The Murphyverse is one of the most exciting takes on Batman in recent memory, so we sat down with Batman White Knight Presents: Red Hood writers Sean Gordon Murphy and Clay McCormack at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con to discuss the upcoming reinterpretation of Red Hood.
Beginning in 2017 with Batman: White Knight, the Murphyverse is an alternate take on Batman where the Joker is briefly cured of his mental illness and starts becoming a force for good, just as Batman loses the public’s trust. The first book was so successful and critically acclaimed that it instantly earned a sequel with Curse of the White Knight before getting two spinoffs. The series’ most recent entry, Batman: Beyond the White Knight takes the series into the future and also is the premier of Jason Todd’s Red Hood, who was actually this universe’s first Robin.
With the release of Batman White Knight Presents: Red Hood being imminent, Screen Rant spoke to writers Sean Gordon Murphy and Clay McCormack about the comic as well as the Murphyverse in general.
How is returning to Comic-Con after the two-year hiatus?
Clay McCormack: You know, it’s funny. A friend of mine who had never come to the convention before came with me. And he’s like, “How do you usually do these things?” I said, “Well, I usually like to walk around the perimeter and kind of zigzag through the floor.” The first day, we tried to do that and we didn’t even finish getting around the entire place because it was like a mile or something to walk the whole floor. Yeah, it was a shock to the system.
The Murphyverse is such a radical departure from what readers expect from a Batman story. Were there any restrictions that DC placed on the universe?
Sean Gordon Murphy: You know, they’ve been good and sort of let me off the leash. I want to stick to the rules for the most part. Like I want the characters to be generally true to their backstories and I don’t want that many radical departures. It should be familiar but different. Killing off characters is something that I don’t remember if I asked permission for or if I just did it. But they were fine with it. But you know we had to be careful about the normal stuff like guns and nudity. So yeah, I always stay within the guidelines and treat everything with respect. If there’s something that they don’t love, they’ll let me know and I’m happy to fix it.
I feel like I’ve got all the freedom in the world and my own universe, Batman. I mean, like, everyone wants that. So I don’t know how I ended up here. But it’s like Marvel’s Ultimate Line but with Gotham, right? Being able to expand it with Clay and my wife’s help for future books, all that’s been really fun. You know, I never thought it would get this crazy. I thought it would just be one volume and that was it. I was going to kill Bruce Wayne at the end of the first book. Frank Miller never did that. I’m going to do it first. But then we decided to do a sequel.
The Murphyverse is truly your baby and is named after you. Is there any added pressure that comes with that?
Sean Gordon Murphy: I mean, Grant had the Grantverse and there are the Snyderverse movies. Pressure though? Yeah, for sure. I feel like I want to do well for DC. I want the people to work with me and for me to be proud. I want it to be a place where creators come and people know they’re getting something different or special. If it’ll help in some way for me to throw my weight around then I’m happy to try. That’s kind of the goal is to make it a premium experience. Even the way we print the books, there are no ads in it. So having Clay on board to help guide me, sort of helping me on the side since the very beginning, just bouncing ideas off as a friend. Then he helped me with notes and my scripts. And I was able to keep moving faster when my editors at DC were not able to keep up. So that was helpful. Then I started paying him and then I’m like, we need to give him credit for a book and hopefully more in the future.
So what is the collaborative process like between you two for this specific book?
Clay McCormack: It’s been good, you know, the bones of the story were Sean. He kind of came to me like, “I want to do this thing. Jason Todd, and he trains his own Robin,” then we just kind of hashed the whole thing out. You know, I went off and I wrote the script for the most part, and then I sent it to him and he’d give me all the intense notes that I’ve been giving him for five years.
Sean Gordon Murphy: He’s more stubborn than I am in a lot of ways. Like I’m happy to fix stuff when it’s not great. And he digs his heels in.
Clay McCormack: Only when necessary. We’ve been kind of through this back and forth. Though I think we pretty much got everything I we wanted to do
Sean Gordon Murphy: When we realized that Jason should be like Johnny Lawrence from Cobra Kai, this brute and loser who knew how to fight but was kind of a sad sack. This was his chance to redeem himself with a young person in his life. That was where it started to click.
Clay McCormack: That’s what hooked it for me because there was so much Sean fleshed out with this idea of Jason’s backstory. It was all great stuff. But I couldn’t quite track the thing’s end, for me to be like, really I think I know how we can do this. Then we were both like, well, he’s kind of like Johnny Lawrence a little bit where he’s a man out of time and has to deal with this younger person. He thinks he knows everything and he’s introduced to this new younger version of himself who kind of opens his mind up very reluctantly. And I was like, okay, that’s, we can work with
Sean Gordon Murphy: You know, he’s the first Robin so I changed the orders sort of accidentally, and people were very curious. I owe them an explanation. So I had to sort of figure out a way to dig out of that hole that some people will probably never accept him being the first Robin. And that’s fine. If you can get past that one thing, then I promise you it’s worth it.
Making Jason the first Robin is a big change and has big implications for characters like Dick. How did you factor that in when writing this book?
