Superman: Secret Identity by Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen is wonderful. It's about a guy named Clark Kent (named after Superman, a fictional character in this world) whose friends set him up with a woman named Lois Lane as a gag. It also turns out this guy has Superman's powers somehow. What would a Batman equivalent of that look like? Well, we're about to find out.
Busiek is teaming with artist John Paul Leon for the spiritual follow-up Batman: Creature of the Night. If the official solicitation is anything to go by, fans of the original will probably be pleased:
Young Bruce Wainwright lost his parents in a violent crime…and in the real world, no superheroes exist to save the day. But as grief and rage builds inside Bruce until he feels he can’t keep it inside anymore, something strange starts taking wing in the Gotham night! Perhaps Bruce’s grief isn’t inside him after all?
Grief is a big part of the Batman origin, but it's rarely a central focus of any given story. Where Secret Identity was about hope and the symbol of Superman, Creature of the Night looks like it could be about exploring grief it in the context of Batman, rather than through the Batman story itself. Count me in. It also looks like a visual departure from its predecessor in all the right ways:
The first double issue of the four-part series arrives November 29th.