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thecruellestmonth · 12 hours

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Juni Ba is holding a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session on May 7 at 4 PM CEST (10 AM EST).

Some of his answers in his previous interviews about The Boy Wonder, a reimagining of Damian's story—

This is a standalone graphic novel (Black Label), meant to be accessible to readers with no prior comic knowledge. It is meant for ages 13+.

Damian is Ba's favorite Robin, and he finds him very relatable.

On Damian comic influences, Ba says Son of Batman and Super Sons were two of his favorite books.

Other than Damian, Talia and Jason are the characters that Ba has been most excited to work with.

Ba did the art for the "Happy Birthday Damian" story in Truth & Justice; while the art was a test run for some design ideas he's using in The Boy Wonder, the actual story isn't necessarily indicative of his own writing style or his version of the characters.

Ba is a big fan of Darwyn Cooke. Justice League: The New Frontier thematically inspired him here, possibly more than particular Batman comics.

Ba is aware of the racism discussion regarding the al Ghuls, and he intends to humanize them.

Ba started writing in 2020 or 2021, and the story is being released now after a period of waiting.

"This is very much I guess a Juni Ba book that happens to feature Batman characters."

To start us off, what can you tell us about the story of your new series, The Boy Wonder?

I usually introduce it to people by saying it's the story of a child with a lot of hang ups and preconceived ideas, both about himself and his family members. Over the course of this coming of age fairy tale he starts to learn about them, and himself, and grow into a better person. And it really leans into the fairy tale aspect to push the allegory and the magic in this story!

Why does Damian appeal to you so much as both an artist and a writer?

I find him both tragic and adorable. He and I share some things and I think that's why my brain started coming up with a story about him all by itself. Writing wise there's a fertile ground to tell a really heartfelt story. And art wise, he's such a fun character to draw. It's like a cute little gremlin who's always frowning and judging everyone, which can often backfire on him in funny ways.

How much does Damian's past with Talia and Ra's al Ghul influence Damian and this story?

A lot! They raised him after all, so that upbringing influences a lot of what he does. But that includes Batman too, even if his influence is more recent. There's a looming presence of all the parental figures and the pressure of what they'd have wanted you to do, how they would have judged you.

Since we were talking about Damian’s mother, there have been questions surrounding characterization and stuff, especially for characters like the Al’Ghuls, whose stories unfortunately do have a lot of racist elements in their origins. Are you doing anything to combat or alleviate those concerns in your book?

Stories often dehumanize them, so I try to do the opposite. I think I have a very character-driven style of storytelling, and a lot of the time I try to give the point of view of as many people as I can in the story.

There are five issues. Three of them have the Robins, and then eventually we get to my 2nd favourite team up, which is with Talia and it’s done from her perspective. The main goal was to try to give her more of a voice, because you start this story with a kid who tells you “My parents are messed up,” he was essentially raised to kill people, but we see how she was raised too, and the faults that she can see in her father’s philosophy.

Ra’s gets a bit of that as well later on, but the main goal was, I want to make it so that when you start the story with Damian, he has a lot of preconceived ideas about both sides of his family, which make his relationships to everyone very difficult. Every adventure he has, he gets to understand things in a different light by the end of every story, and one of them was, “What is his relationship to his mom like?” And you get to see it from the mom’s point of view and understand that she loves her son, but there are a lot of complications that come from being raised by someone like Ra’s.

Beyond that, this is an older Talia, more mature and less sexualized than the usual I’d say. As for Ra’s, I can’t say much, but a lot of what you see of him at first is rooted in Damian’s childlike, heightened, and scared perception. Just like the rest, it gets explored later.

It sounds like the book will see Damian coming to terms with his place in the Robin lineage. How does he feel about his brothers?

This Damian would probably say they're usurpers, ingrates, failures and profiteers! It's pretty hard being raised as the center of all the attention, as well as a successor who's never quite enough for his grandfather, and then when thrown into the Bat family, he becomes what feels like the fifth wheel. The last and least appreciated son. So his whole arc will be about processing that.

Is there a character other than Damian that you’re particularly excited to be writing and/or drawing?

