BATMAN: BROKEN MASTER

Around the middle of last year, as I was finishing up my Green Lantern Corps assignment, I was given two issues of Batman to write and told to go off and come up with some ideas.

I knew right away what I wanted to do.

The DC universe is chock full of martial artists, all of them seemingly the toughest of the tough, world class fighters who have mastered every conceivable discipline known to man and quite a few that have been made up over the years. I've always kind of wondered who was the baddest mofo running around town.

So I pitched the idea of a tournament consisting of six or eight of the top fighters running around the DC Universe. Guys like Batman, Richard Dragon, Bronze Tiger, and The Question. Ladies like Shiva. A few more thrown in for good measure, for reasons related to the story. All I needed was a context to give them a good reason to fight.

I got that context from Infinite Crisis, specifically the panel where Bane breaks JudoMaster's back. It was a throwaway moment (at least I thought so) but it gave me the germ of an idea that grew into my Batman pitch.

After breaking Judomaster in half, Bane, being the asshole that he is, would have claimed the mantle of Judomaster. By doing so, he steals Judomaster's identity and, more importantly, his honor. Now paralyzed and unable to wrest his honor back from Bane, Judomaster sends out a call for help to some of his friends.

They all assemble in Nanda Parbat and agree to fight tournament style, with the winner challenging Bane in Judomaster's stead. Bane agrees to go along with it because, in a nutshell, it gets him off to drive everyone nuts like this.

I wrote up the first fifteen or sixteen pages of issue #1 and then my little project was killed. Due to 52 and One Year Later, almost every character I was using would either be unavailable at the time the story took place or drastically changed by the time it saw print (See: The Question.) Not to mention, the powers that be had decided that Judomaster was killed during Bane's attack, not paralyzed.

It was disappointing and frustrating but these kinds of things happen when you work in a shared universe. I went on to write two issues of Batman about a new villain, The Mirror, that should see print sooner or later.

In the meantime, I thought I'd post up my script for BATMAN: BROKEN MASTER here on my blog, one page at a time. So look for page one starting later this week, and I'll probably post a new page every couple of days. When I'm out of script, maybe I'll post the complete synopsis so you can see how it was all going to end. Or maybe not, maybe it's better just to make up your own ending. We'll have to see how it plays out.

So keep an eye out and I hope you'll enjoy it.