FCO Plascencia

With the release of last week's Batman #50, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's tenure as the creative team behind the Dark Knight's flagship title has come to an end. It was a run that had some of the biggest, weirdest stories in Batman's history, uprooting the history of Gotham City, sending Batman's origin story through an apocalyptic disaster ruled over by the Riddler, and pitting Batman against an entire city full of Jokerized Gothamites. And, of course, it also gave us some pretty great covers from Capullo, Danny Miki and FCO Plascencia. But if you ever looked at those covers and thought "Huh, I wonder what that would've looked like if it happened on Batman: The Animated Series," a thought I have about literally everything I see, then artist Rick Celis has your answer.

This week sees the release of Batman #51 by Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Danny Miki and FCO Plascencia, the final issue of a nearly five year-long collaboration. The team's run has seen them take Batman and Gotham to strange new places and revolutionize some of the key characters in Batman's Gotham, including Bruce Wayne, The Riddler and The Joker. To mark the imminent release of the team's final issue, ComicsAlliance caught up with Snyder and Capullo to talk about how their collaboration process has evolved over half a decade, their proudest achievements, and the story behind Batman's new costume.

This week saw the release of Batman #50, and as you might expect from that big round number, it's a pretty big deal. It's the final act of Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Danny Miki and FCO Plascencia's "Superheavy," in which former Gotham City Police Commissioner Jim Gordon took over the role of Batman with the help of a robotic bat-suit, and --- perhaps unsurprisingly --- it marks the return of Bruce Wayne to the cape and cowl. A slightly different cape and cowl. Yes, he might still be Batman, but this issue features the debut of a new costume for the Caped Crusader, and that means that it's time once again to go deep with an extremely thorough review of Batman's new costume.

If you've been keeping up with "Endgame," the current story raging through Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Danny Miki and FCO Plascencia's Batman, then you've seen a lot of stuff going on. I mean things are apocalyptically bad in Gotham City on a scale that they haven't been since... well, since the last big Batman story. Still, it's pretty rough out there, what with the millions of zombie-like citizens infected with airborne Joker toxin. But in all the action of the latest issue, you may have missed the most important part: Jim Gordon's ringtone. It might seem like a minor detail, but it's actually a pretty significant piece of the ongoing Batman mythology -- mainly because I suggested it on Twitter back in November, and now that it's canon, I will never, ever shut up about it.

If there's one thing we've learned from our series of in-depth reviews and interviews about Batman: Zero Year, it's that the creative team of Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Danny Miki and FCO Plascencia set out to do a lot more than just re-tell Batman's origin for a modern audience. That might've been the stated goal, but along the way, it became clear that the team wanted to use that bombastic superhero background to tell a story that was incredibly personal, using the trauma that made Bruce Wayne a hero to explore feelings of isolation, fear and, eventually, triumph. In our final Zero Year interview, Snyder tells us about the interactions with other Batman creators while it was coming out, how he identifies with both Batman and the Riddler, and how much of the story was inspired by his own very personal experiences with overcoming panic and despair.

For the past year, I've spoken to Scott Snyder for a series of in-depth interviews about Batman: Zero Year, the new origin story that he, Greg Capullo, Danny Miki and FCO Plascencia have produced for DC Comics. In the final act, "Savage City," Batman was confronted with a Gotham City that had been destroyed by a super-storm, was overrun by plants that had grown out of control, and was being held in the iron grip of the Riddler, all while confronting the trauma that inspired him to become a hero. With the full story completed, I spoke to Snyder for the first part of a two-part interview about how he felt he'd achieved his goals with the bestselling story, the inspiration for the dynamic visuals, and his meeting with Frank Miller, possibly the most definitive Batman author, who had one very specific note about the story.

There was a lot to be wary of when Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Danny Miki and FCO Plascencia's "Batman: Zero Year" was announced. The most obvious reason was that it was the story that was set to replace my all-time favorite comic, Batman: Year One, going back to cover ground that had been stomped into concrete by one of the most influential stories of all time. Even the name was a response to Year One, and the expansion of what Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli had done so elegantly in four issues to a full year of comics felt like it could've easily been symptomatic of the trend towards decompression that drags everything out for the bookstores. Why sell one hardcover when you could sell three, right? At the same time, I liked what Snyder and Capullo had been doing on Batman enough that I was looking forward to reading it, and from that first shot of Batman on a dirtbike, something that I am genetically hardwired to love on sight, I was hooked. This week, the final issue came out, and while we're still too close to it to really tell how well it'll stand the test of time, what I know right now is that I love it, and there's a good chance that it'll end up not only as my favorite version of Batman's origin, but as one of my favorite comic books of all time.

In the pages of Batman, Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Danny Miki and FCO Plascencia are retelling the origin of Batman for the modern DC Universe with "Zero Year." Told over the course of a year, "Zero Year" is divided in to three arcs, each representing a facet of Gotham City and Batman's growth into a superhero, and it's been wild right from the start. For each arc, ComicsAllia