Usually, a sequel to one of the biggest movies of all time would be carefully concocted in a Hollywood boardroom to maximize four-quadrant potential. John Jackson Miller wrote his continuation of Tim Burton’s mega-hit Batman over the last year in his memorabilia-filled office in central Wisconsin.
Miller has been thinking about how to follow up Burton’s Batman since he reviewed the film for the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s campus newspaper, The Daily Beacon, in 1989. Burton’s shadowy, spooky take on Batman was a mega-hit that changed superhero storytelling — and the weirdo sequel, Batman Returns, blurred the definition of “comic book movie” even further. Miller was among those fully activated by Batman (he went on to write comics, then sidestepped into the world of tie-in novels), but he always had questions about where the story of the 1989 movie would have actually gone if Burton and Returns writer Daniel Waters hadn’t jumped so far into the future (and into a more elevated tone). What actually happened to Bruce Wayne after Joker’s attack? What happened to Gotham? Was the Joker even dead?
In Batman: Resurrection, a new officially licensed novel out now, Miller answers his own long-burning questions. Bruce Wayne (the Michael Keaton one) is reeling from his fight with Jack Napier, aka Joker. Clayface has emerged. And as Miller explores the aftermath of the Joker’s terrifying reign over Gotham, new-but-familiar faces enter the Burtonverse. Polygon talked to Miller about picking up the mantle of a beloved property, the lengths he went to be true to Burton’s vision for the universe, and what it meant to write a book that felt cinematic enough to be an actual movie sequel.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Polygon: This is a high-stakes book for you — you love Batman! So how do you strip away all the personal excitement to narrow in on a great story? How do you start?
John Jackson Miller: Well, I had questions about various plot elements and reveals that happened in the movie. The movie is not perfect. The movie has a number of lines that are either blown or clipped, or that were put together in the editing process, that don’t exactly sync up right — in particular, one plot element having to do with the events in the cathedral. I noticed them years ago, back in the beginning, and I [thought], There may be a springboard to do something, because obviously this story is not going to end just like that. Bruce Wayne is not going to end just like that. For Gotham City, this has been a very traumatic experience. A lot of things have changed, a lot of people have been changed, a lot of lives have changed.
When I got the opportunity to write this book — it came from my editor on Star Wars: The Living Force, Tom Hoeler — he knew that I had seen the movie 12 times, and he said, “OK, what would you do?” I knew that I did not want to step on the toes of [Batman screenwriter] Sam Hamm and Joe Quinones [the artist who worked with Hamm on the Batman ’89 sequel comic book]. I knew that they were working out well in advance of Batman Returns, but […] we put hundreds of stories in between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, and The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. And there’s only three years between Star Wars and Empire. There’s even less time in between the next two films. And so I said I wanted to be right there, I wanted to hug the first movie.
We ended up going several months after. We’re not specific, but I wanted to be in the shadows of the Joker. The prospect we hold out is that Batman might not have seen what he thought he saw, that body on the pavement might not be the person that we thought it was. I wanted to actually put that out there, because Batman is very invested in that question. And I wanted to have Gotham City react as well.
My favorite chapters are where we have everybody who was in town, people that we never saw, [comment]. What did Max Shrek think of the Joker? What did Selena Kyle think of the Joker? What did people associated with the Penguin think of the Joker? So setting the novel when I did gave me the chance to draw upon these other players that were still alive and still available.
How did you approach writing the actual book? Were you channeling pulp-novel prose, or was it more like writing in a world like Star Wars and Star Trek?
Well, the outline process is always the hardest part. I always write really long outlines, almost a 10th of the book sometimes. I’ve gone as long as 20,000 words with one book — not recommended. It’s not the way you should do it, but when you’re doing something which is a carefully calibrated puzzle where everything links together, you want to have this stuff thought out before you hit the page. And on Batman, by me having to go through an editor as well as a licenser, I have to have what I plan to do more or less mapped out.
But the mood […] Michael [Uslan, rights holder on the 1989 Batman] and I had a conversation when we first met years ago. I wasn’t even writing comics at the time. He said that he felt the first movie was Batman in the ’30s. That was when Batman carried a gun. That was very noir. And then the second movie [Batman Returns] is the ’40s, and that’s when you begin to get the rogues’ gallery, and it’s still relatively dark. And then he looked at Forever as the ’50s, where now we have Robin and it’s getting lighter. And the ’60s is Batman & Robin, that’s obviously when we get the campy feel of the TV show, and also what’s going on in the comics themselves at the time.
This [conversation] was before Batman Begins. And so he says logically, you’d probably expect the next one to be the Detective Batman from the ’70s, and maybe the ’80s would be the Dark Knight — but I mean, if you think about it, the Nolan films work that way. And I guess the [Robert] Pattinson movie works out to be what, Cataclysm or something like that.
That thought was there in my head in the beginning. I needed to stick with the notion of Batman in his very early career, Batman in the ’30s, early ’40s, Batman where the villains are reality-based. I made sure, especially with the supervillain character that we introduced in this book, that everything we did was based on the equivalent moment we saw on screen in terms of what technology was like, what reality was like.