Jason and Talia, by a lot. I think because the core of it is this is a world of people who seem very perfect. Damian works as this kid who feels like he’s not good enough for that. But aside from him, there’s Jason, who’s really a well-intentioned, good hearted person who really bad stuff happened to, and he’s struggling to get out of the traumatic impact of that. And I think the story works really well in showing that.

Talia is kind of the same. It’s someone who has a very idealistic view of the world and wants to essentially, be allowed to shape the world into what she thinks it could be, but she has to be under the boot of someone else who is not very reputable, and it has impacted a lot of her life in ways that she did not intend, including her relationship to her son and that’s also probably why those two characters also get like an issue told from their perspective. I really wanted to show you the inside of their mind and dispel a lot of the prejudice that Damian has about the way they are.

I really love the way you visualize Damian and the other Robins expressing themselves with their eyes. What design elements of the character were you most excited to highlight to help show readers what Damian was feeling in a given moment?

I do love using the eyes to express! It’s a very efficient and visually compelling way to do it, but more so than that I use character design. Their shapes, their colors, they all are designed to convey something relative to the story at hand. For example Jason takes cues from Taxi Driver and the general feeling of alienation and being a drifter. It’s all to give a shorthand into how he feels, to then unpack that and give it context. Everything is story basically. Damian looks like a cute angry potato! And that’s all because despite how abrasive he can be, he has to remain endearing and you must see that it’s still a kid learning.

Well, since this is your own thing, I assume that must mean that you’re giving your own spin on these characters. Is there anything without spoilers that you can tease that is going to be different? Like if you’re a long time reader going into this you’re going to be surprised by it.

I’m someone who really likes a more fairy tale and magical side to storytelling. Something that I added a bunch of, I mean, they talk about demons in the solicits of the first issue. It’s both an allegorical thing and a very, real thing that the magical aspects of certain parts of that world have been pushed more.

The other big thing for me was Damian is the heart of the story, so everything is seen from his point of view. So Batman looks a lot more like a dad. Talia looks a lot more like a mom, and with every one of the Robins, I try to take a core concept of every one of them and push it to the forefront to contrast it to Damian. So like, I would say that the more fun part of it would be observing how Damian interacts with what’s essentially kind of a mirror put to himself every time. But overall the idea is a sort of cartoon-making logic, of taking the general elements in various iterations of a character, synthesizing them for the story, into something recognizable but digestible.

The Boy Wonder has this beautiful visual style - fairy tale, as you just said - despite some strong moments of violence. Why did you choose to tell the story this way?

Fairy tales are great for allegory, larger than life concepts and leaning into the magical. There's also a story reason I can't spoil but it makes for a great framing device.

[...] There are narrative reasons in the book that I can’t spoil, but overall I’d say it’s because it’s my favorite format, as well as a great way to really lean into the larger than life aspect, the allegorical, the magical. Fables often contain a nugget of a message or meaning, and this is a coming of age story, so it fits rather well.

The Boy Wonder is as much about Damian as it is his brothers. Has that story not been told enough — how similar and different Bruce’s kids really are — and did you draw on your relationship with siblings at all?

Pretty much no one I talk to in the larger world ever even knows that there are multiple Robins, let alone read their stories. So I’m glad to be making a book that’s easy to access for new readers, with no prior knowledge needed, that appeals on its own and can tell them a cool story about family and overcoming pressure. A story that works both for the ones who know these characters and want a self contained tale, and the ones who know nothing and just want a fun comic to read. The comic is Black Label, which usually skews older, but this is a tale I wanted accessible from mid teens to as old as you want.

And I did pull from experience! I have two siblings, my best friends all do as well, and the inner workings of how you view yourself and your family members depending on where you fit is interesting to me. It’s very much a tale of reckoning with your assumptions about your family, as well as the impact your parents had on you and your siblings.

What about Damian Wayne is so interesting to you? Do you think he gets a bad rap even now in the grander DC Universe?

Damian is simultaneously the most insufferable and most touching little boy to me. There’s a mix of adorable and deadly that I find amusing to watch, and satisfying to write. Plus I sympathize with him on a few backstory elements which are the cornerstone of the whole story.

