MichaelDoran
11-10-2002, 01:13 PM
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><a href="http://classic.newsarama.com/DC/RRP/Bmdm102.jpg" target="_top"><img src="http://classic.newsarama.com/DC/RRP/Bmdm102_t.jpg" width="175" height="266" border="0" alt="BATMAN: Death and the Maidens" align="right"></a>It was originally a 1872 painting by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, the title of which has been used for many other forms of art, including a symphony and a play. Come 2003, the title of Death and the Maidens will get a shake by comics, teaming Greg Rucka and Klaus Janson for a nine-issue miniseries pitting Batman against a long-time enemy – and some of his own demons as well.
For Janson, the miniseries will be his first return to a large superhero project, pairing him with a writer who’s recently signed off of the regular writing gig on Detective Comics, but is revisiting the Batcave one more time. Of course, this does lead to a question with a similar slant to a well-known, eternal one…which came first, the story, or the Klaus?
“The Klaus came first,” Rucka replied, laughing. “I heard through the Bat-office that he was looking to do something, and I was asked if I was interested in doing something with him. I don’t now if he actually wanted to do anything with me, but from where I was standing, as soon as his name was mentioned, I was there. Twist my arm – it really didn’t take, how shall we say...convincing.”
The project was mostly orchestrated by Bat-editor Matt Idelson, who brought Rucka and Janson to the same table. “We sat around and started discussing things that we wanted to do, and in particular, things that Matt thought were lacking in more recent Batman stories or arcs, and that Klaus was interested in doing. He didn’t want to do something and have it be ‘just’ a Batman story – he wanted it to have some resonance.
“So we started talking about Bruce in particular, and Klaus had a couple of suggestions of some things that he wanted to see – scenes that got his engine going with regards to what he was looking forward to working on. That led to the writing. Starting with those ideas, I came up with a story that would have scenes like the ones Klaus wanted to see. From there, it really took off.”
Rucka said that he first encountered the title Death and the Maidens from the symphony, and ran into it again this past summer when he was in England, and saw the original painting. “The painting is what inspired everything afterwards, from the symphony to the play and everything else,” Rucka said. “When I started writing the story, we really didn’t have any title for it, but as certain themes kept manifesting, we started calling it Death and the Maiden. Later, when I pointed out to Matt that the painting was actually called Death and the Maidens, we switched it right over, because that actually fit better with the story, because, well – there’s more than one ‘maiden.’
The painting in and of itself isn’t super-evocative, but it does kind of touch on what we’re doing. It’s a Ra’s story, and it’s about these particular women that Ra’s is surrounded with, and also with Batman and with one woman that Batman is particularly focused on. And then of course, there’s some death in it, so we’ve got death, and we’ve got maidens.
<img src="http://classic.newsarama.com/Death_Maidens.jpg" width="150" height="150" border="0" alt="Death and the Maidens by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes" align="left">“We figure the title has been used for a symphony, an opera, a play, probably a poem, and of course the classical painting. We decided that it was time someone did a graphic novel – it was the medium that was missing.
In Rucka’s view, Janson’s ideas meshed perfectly with the scenes he wanted to illustrate involving Bruce to produce a story with one overarching goal, that is, remind readers, Batman, and the rest of the DCU that Ra’s is, for lack of a better term, the real deal - early comparisons to Fleming’s Dr. No did little justice to the character, and Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil has made it so it’s difficult to even think about a megalomaniacal supervillain bent on controlling the world without at least the hint of a snicker. Ra’s isn’t Dr. Evil with a funky haircut, soul patch and thing for capes. Death and the Maidens is Rucka's and Janson’s way of reminding readers that Ra’s is the most dangerous man on the earth for the DCU.
