Three years ago Geoff Johns and Gary Frank released “Batman Earth One” on the world. It was a challenging contemporary revision of the Batman mythos that managed to change things we knew about the world and spin Gotham in an entirely new direction. Now, three years later these creators have returned to Earth One to continue the story of a Batman who’s just figuring things out. This is a Dark Knight who isn’t quite the detective you know and love, his loyal butler? He’s a military veteran. And the mayor of Gotham just so happens to be District Attorney Harvey Dent’s twin sister.

This isn’t Gotham as you know it. But, with today’s launch of “Batman Earth One: Volume Two” Bloody-Disgusting sat down with Geoff Johns and Gary Frank to talk about the creation of this new albeit familiar world, challenging the emotional core of characters, and building a new Gotham.

Bloody-Disgusting: It’s been a very long road publishing “Batman Earth One: Volume Two”,how do you guys feel now that it’s completed?

Geoff Johns: Pretty good. It was a long road. This one was definitely longer than the last one. But to see it all printed up with Gary’s amazing artwork. The inks, the colors, and the letters came together so nicely that the book is a joy to look at. It’s weird because this is my second original graphic novel. Having the story come out all at once is fun. It’s more like a movie than a TV show.

Gary Frank: Yes, it’s fantastic.

When you started working on the book what was it about Batman that you wanted to make modern? what was it that you wanted to change?

GJ: I don’t know if we wanted to necessarily make it modern but we wanted to make it more grounded and emotional. There is an emotional reality to the book centered around self-awareness, identity, hope, inspiration, and finding each other in darkness. At its core it’s a character story.

GF: Yes, there are no tommy guns as there were in earlier Batman tales. But I don’t know maybe modern in sense that we are telling stories that people couldn’t tell years ago. People have a slightly different expectation for the book, now. Which frees you up to tell different types of stories. We’re not doing modern for modern’s sake.

GJ: We didn’t necessarily go in with any intention to specifically change anything. We knew we wanted to take some risks. We wanted to alter some things emotionally. Everyone’s read, seen, and experience so many Batman stories that if Gary and I were going to do Batman we really wanted to approach it differently. Some of that is having new revelations, about the characters but a lot of it comes from creating a new texture. For example the Waynes now having ties to the Arkhams. We wanted to give a different history to our world, to Gotham, and to Bruce.

Most importantly we wanted to look at the characters and see different nuances, different motives and different arcs for everybody. When we meet Harvey Bullock, or Alfred, or Croc we’re in very different places. People have really responded to it, because we’re still true to the DNA of the characters. Batman doesn’t have heat-vision.

GF: I don’t think we ever had a conversation about what we could change. It was more about what we could expand upon. What could we tap into, we could never “fix” Batman. We took different elements of Batman to bring them to the floor. We tried to engage ourselves first and foremost. 

Perhaps after Alfred, Harvey Bullock was one of the characters who was furthest from what we knew him as, and even here he’s not quite the man he used to be, but he’s on the way. Why the sudden change, and why back to familiar territory?

GF: Harvey is now closer to who he recognizably is than he is in the first one.

GJ: Harvey’s on a journey. He’s got the tendencies that people may know but he’s starting in a very different place. He might end up in a very different place, or he might end up as the man people are familiar with. That’s part of the journey. You might be surprised where we are taking that character in particular.

GF: The goal is to keep it fresh. 

How did you approach reimagining the villains? It seems there was a big effort to make them heroes in their own eyes, and you can certainly feel the humanity of at least one of them, why draw the parallel between Batman and these iconic villain’s efforts?  

GJ: That came organically out of the conversations Gary and I had. We’re trying to spend more time with our characters. The graphic novel format allows the emotional journey to be as important as the action. We don’t get that luxury on a monthly series, at least not all the time. It’s only 22-page book a month, it becomes hard to do that kind of stuff. And we really need it.

The sheer size and length of the book is difficult schedule-wise. We definitely don’t short change the story.

GF: It’s all happen in an organic way. We’ve organized the pieces and let them fall where they may. We discover what they do next as we’re creating the story. It was never an issue of pushing them in a certain direction.

Let’s talk about Harvey and Jessica, why the addition of his sister? Why does it seem that together that they represent the duality of Dent? Harvey isn’t exactly likable in this story, was that a conscious choice?

GJ: We started that distinction in volume one. We wanted to introduce Jessica as a new character. We wanted her to have a relationship with Bruce and Harvey just felt like the natural antagonist to that. So Bruce is caught between the “good twin” and the “bad twin.” At the end of the day he’s actually pretty good at his job, but he’s very threatening and his strong personality makes him very protective of his sister.

He’s not wrong. His perspective is pretty understandable. You can see Jessica clearly has an influence on Harvey as he agrees about Bruce.

The fight sequence used to market this book between Killer Croc and Bruce shows a much more vulnerable Batman. It’s an uneven matchup but thrilling to read, what motivated that scripting decision?

GJ: Yeah, that fight with Croc humbles Bruce in an interesting way. We thought a lot about that and what could make that fight slightly different from what we’ve seen before. It again cam from various discussions between Gary and I about new directions for familiar characters, and here Croc plays a role in bringing Bruce down to Earth.

Alfred seems to embody the teacher role in Earth One more than ever, and here he pushes Batman to break his rule against killing.

GJ: This to him is war. If you’re going to go out there every night you’re not doing anything without killing in his mind. Alfred has a very different perspective. He’s not a natural paternal character. We wanted him to push against Bruce and say “why don’t you just let them fall?” And Batman has a really great response to it he doesn’t want any kids growing up thinking Batman killed their parents.

GF: I think also you’ve got to get some story of Batman you’ve got to move from the awkward kid to a crime fighter. You need a figure to teach him this stuff. He’s not getting it from the Internet. You can go the traditional route and do the Ras A Ghul thing but doesn’t it make more sense that someone closer to him would help him? It’s more human and logical this way.

I want to bring it back to the opening sequence of this book. I was stunned in the because it reminded me that this Batman is still figuring out, he’s got ways to go, what do you think he still has to learn?

GJ: The hope is that this is not the Batman you know, but you love him all the same for what he is and what he’s trying to learn. He’s got a lot to learn. Our second book is all about his experience being a very active detective. He’s growing into someone more aware of himself. This is about the formation of his identity. Through the expectations of others, how he should evolve, who Bruce Wayne is, and by the end of this book he’s on a journey to the next level.

He’s got a lot to learn about himself, the people of Gotham, and his relationships. It’s like him trying to get through a maze, and “Batman Earth One: Volume Two” is the middle of it.

Batman Earth One: Volume Two is available today in your local Comic Book Store, and available at finer book stores May 13^th 2015.