As for his reputation, I think I’m glad there’s a reminder that being coarse and ill mannered can hide a good heart.

What are some of the benefits of putting this out as a DC Black Label book?

Mostly freedom! I got to tell the story I wanted. I didn't have to worry about continuity, and thus made what I like making: a self-contained adventure that anyone can appreciate as a comic, with or without any prior exposure to that world. Plus we got to have fun with the design of the issues!

Do you have a favorite Damian-starring story that you drew on for this book? Or maybe another Bat Family story instead/as well?

I think my two favorites were Son of Batman and Super Sons. I just vibed a lot with the fun adventurous tone. But most of my inspiration comes from outside superhero comics, or even outside comics as a whole. I didn’t even reread those two books I mentioned aside from when I needed to check phrasing. In that case I read those, and the early Damian stories just to absorb how he spoke.

But outside superhero stuff, were there any influences that were working on you as you were writing this story?

So a lot of comics from the 60s and 70s, from France and Belgium.I have a thing for like 80s and 90s movies, including movies that I was not supposed to watch when I was a kid, so stuff that’s drama-oriented. The point of this book is, it’s basically a character study, mostly of Damian, but also Damian through his interactions with other people in his life. So, mostly the other Robins, but also his parents and more so his mother.

The events that happen are really just a setting for you to observe how the characters interact, and there’s a bunch of movies in the 80s that were really good at doing that and showing you a very flawed person and the way that they react to the world around them. So yeah, that’s more of a tone thing. The aesthetic aspect was really taken from 60s and 70s French and Belgian comics as well as very old sci-fi, fairy tales, and black and white photography.

What’s the process look like for you when you write and draw a comic?

Whoa. Let’s see. So the origin of every book is a little different, but usually I spend a year or two, maybe more just thinking about the story and putting ideas down and then once I have an idea of how every story step works into each other, I start storyboarding so there’s no script.

[...] I don’t write scripts because I prefer to have the storyboard of the thing already made, because that’s where I know if something is working or not. Then once the storyboard has been greenlit and all the corrections are done, the next step is drawing the final pages. I do the sketching on my tablet, and then I print that in blue lines and ink over that. It’s a recent thing, I started doing it the last few months. The Boy Wonder was made that way. [...]

[...] I mean, technically, I started writing it in 2020 or 2021. Yeah. I’ve been sitting on it for a while, and then I made a tweet about it and it got the attention of Chris Conroy, who basically runs Black Label. He just asked, like, “OK, sure. Show it to me. I want to see what that’s like.” Several months later, the book was greenlit by DC.

You talked about how Batman: The Animated Series is an inspiration for this. And also because it’s Damian, I assume that the Grant Morrison Batman stuff is also an inspiration in some ways. But what other Batman material were you inspired by, if any, when writing this book?

Well, I wasn’t so much using Batman as I was using other things. Like there’s a bunch of influences from a bunch of different places, but the superhero stuff was mostly influenced by Darwyn Cooke. So it wasn’t so much Batman as much as it was Cooke. Like the thought process I guess was, “What do I like about these characters? Like the concept of the superhero?” Because the idea came from me watching a documentary about The Dark Knight Returns and Frank Miller. They mentioned how he was given free reign to make the Batman book he wanted. I just had the thought of, “Yeah, that would be fun, having a superhero story where you can just do whatever you want. Like, it’s your personal take.”

I guess from then, my brain started imagining a story with Damian because he’s my favourite Robin and I have a lot in common with him in terms of his backstory. I think it was this sense of sympathy towards the kid and the story grew from wanting to talk about the feeling of “You’re not good enough to be a part of the group you’re in or the family you’re in.” So being a superhero was more of an allegory of, “I don’t feel good enough to be a part of those great people who seem so perfect.”