“One of the things that we wanted to do,” Rucka explained, “is that we wanted to give Ra’s his teeth back. He’s been softened, and I think he’s been softened because there’s a certain cool factor that people have picked up on with him. The fact of it is a lot of his argument holds a lot of water. If you met him and you didn’t know who he was, and decided that he didn’t look too freaky with his weird beard and strange outfit and were to sit down with him, you would probably determine a couple of things pretty quickly – you’d determine that he’s very smart. You’d determine that he’s very charismatic, and when he launched into telling you that he really felt the world was in jeopardy, you would find yourself agreeing with him. If you sat with him long enough, he’d say something like, ‘Every day, there’s less and less potable water left on the world, every day, we put more and more toxins in our soil and our atmosphere, and every day more people are born to such an extent that it’s very conceivable that the weight of humanity on the planet will one day be more than the weight of the planet. We’re destroying our world. It cannot sustain it.’
The writer continued with his hypothetical, fictional conversation: “After he gets done with his speech, thanks to his charisma and intelligence, you’d probably find yourself agreeing with him. Then, when he says, ‘How can people of good conscience sit by and allow this to happen?’ You’d want to know where to sign up for his cause. Ra’s then says, ‘Luckily, I have the solution.’
“Of course, you’ve got to know what this wonderful solution is, and he says, looking at you with all the intelligence and charisma that you found so alluring, ‘We have to kill 90% of the people on the planet.’ That’s when you start to be afraid of this man in the pit of your stomach. Then he looks at you again and says, ‘I have a way to do it.’
“We really wanted to bring that back, and make it clear that Ra’s is dangerous, dangerous guy, and he’s crazy in the sense that he’s disconnected from humanity enough that he believes killing billions and billions of people is the answer to the problem. Not build colony ships, and find new places for man to live – he wants to kill nearly everyone.”
<a href="http://classic.newsarama.com/DC/RRP/Bmdm103.jpg" target="_top"><img src="http://classic.newsarama.com/DC/RRP/Bmdm103_t.jpg" width="175" height="266" border="0" alt="BATMAN: Death and the Maidens" align="right"></a>Even then, Rucka explained, when Ra’s would talk about killing off upwards of 90% of the people on the planet, it was always in the abstract. “What has Ra’s actually ever done?” Rucka asked. “I don’t think you can go through the Ra’s canon and find anywhere where he’s wiped out millions of people. You can only find stories where he tried to, and he was stopped.
“We’re talking about a guy who’s been alive for nearly 600 years, so he’s probably made a couple of runs at it, but it wouldn’t have been until the 20th century where the mechanism for doing it would’ve existed. It hasn’t been until the 20th century where you can create a disease in The Stand-type of scenario. You can go nuclear. Those options didn’t exist before. One of the things that we wanted to do in this story is make it clear that Ra’s is actually a bad, bad guy. Just because he can talk eloquently, just because he calls Batman ‘Detective’ doesn’t mean you should trust him as far as you can spit him, and doesn’t mean that you can convince him of anything. He believes that he is right, and he’s going to do what is required.”
The storyline (and where the main ‘maiden’ of the ‘Maidens’ come in) focuses on one of the women in Ra’s entourage, one that has not only seen the extent of how bad Ra’s can be firsthand, but also some conclusions about the world.
“Those conclusions lead her to a course of action, and those conclusions also mirror, going back to what Klaus was initially after, the story that we’re telling about Bruce, which is both Bruce and this woman, whose name is Nyssa, they both are terrified of apathy in different ways,” Rucka said. “For Bruce, it’s a fear of waking up and not feeling it any more – not feeling the need to go out and fight because of what happened 25 years ago.
“Nyssa looks at the world, and as far as she’s concerned, the world doesn’t give a rat’s ass – it just doesn’t care. Tragedy after tragedy after tragedy occurs. Horrible crime and horrible crime occurs in the course of humanity, and people don’t care. They just keep going. Because of all the trauma this woman has been through, she really doesn’t feel anything anymore. So she suffers from the apathy that Bruce is afraid of. Unlike Bruce, who acts apathetic and isn’t, you have this woman who acts like she isn’t apathetic, but really has to work very hard to remember what these emotions should look like on the outside. She’s got a good reason for being as dead as she is, emotionally, and a very good part of that is tired to Ra’s.”
