Omega Men?" And I was playing with these nine- grids and all that stuff.
Look, the people who are reading comics today, we want them to be reading the best comics that were ever written. We don't want them to be like, "The best comics were written in 1983. And you're kind of 40 years late to the 1980s." So in that case we have to think that we have the possibility of writing those great comics. And if we have to get in the ring with the people in 1991, we have to be confident enough to think we can take them on and we can win because that's our responsibility to the audience. We're not here to tell you that we're just going to write the greatest comics ever written again, we'd just live in their shadow forever. No, we're gonna give you the greatest comics ever written so you have the chance to buy that off the shelf for the first time, just like your father did.
Mitch Gerads: I think we've always approached our projects under that auspicious angle, which is I mean, it's like obviously scary because you're going up against things that you find to be the best of the best. But it's also the thing that I think elevates you if you want to rise to that occasion. And you know, it's not for me to say if we do it or not, it's for the readers, but I at least want to know that I put my best foot forward to attempt it
The Riddler has had just so many designs over the years. What was the design process like for deg the Riddler?
Mitch Gerads: He's my favorite Batman villain and has been, but I always thought that, aside from the animated stuff, I've always hated his design with the big mutton chops that started in early 2000s or whatever. It was pretty New 52. I think there was a version where you had a question mark mohawk at some point? So I've always liked that animated series version, you know, the guy in the suit, well put together. But then in The New Adventures of Batman, you know, the fourth season I think, and then that's continued on and to just recently in Justice League Action, he was portrayed this way. You know, the bald guy with the black makeup underneath. So I was like, "Oh, that's, that's an intense look." So I kind of combined the suit look with that look, and we get this very kind of sallow creepy dude. And I really enjoyed drawing it.
If you had complete creative control, what other classic DC villain would you want to elevate to the level of Batman's new nemesis?
Mitch Gerads: I mean, like I said, Riddler's my favorite so I'm kind of I'm literally doing my dream book. Right. But under those rules, yeah. I think Man-Bat would be fantastic. Just make that guy terrifying. Like a real cryptid.
Tom King: This has been done 1000 times, but Lex Luthor versus Bruce Wayne. I think, like, it's always been brains versus brawn in the Superman books for 80 years. So brains versus brains. Corporate Executive versus Corporate Executive. Corporate secret life versus corporate secret life, right? Like they're almost like evil reflections of each other.