Then the Darwyn Cooke stuff came. He was probably the biggest superheroic influence, because he’s kind of the epitome of superhero storytelling to me. He makes all his stories very easy to understand, very accessible to someone who maybe has never opened or barely knows what that character is about. His storytelling is also strong on its own artistic terms and most of all, he has this great sense of making superheroes this idea of the ideal version of ourselves, like those people who, even if they have bad thoughts or flaws that they have to overcome, they always do the right thing and they represent the best in all of us, and there’s a sort of sense of joyful fun in the superhero stories that he does. He also can talk about very serious subjects through that at the same time. My favourite superhero comic is The New Frontier, and I kept reading it over and over again when I was rewriting the book just to look at how he was managing that balance of joyful, superheroic, and inspirational fun, and the more serious themes. So yeah, the biggest influence would probably be him.

When I was doing research for this, I noticed that this isn’t your first time with a Damian comic. It was the “Happy Birthday Damian” story for Truth and Justice. Even over there, there’s a lot of similarities in terms of the character design, and even to some degree, Damian’s own struggle with his family and all that. So did that story help inform or define where you wanted to go with the characters for this book?

Well, no actually because basically when they asked me to do that story, the way it happened was that I was originally approached for something else, and I said, “I don’t really want to do that, but I’ve been writing this Damian story just for myself. Would you like to take a look?” Truth and Justice was kind of a test like, “We already have this story written by Andrew Aydin, and the idea was, do you want to draw it? It’s kind of a test run.” So I just used the designs I had already made for my own book. The fact that the themes are very similar is kind of a coincidence and it was kind of funny actually. It was a good way to sort of try my hand at drawing these for the first time, get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. I would say my story is a lot more complex, and delves a lot more into the psychology of most of the characters.

This book is an anthology like you said, where it’s about Damian with all these characters. But in terms of the structure of the story, is there like a connection beyond that, like Monkey Meat is all about the corporation. So is there a connection like that in this story?

Yes. It’s a narrative cut into different, contained stories, basically. Because the idea is that Damian is on a quest to try and prove his worth by defeating an enemy, and it’s really more of a set up to allow for him to meet all the different characters that he does. But the goal is that every story progresses that main plot that he’s on and getting closer to the final showdown against the big enemy.

The whole point is this kid needs to grow up and understand the familial context that he was born into on both sides, like a lot of it is him learning how complicated his parents are, and the effect that they’ve had on the people around them and learning to move beyond the trauma and the more negative impact of being the son of a guy who dresses like a bat, or the descendant of a selfish egomaniac. The big plot of the thing is a young boy wants to prove his worth and every story is a step on that journey towards the final end.

For Damian, you said he’s your favourite Robin. You relate to him a lot, but was there anything beyond that that made you want to sit back and think, “Okay, this is the character that I want to give my own spin on?”

I love the concept of Robin. When I was a kid, that was probably the thing that I liked the most about the Batman world. The reason why Damian worked so well is that it was such a perfect way to also tackle the previous ones, so every one of them represents some aspect of what being a Robin is like, and you can use that as an allegory for being part of a group or family with a code and stuff. You can talk about being part of a group with specific ideas of how you should behave, what kind of things you should uphold as good.

Damian’s the runt of the family. He’s the kid who just showed up. He doesn’t really know these people. He has a lot of preconceived ideas and it was a good way for me to be able to also talk about the previous Robins through him. It’s not a meta commentary, it’s more like, “Why do you like these concepts? What speaks to you as a person when you watch those beacons of goodness do things?” Damian is kind of like the audience surrogate in discovering that aspect of things at the same time.

What’s Damian’s favourite sandwich?

Well, I’m going to try and focus on my version of Damian from The Boy Wonder specifically. That Damian, his favourite sandwich would probably be something made by the mystical creatures that serve his grandfather, who take care of the whole land that they live in. So it’ll probably be a sandwich made with vegetables and meat from supernatural sources, something that he would not be able to get in Gotham because no one even knows that this stuff exists.

I like the idea of how even his favourite food is inaccessible in the new place that he’s in, furthering the whole alienation that he’s experiencing.

If Damian had a favorite song, what would it be and why?

I’m now going to show my age and mention how my teen sister listens to these moody chill songs that sound like the softer version of the emo rock I listened to as a teen, so I’d say that style! (Don’t ask me to name them, I don’t know!)

A song from my angst phase? “Numb” by Linkin Park.

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