Amazon.com: You originally started with Batman in Arkham Asylum. How has your view of the Dark Knight changed since then, now that you’ve returned to the character?
Grant Morrison: Well, Arkham was kind of responding to the Batman of the time. You know, Frank Miller had just done his Batman and kind of recreated the character as a much more driven, obsessed vigilante. So, with Arkham Asylum we wanted to do something quite different. I think the Dark Knight…was so American and rooted in the hard-boiled and pulp fiction and some of the big themes of American cinema. So we [wanted] to do a Batman back then that was inspired by European cinema. So, we’re kind of taking the idea of Batman and making it much more European, which meant, you know, that it was more ambiguous; it was shifty and shadowy, and the character was slightly undermined by the portrayal--you know, he was a mommy’s boy; he was kind of obsessed [to] an unhealthy degree. So, we were kind of psychologically critiquing that take on Batman, which wasn’t necessarily Miller’s take, but a lot of writers who followed Miller took Batman a little too far down the path of psychopath.
