Tom King, Phil Hester, Eric Gapstur, Jordie Bellaire and Clayton Cowles will tell the story of Gotham City, pre-Batman, in Gotham City: Year One.
DC decribes the six-issue miniseries as “the definitive origin of Gotham City: how it became the cesspool of violence and corruption it is today, and how it harbored and then unleashed the sin that led to the rise of the Dark Knight.” It will feature P.I. Slam Bradley and the kidnapping of Helen Wayne.
“Having written a ton of Batman comics,” said King, “I can say it’s incredibly rare to write books like this, where you can add something large and essential to the mythos of the Dark Knight, as Scott did with Court of Owls or Grant did with the introduction of Damian or Frank did with, well, everything he touched. In Gotham City Year One, Phil and I will take you to a noir drenched past, where the secrets that made Gotham become Gotham, the sins that made Batman become Batman are finally and violently revealed.”
Here’s the full story description from DC: Taking place two generations before Batman, private investigator Slam Bradley gets tangled in the headline-grabbing “kidnapping of the century” as the infant Wayne heir Helen disappears in the night…and so begins a brutal, hard-boiled, epic tale of a man living on the edge and a city about to burn.
“Night falls quickly in Gotham City,” said Hester. “The shadows cut across guilty and innocent alike. I feel lucky to be the artist to show you just how this city got so dark in the first place.”
Here’s a look at some of the interior artwork:
The first issue arrives Oct. 4.