And for more than that? Wait for the series. “It’s one of those stories that’s really came up and turned out to be quite good, so I really don’t want to give anything away,” Rucka said. “It’s got Bruce, it’s got Ra’s, and it asks some questions and goes down streets that maybe haven’t been asked or traveled before.”
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For Janson, the miniseries will be his first return to a large superhero project, pairing him with a writer who’s recently signed off of the regular writing gig on Detective Comics, but is revisiting the Batcave one more time. Of course, this does lead to a question with a similar slant to a well-known, eternal one…which came first, the story, or the Klaus?
“The Klaus came first,” Rucka replied, laughing. “I heard through the Bat-office that he was looking to do something, and I was asked if I was interested in doing something with him. I don’t now if he actually wanted to do anything with me, but from where I was standing, as soon as his name was mentioned, I was there. Twist my arm – it really didn’t take, how shall we say...convincing.”
The project was mostly orchestrated by Bat-editor Matt Idelson, who brought Rucka and Janson to the same table. “We sat around and started discussing things that we wanted to do, and in particular, things that Matt thought were lacking in more recent Batman stories or arcs, and that Klaus was interested in doing. He didn’t want to do something and have it be ‘just’ a Batman story – he wanted it to have some resonance.
“So we started talking about Bruce in particular, and Klaus had a couple of suggestions of some things that he wanted to see – scenes that got his engine going with regards to what he was looking forward to working on. That led to the writing. Starting with those ideas, I came up with a story that would have scenes like the ones Klaus wanted to see. From there, it really took off.”
Rucka said that he first encountered the title Death and the Maidens from the symphony, and ran into it again this past summer when he was in England, and saw the original painting. “The painting is what inspired everything afterwards, from the symphony to the play and everything else,” Rucka said. “When I started writing the story, we really didn’t have any title for it, but as certain themes kept manifesting, we started calling it Death and the Maiden. Later, when I pointed out to Matt that the painting was actually called Death and the Maidens, we switched it right over, because that actually fit better with the story, because, well – there’s more than one ‘maiden.’
The painting in and of itself isn’t super-evocative, but it does kind of touch on what we’re doing. It’s a Ra’s story, and it’s about these particular women that Ra’s is surrounded with, and also with Batman and with one woman that Batman is particularly focused on. And then of course, there’s some death in it, so we’ve got death, and we’ve got maidens.
<img src="http://classic.newsarama.com/Death_Maidens.jpg" width="150" height="150" border="0" alt="Death and the Maidens by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes" align="left">“We figure the title has been used for a symphony, an opera, a play, probably a poem, and of course the classical painting. We decided that it was time someone did a graphic novel – it was the medium that was missing.
In Rucka’s view, Janson’s ideas meshed perfectly with the scenes he wanted to illustrate involving Bruce to produce a story with one overarching goal, that is, remind readers, Batman, and the rest of the DCU that Ra’s is, for lack of a better term, the real deal - early comparisons to Fleming’s Dr. No did little justice to the character, and Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil has made it so it’s difficult to even think about a megalomaniacal supervillain bent on controlling the world without at least the hint of a snicker. Ra’s isn’t Dr. Evil with a funky haircut, soul patch and thing for capes. Death and the Maidens is Rucka's and Janson’s way of reminding readers that Ra’s is the most dangerous man on the earth for the DCU.
“One of the things that we wanted to do,” Rucka explained, “is that we wanted to give Ra’s his teeth back. He’s been softened, and I think he’s been softened because there’s a certain cool factor that people have picked up on with him. The fact of it is a lot of his argument holds a lot of water. If you met him and you didn’t know who he was, and decided that he didn’t look too freaky with his weird beard and strange outfit and were to sit down with him, you would probably determine a couple of things pretty quickly – you’d determine that he’s very smart. You’d determine that he’s very charismatic, and when he launched into telling you that he really felt the world was in jeopardy, you would find yourself agreeing with him. If you sat with him long enough, he’d say something like, ‘Every day, there’s less and less potable water left on the world, every day, we put more and more toxins in our soil and our atmosphere, and every day more people are born to such an extent that it’s very conceivable that the weight of humanity on the planet will one day be more than the weight of the planet. We’re destroying our world. It cannot sustain it.’
