Broken Frontier

DC continues the rollout of its 2010 plans with the announcement of Bruce Wayne’s return in Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, a new six-issue miniseries hitting in April. Grant Morrison, responsible for ‘killing off’ Bats in the pages of Final Crisis and scripting his demise in Batman R.I.P., will revive DC’s most popular multi-billionaire together with a list of superstar artists, including Chris Sprouse and Andy Kubert.

Check below and on DC’s The Source blog for a peek at Kubert’s design work for the book, which follows Wayne as he fights his way through the timestream back to the present day.

In an interview with USA Today, Morrison promises that the miniseries will dramatically alter the current status quo of the Batman universe. The Scotsman further describes the story, saying:

As we saw at the end of the Final Crisis book, Bruce Wayne was never dead, only AWOL, so this was never a literal "back to life" story. And I like to think the series will have a wider general appeal than some of the continuity driven "death and rebirth"-type stories we've seen before.

This is more for me about putting Batman/Bruce Wayne through my own, and my collaborators' version, of the ultimate test of who and what he is. So far I've had him overcome the Devil, Madness and Death; now we see him, truly lost, amnesiac, and stripped down to basic human survival mode in some extremely hostile environments and unfamiliar situations. He's the best fighter in his world, he's one of the smartest and most driven men who ever lived, but we've seen him outwit the Joker 10,000 times. This was a way of taking the character off the grid, as they say, and reminding readers what kind of man he is and what he's capable of. If you wonder why Batman is so cool — here's why Batman is so cool.

This is an attempt to look at a very familiar character from some unusual angles. And it's about Bruce and who he is — I want to remind people how the man and the mask are inseparable parts of a terrifying whole.