Sean Gordon Murphy: It actually makes more sense to me now because I’m biased. But Jason was the first one. His teenage years were sort of over and he didn’t really have much of a childhood either, just like Bruce, so they were closer in age. Bruce sort of treated him like a little brother and not so much as a son. Jason sort of really wanted him to be a dad and that didn’t work out and he was supposedly killed. So he’s like, Bruce’s original sin. So when he meets Dick, he’s like, “Oh, let’s do this the right way. He’s younger. Let’s give him a childhood” you know? And then he becomes Robin. It’s good to have a flashback where Dick is dressed in the Robin costume and it’s just like fate where it’s like, “Oh, Jason was a Robin died. This kid’s name is Robin and his parents just died. Maybe Bruce should take him in.” It sort of makes more sense that way. And that explains why Jason is so angry after he survived. He just never knew how to approach Bruce with it and just sort of wanted to hurt him. And they never, you know, think letting him think he was dead.
We sort of cameoed Tim but I don’t know, there’s been a few Robins I imagined, but we haven’t fleshed out when or where.
Clay McCormack: It’s been interesting to watch what’s happened to Jason because, you know, it started in the first volume as kind of this one little moment that was meant to be used by Joker as kind of a leverage point against Batman. Then, as it kept coming up across books like Curse of the White Knight and Harley Quinn, it became clear that Jason’s capture and torture was the central moment for everybody else in the story. It affects literally everybody else. It affects Bruce, it affects Harley, it affects Jack. So one of the things with the Red Hood book is we never figured out how that affected Jason. So that was one of the other things we wanted to get into is what’s he been doing? What’s he been trying to do to get himself better?
Sean Gordon Murphy: Luckily, we’ve got Simone Di Meo on the art who did a killer job. I should have named Jonathan in the other interview. I hate it when writers don’t mention the artists.
After the Red Hood book, at least from what I’ve read, is a White Knight: Justice League series. Is there anything you can reveal about that? Can you reveal the Murphyverse’s Justice League roster yet?
Sean Gordon Murphy: The plan was to start dropping hints of a future Justice League. If there’s a volume 4 that I tackle after this it’d be nice to see what the other characters are doing and to sort of create a book that has the Justice League in a new way that no one’s ever seen before post-Neo future in a way. So I’m really excited by that and a kind of a World’s Finest type of thing to say that they will find this thing at the end.
Do you have a Genesis point for this whole line of White Knight books?
Sean Gordon Murphy
We do a podcast together about Batman the Animated Series, called Battass. We just finished season one of Batman Beyond. So for us that’s been the epitome of Batman alongside Batman 89.
Clay McCormack
White Knight is very steeped in the animated series. As we were going through the show we were like, “Oh, that’s where that came from, and that’s where that came from.” Even he was like, I didn’t even realize I did that.
Sean Gordon Murphy
I was influenced in ways that I had no idea. There’s one episode called The Trial and they use words like super criminals and ask if Batman should wear a badge and all that stuff. Like oh, man I stole from Paul Dini. I wrote to him and he’s like, “It’s okay. I can tell you love Harley.”
Batman is so many different things to so many different people. How do you balance doing something new while still making it recognizably Batman?
Sean Gordon Murphy
Yeah. I think the reason that Clay and I work well together is that I’ve read comics, enough, but like there’s a lot I don’t know about the Justice League and I think it gives me a slight outside perspective on Batman. I know what I want to see, I know what the rules are, but I’m happy to make changes that otherwise you can’t do. But I don’t want it to feel so foreign that it’s unrecognizable. You know, Clay is good at keeping it grounded.
Clay McCormack
He has so many big and great ideas that I consider myself more of someone who kind of like knocks the pieces. A wrangler, where if he’s going too far one way, I can say, “Well, honestly, that’s a little bit too far off the grid.” For instance, in Volume One, he towards the end of the series had this really, really great story that he wanted to put out about Mr. Freeze. It was the four or five pages of this great backstory, but it was at a point in the story where it was just going to grind everything to a halt as far as storytelling goes. So one of the things I said is, “This is really good, but I don’t think this is the place to do this.” That ended up turning into the Von Freeze one shot that he did afterward.
Sean Gordon Murphy
Yeah, I tried doing one spin-off. I’m happy taking this story and putting it on the back burner if I know I can just do something with Klaus Janson or something. So that worked out well. Even as a $6 book at the time that sold really well. So that was the beginning of doing these spin-offs in a way with my friends and seeing where this mini-universe can go.
So are there any characters or plots that you just couldn’t find a place for?
Sean Gordon Murphy
We haven’t figured out Catwoman yet. She’s like, bizarrely missing from all of it so far to the point where people are like, “Where the hell is she?” So Clay has an idea he wants to do, and I have an idea of what I want to do. Obviously, I want to do more with her, as kind of the one that got away, the girl that he dated, but it was a bad for you type of thing. So I imagined it would be mostly like a flashback to older Batman times. Clay, you wanted to infuse some wrestling into it, right?
Clay McCormack
Yeah, I had wanted to work her in moving forward with a new character who kind of stumbles on Selena Kyle and through her find out where Selena has been. She’s not necessarily in a place that you’d expect she’d be in. Then they get caught up, so I wanted to use Tommy Elliot in there to just to bring some other side characters. But yeah, infuse a little bit of pro wrestling into it.
Sean Gordon Murphy
This is this is his biggest platform, and he’s dying to do more comics and with the rules of White Knight. He’s like, as long as I say, yeah, it’s mostly okay. I don’t care about wrestling at all. He’s been pushing this for years now. So I feel like I owe it to him. At this point.
Clay McCormack
I slipped a little bit into Red Hood. I’m hoping I opened the door enough that I can do something more.