The writer continued with his hypothetical, fictional conversation: “After he gets done with his speech, thanks to his charisma and intelligence, you’d probably find yourself agreeing with him. Then, when he says, ‘How can people of good conscience sit by and allow this to happen?’ You’d want to know where to sign up for his cause. Ra’s then says, ‘Luckily, I have the solution.’
“Of course, you’ve got to know what this wonderful solution is, and he says, looking at you with all the intelligence and charisma that you found so alluring, ‘We have to kill 90% of the people on the planet.’ That’s when you start to be afraid of this man in the pit of your stomach. Then he looks at you again and says, ‘I have a way to do it.’
“We really wanted to bring that back, and make it clear that Ra’s is dangerous, dangerous guy, and he’s crazy in the sense that he’s disconnected from humanity enough that he believes killing billions and billions of people is the answer to the problem. Not build colony ships, and find new places for man to live – he wants to kill nearly everyone.”
<a href="http://classic.newsarama.com/DC/RRP/Bmdm103.jpg" target="_top"><img src="http://classic.newsarama.com/DC/RRP/Bmdm103_t.jpg" width="175" height="266" border="0" alt="BATMAN: Death and the Maidens" align="right"></a>Even then, Rucka explained, when Ra’s would talk about killing off upwards of 90% of the people on the planet, it was always in the abstract. “What has Ra’s actually ever done?” Rucka asked. “I don’t think you can go through the Ra’s canon and find anywhere where he’s wiped out millions of people. You can only find stories where he tried to, and he was stopped.
“We’re talking about a guy who’s been alive for nearly 600 years, so he’s probably made a couple of runs at it, but it wouldn’t have been until the 20th century where the mechanism for doing it would’ve existed. It hasn’t been until the 20th century where you can create a disease in The Stand-type of scenario. You can go nuclear. Those options didn’t exist before. One of the things that we wanted to do in this story is make it clear that Ra’s is actually a bad, bad guy. Just because he can talk eloquently, just because he calls Batman ‘Detective’ doesn’t mean you should trust him as far as you can spit him, and doesn’t mean that you can convince him of anything. He believes that he is right, and he’s going to do what is required.”
The storyline (and where the main ‘maiden’ of the ‘Maidens’ come in) focuses on one of the women in Ra’s entourage, one that has not only seen the extent of how bad Ra’s can be firsthand, but also some conclusions about the world.
“Those conclusions lead her to a course of action, and those conclusions also mirror, going back to what Klaus was initially after, the story that we’re telling about Bruce, which is both Bruce and this woman, whose name is Nyssa, they both are terrified of apathy in different ways,” Rucka said. “For Bruce, it’s a fear of waking up and not feeling it any more – not feeling the need to go out and fight because of what happened 25 years ago.
“Nyssa looks at the world, and as far as she’s concerned, the world doesn’t give a rat’s ass – it just doesn’t care. Tragedy after tragedy after tragedy occurs. Horrible crime and horrible crime occurs in the course of humanity, and people don’t care. They just keep going. Because of all the trauma this woman has been through, she really doesn’t feel anything anymore. So she suffers from the apathy that Bruce is afraid of. Unlike Bruce, who acts apathetic and isn’t, you have this woman who acts like she isn’t apathetic, but really has to work very hard to remember what these emotions should look like on the outside. She’s got a good reason for being as dead as she is, emotionally, and a very good part of that is tired to Ra’s.”
And for more than that? Wait for the series. “It’s one of those stories that’s really came up and turned out to be quite good, so I really don’t want to give anything away,” Rucka said. “It’s got Bruce, it’s got Ra’s, and it asks some questions and goes down streets that maybe haven’t been asked or traveled before.”
<a href=http://classic.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=000039>CLICK HERE</a> to return to the main menu to read about more of DC’s upcoming projects.
Got something to say about this? <a href=http://classic.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=agree>CLICK HERE</a> to register and join one of comics' most active online communities. Registration is fast and easy. </font>