Robin Annual #7

Tomorrow, the long awaited (by me, at least) Robin Annual #7 arrives at local comic shops across the country.

I still haven't received my comps so I don't know what the book looks like in color yet but, based on the black and white Jpegs Jason Pearson and Derec Donovan sent along while they were working, I'm pretty confident in saying it's one freakin' beautiful looking comic book. It's always a treat to see Jason Pearson do interior work. Everyone knows how great he is and I feel very lucky that I got to see one of my scripts filtered through his imagination.

The real revelation to me on this book, though, was Derec Donovan. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed his work for years but I didn't appreciate how good he was until I got a chance to work with him. His black and white pages are STUNNING and I guarantee this won't be the last time I work with him. At least I hope not!

As I mentioned previously (in the interview with Jen Contino), the solicitation info for this issue, which listed three separate stories, was wrong. There are only two, one featuring Damian (Batman's biological son) and the other an adventure starring Tim Drake (Batman's now-adopted son).

The Tim Drake story was originally intended to be my first issue as the regular writer of the monthly Robin comic. Unfortunately, when Tomasi left staff at DC, those plans changed and the book moved to a different writer. That's comics and DC (and Mike Siglain) have taken good care of me, keeping me writing other work. But I had big plans for Robin and hopefully, I'll get another crack at the title at some point or other, or at the least a chance to do another annual to conclude the grim little tale this one started.

I listened to some mood music while writing this annual so, if you want to get in the same frame of mind as I was, I recommend 'Comfortably Numb' by Pink Floyd for the Damian story and 'Gimme Shelter' by the mighty Stones for the Tim Drake tale. I tried to channel the mood of each song for each story.

This Robin Annual is my first writing work released since WORLD WAR III, so I'm glad the wait is over. ARENA is up next, which is basically going to own the month of December, followed by The Atom in January, The ***** in February, and then a much larger project shortly thereafter.

Can you tell I'm bored tonight? I keep writing and writing.

Enjoy the annual, I hope everyone likes it. And Happy Halloween!