Dark Night: A True Batman Story

It's no secret that, before he came to comics, Paul Dini worked as a writer in animation on series including Batman: The Animated Series and, before that, Tiny Toon Adventures --- both from the then-resurgent Warner Bros Animation studio. Dark Night, his new graphic memoir detailing a traumatic event from that time in his life, is premised as the Dini of 2016 pitching the story as he might have pitched an animated episode, pinning sketched-out storyboards to a wall before an unseen audience that will have their say when his presentation is over. The elaborate narrative set-up isn't the only unusual thing about Dini's Dark Night. Unlike the vast majority of comics memoirs, in which the memoirist is also a cartoonist and thus writes and draws the story, this one has the more traditional division of labor/creation of superhero comics, with Dini scripting and artist Eduardo Risso handling the art. And it's also got Batman in it. A lot.

There are few creators in the history of Batman who have had a greater impact on the character than Paul Dini. As one of the showrunners of Batman: The Animated Series, he shaped not only how a generation of television viewers would view Batman, the Joker, and Gotham City's other heroes and villains, but also how the comics would be influenced for decades after the show's launch. Behind the scenes, though, it seems as though 1993 was a rough year for Dini's relationship with Batman, owing to a violent mugging that left him with a broken skull and his faith in the ideas behind superheroes shattered. Now, as revealed at The Hollywood Reporter, Dini is revisiting that trauma alongside artist Eduardo Risso in a new graphic novel from Vertigo, Dark Night: A True Batman Story.