I specifically did not want the shambling-mound Clayface of the comics, for example, because that’s not something you would see in either of those first two movies. However, you do see the effects of Smilex changing somebody’s face radically. You see a variety of things that fit the Tim Burton macabre horror movie thing. And so I worked very hard to basically imagine: What would it be like if Tim Burton did it? What would it be like if Michael Keaton is playing this? What would be in a movie like this if you actually had a Christmas ’89 film come out, which is about as many months as it is between the film and the events of this novel? Obviously it wouldn’t be an all-out superhero movie with people reading people’s minds and freezing Gotham City or anything like that.
Clayface is at the center of the story, but there’s more lurking in the shadows — no spoilers! — that you draw from classic comics, which gives the book a pulp flavor.
It was interesting triangulating this thing, because I was reluctant to add any element that didn’t exist in the comics in ’89. I know that in the Batman ’89 comics, they’ve forged ahead. They’ve got Harley Quinn, they’ve got later characters. But my feeling was that Bane, for example, would never have fit into the aesthetic of Tim Burton-era movies, because that character was from another age, not from the Golden Age Batman era. You look at the fashions in Gotham City as well, there’s a Gotham City architecture that does not look like 1989 does anywhere else. People are wearing fedoras and trench coats — they’re still dressing as if it’s the 1940s. The newsroom still looks like a newsroom in the 1940s. And yet the characters who are either main characters or on the edge of being main characters have more advanced technology.
Obviously Batman has the most advanced technology of all. Bruce Wayne has multiple TV screens and tape recorders and everything else like that. But look at the scenes with the press, they’ve got people with old-timey cameras, and Alexander Knox has a mini tape recorder. This is an artistic choice in the films to separate out the players from everybody else. And so I went with that. In the technology that you see in this film — I call it a film, it’s not a film, it’s a novel — I am always trying to set it in that hybrid ’40s-’80s world and not go past it, either for anything that exists in the comics or anything that exists in real life.
To the point of that blurriness of it feeling like you wrote a movie, you are still writing for an actor, Michael Keaton. Are there any moments where you got to really lean into his specific take on Batman/Bruce Wayne?
The moments that we have with Bruce and Alfred are just… My editor said he didn’t want them to end. You’ve got this guy who is operating on five, six, seven levels at the same time, and yet he’s also clearly exhausted. He’s not unaware of how weird the world has turned. He’s not unaware of how he’s had something to do with it. And we have Alfred here, who is just sort of riding the wave of everything that’s happening and trying to help him put some perspective into everything.
I think it’s not wrong to say that what goes wrong for everybody else whose life is touched by weirdness in the Burton movies, whether it’s Penguin or Catwoman or even the Joker, is they don’t have an Alfred, they don’t have somebody who can actually ground them, and when necessary, intervene, as in the case with [Alfred] bringing in Vicki Vale.
We have moments with her as well in this book. I didn’t want to show the initial breakup. I wanted to show that the breakup is still ongoing, that it’s a rolling thing. And of course, as the book opens, she’s conveniently out of town and we find out that it’s not so convenient, that it is a choice on her part. But I wanted to have these moments where I hope that readers could visualize these scenes.
My job doing tie-in novels is to help you imagine the movie that doesn’t exist, or pretend this is an adaptation of something that hasn’t been filmed. And to expand beyond it, to get into the moments that they would never have time to show you in a film. I think there’s this one scene with Bruce and Vicki basically, it becomes very clear that they can’t have an argument about them that doesn’t end up dragging in everything else in Gotham City and Batman and everything. And it’s just not something where he’s going to ever be able to detach in a way that’s going to be satisfactory for her.
I don’t think I’m spoiling anything to say this won’t be your last Batman book. Batman: Resurrection is already set for a sequel, as teased in the final pages of the novel.
We’ve clearly set something up for the second act. And again, this was something which was intended in the beginning — that there would be the second act. And so all along in the writing, I was setting that up. In much the same way, the branches are there in the first film for things to happen in the second or third or fourth. And I think that it really did help me ground and focus the first book a lot better, because I didn’t have this feeling that this could be the only one ever, that I’ve got to have every thought I’ve ever had about Batman here. This allowed me to clarify and focus and winnow down.
And if you know who my main antagonist is in the second book, as you may have already guessed by reading the first book, you may have a notion of why it’s a lot more complicated this time to plot.
I don’t envy you at all having this task in front of you, but it also sounds like a dream.
There are dream projects and then projects you never dream were even possible. And in all the interviews over the years where they’ve asked me what franchise would I like to work on or do a tie-in for, I never even asked for Tim Burton’s Batman, because I didn’t think that would be possible, that you could subdivide the license like that.
Batman ’89 and before that, Batman ’66 at DC paved the way for this being able to happen. And I’m thankful for that, and I’m thankful that they brought me in on it. And I really do feel that the horizons on a project like this, as people now see that there’s another one coming, are a lot broader than for the typical comic book or superhero novel. That genre has always had sort of a ceiling. Those are books that tended to sell to fans of the comics. The young adult novels had a higher ceiling. This is a comics novel, but it is also a movie tie-in, and I think that puts us in another orbit.
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