Scott Snyder quotes:

[Duke] is the same way that Harper Row is a character who doesn't want to know who you are beneath the mask, and that makes her interesting. She'll show up and help Batman, but she never wants to know if he's Bruce Wayne.

"The Cursed Wheel" is the heart of the whole year on All-Star. All-Star is a series that's largely compartmentalized so that every artist can reinvent a villain and have Batman go up against the villain in a way that's pretty singular.

Beware The Court of Owls, that watches all the time, ruling Gotham from a shadowed perch, behind granite and lime. They watch you at your hearth, they watch you in your bed speak not a whispered word of them or they'll send the Talon for your head.

Duke is a character who believes that heroism and the Robin mantle can exist entirely separate from Batman himself.

Having that North Star for every story [about Batman] is really key for me. It allows me to go farther and farther off the reservation.

I really wanted to make sure that if we set Duke up, that he's set up the right way and he's his own hero for the right reasons.

I've always been a relatively big history buff. In college, I took a lot of history courses, and when I was in grad school, I liked to audit them.

"The Cursed Wheel," which Declan [Shalvey] is starting here, is the one constant. It's a story in the backups that will go through the whole year and be the one consistent narrative. It anchors the entire [book].

Bruce sees in this character - who fought all the way through "Superheavy" when his parents were missing, and now is determined to fight even though his parents are telling him he's worth nothing - the essence of Batman.

I remember when I was in school I had this teacher give me this E.L. Doctorow quote: They asked him how much historical research he does for his books and he said, 'As little as possible.' So I try and adhere to that.

A post-9/11, modern take being Batman training people to be the heroes they know they can be on their own.

Vampires as creatures have evolved over time as different vampire bloodlines have hit different populations of humans. Every once in a while the blood will make something new and mutate into a new species with different powers, abilities, weakness, physical characteristics, and so on. I don't want to give anything away, but there are whole species and branches that date all the way back to pre-modern times.

I had to fight for wingdings. Batman needs to curse sometimes!

Jordie Bellaire knows how to tell a story with color.

On this global stage, Superman is someone that we can all look up to and he's almost kind of ultimately American.

One of the things that's great is that Batman is a character that lends himself to very personal stories.

Sometimes, all it takes is a few words to change your life.

I always, always got to be the last man standing.

I like stories where people have to face some big demons internally. It always seems to be an element of horror, because it's pretty scary to have to face yourself and the things you're most worried about: your own abilities and your own capabilities and your own level of competence in being a hero.

When I get the possibility of using a character like Bruce Wayne or Dick Grayson, I try and think about what's most exciting or interesting about them as a person, so I try and think what they are at their core, or what piece of their psychology do I gravitate toward that I respect, and I'm excited by it when I read books about them.

If I tell you, will you let met go? - You bet, partner. [...] - You promised! - Nope. I said "you bet." You did ... and you lost.

[Bruce] sees a lot of himself in [Batman], you know? You could argue that something even worse than what happened to Bruce happened to [Duke's] parents, who are now Joker-ized*. They're not just gone or irretrievably lost. And I'm NOT curing them, so you can put that out there! There's no relief from that.

Does it matter how long they were together that night? To lovers, an hour can last a century. But even for lovers, every hour ends.

First of all, what made him [Duke in "Zero Year"] captivating is this sense of somebody who wants to save the city regardless of whether Batman wants to or not, but has been inspired by Batman. He's always been - not combative with Batman or anything - but I think he has a sense that what Robin is and what heroism is in Gotham is something that's inspired by Batman and sort of separate from Batman.

I read THE WICKED + THE DIVINE last night, and no matter how high your expectations are for it, its better.

I spoke to Geoff Johns a lot. We went back and forth, and found a way to bring up the best qualities in his personality and psychology and also fill a niche in Gotham that we've never seen. It became about is there a way to really plant this hero in Gotham and say this is someone you haven't seen before - both in terms of who they are as a person and who they are as a hero.

I was on Batman with "Superheavy" or "Zero Year" where there was a lot of fun and bombast, but it was also personal. [In All-Star], I wanted to take that to its complete extreme, like the end of the Earth extreme, where it's over-the-top humorous, yet at the same time really deeply about what I think is of this particular moment in time, at least for me. The things I'm terrified of and the things I'm hopeful about. My life is the page.

If I know what something's about, and I can always have that touchstone, I feel like I can reach for really ridiculous humor and also go really dark in terms of the things I'm afraid of.

It's one of the worst nightmare situations we could create for a young character, having the people who are supposed to believe in you keep telling you you're nothing.

KGBeast starts chasing our heroes in a big way, and you get the return of an old character from the mythology that I think people will be really excited to see.

That's what everyone thinks--they think being a cop is about punishing people for doing wrong. But that's not true. You know it isn't. It's about believing in people, believing in the good. In the will of people to do what's right despite their own instincts.

The hope that they have legs. That's the biggest fear you always have creating new people. You love them, but then they kind of dissipate. Sometimes you don't get to write them as much as you'd like, like me and Harper Row.

There's nothing comparative to Damien [the current Robin] or any of the other characters. I love those characters. And this isn't, "This is better than that." I think a couple of people misread what we had said in the first issue about that stuff.

This one's like that because it's about these things that I think weigh heavily on me in terms of my own failings and the things that I worry about and my personal demons. Is the sum of my personal demons greater than the things that I like about myself? Is this moment - because it's a particulary high tension, scary moment for all of us in terms of the global climate - going to bring out the best or the worst in us?

What Batman is saying is that, "I want to try something new that's more about this era and this moment." And I do think that it speaks to a modern take [as opposed] to a 90s take or a 2000s take being maybe the older program about having a sidekick.

With this particular series [The Cursed Wheel] I'm going farther in that direction than I've tried before in terms of the elasticity of the mythology.

You take the thing that is the worst thing that could have happened to you, the worst challenge in your life, and you turn it into fuel. You don't give up. And that's what Gotham is about.