Swank got a chance to talk to Judd Winick about the new Batwing book that came out today.  If you’re on the fence about picking it up, this might change your mind.

We had this chat to launch some preview pages on Huffington Post that appear here.  This is our unabridged conversation.

Judd Winick: In general it’s a superhero book. He is a man, who is an anointed batman. Last year Grant Morrison came up with Batman Incorporated, where Bruce Wayne steps forward and admits to the world that he’s been funding Batman. And Batman then went around the world and began anointing somewhat established, somewhat unknown super-heroes that he brought into Batman Incorporated. And basically slaps on the bat-signal, the bat-insignia and they become soldiers in Batman’s army. And in kicking around the idea coming up with a series based on one of these characters we wanted to expand the bat universe a little more, we kind of centered on Batwing. We just thought it would be incredibly interesting for all reasons.

Africa as a landscape is somewhat untouched in the DC universe in a significant way and we thought Batwing just the kind of character to deliver these fresh stories. Both as a straight up super-hero story, this is a guy flying around in armor with a big bat insignia on his chest fighting other guys in other crazy outfits, but it’s set in Africa which is this highly politicized landscape where we don’t really have to come up with super villains. We have men in Africa that call themselves warlords who kidnap children and put guns in their hands and hop them up on meth and have them go kill people. These are the real guys. So we thought that combining the really over the top super-hero elements along with the very established politicized environment of Africa could make for great story telling. And with that I should say this isn’t “Lion King,” we’re not gonna have Batwing running around the Jungles with animals or things like that. There are jungles and rural areas, but it’s not going to be that kind of story. On what could be considered the more political vent is that Batwing is AIDS orphan. He lost both his parents to AIDS. Which some folks might call that politics. From where we sit we’re just trying to be true to life in Africa right now. In most of the regions one fifth of the population is HIV positive or living with AIDS. And there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 million AIDS orphans out there. It rang kind of true to us especially in the Bat universe. Batman himself and most of the other members of the Bat family come from tragic beginnings. That’s sort of the motif. That’s sort of the opera of it all. It’s not like Batwing was out there doing pre-law for a while, starting his own practice, and then decided “Hey, I’ll put on a costume and start beating up bad guys.” We usually don’t come from that place. It’s usually that they have rather sort of tragic beginnings. The fact that he lost his parents to AIDS and never knew them is one piece of that puzzle.
Big Shiny Robot!: So it sounds like the Bat-Family they’re sort of born from sorts of tragedy that befall their society. And it sounds like he’s very much in that mold, but in a different culture completely.

JW: Exactly! Whereas Bruce Wayne lost his parents to crime, David lost his mother and father to this plague that is ravaging the continent. And two-fold beginning in some later issues, around issue 3 or 4, we’ll find out that David was a boy soldier. He and his brother were scooped up and brought into a warlord’s army. And guns were thrust in their hands and they were forced to kill for this madman. So he comes from a very, very dark place. And what we learn is he and his brother were very good at what they had to do. They actually possess very unique skills. As the story progresses David turns his back on the whole thing. He’s basically brought to the point that these horrors that he’s forced to perpetrate and witness become too much for him. And he flees. That is the amazingly truncated story, but It’ll be laid out further in the book. He begins as a boy soldier and flees swearing never to take a life again. And also using every cliché he can muster, tries to make the world a better place. He’s never going to take a life again and wants to make the world better. Particularly his own world in the land of Africa.
BSR!: The book sounds like it is interested in telling a very good story that is unique to the time and place in where it is set and the characters that inhabit it, but when Batwing was first talked about the conservative media was like “Oh great, we have this black African Batman.” They had the same explosion when Laurence Fishburne was cast as Perry White, or Miles Morales was announced as the new Spider-Man.

JW: Yeah it was kind of a rough month for racist comic book fans I guess. Between Spider-Man, Perry White and Batwing it was kind of a rough four weeks there.

The idea that making people of color into super-heroes is in some way a part of some liberal agenda speaks to a greater question, how is that liberal or conservative that people of color should be super-heroes too? Super-heroes are an old concept, incredibly old. 70-80 years ago some young men started creating these guys that put on costumes and have super powers. And for the most part, almost across the line, the characters they created were all just white men. And it’s just a matter of form comics have only evolved slightly. We’re still writing about Batman and Superman some 70 years later. But our readership has changed, and our world has changed in great many ways. There were small battles in the sixties and seventies trying to introduce just a few black characters into comics because of the whole rights movement. And that was met with a lot of consternation and a lot of vitriol. Here we are, it’s 2011 here and we’re just simply tring to create characters that speak to our readership. To extrapolate on an old chestnut, we’ve been writing about aliens and people from different dimentions and people in capes and tights and colors from different worlds. Like there’s a big damn deal to have a couple of black people in comics here and there. I don’t think so, I don’t think any of us really think so.

BSR!: It seems like there’s this big disconnect between the people who read comics on a month to month basis and the people who blog on to a big news story about something going on in them. I talked to Scott Snyder a week ago and looked up that the best selling Batman comic in June sold something around 57,000 issues. While Batman has 1.8 million fans on Facebook that say this is what we like or don’t like about the character.

JW: I think there are a couple of disconnects. There’s a media which has barely been speaking to comic readers and might be jumping up and down about everything from Batwing to Spider-Man to Perry White. And that’s one camp. Then there is a very loud micro minority on the web, of comic fans, who don’t want comics to change at all and never do. And they’re the ones who are always the loudest. They’re the ones who complain about the big things and the little things, the minutia. A lot of comic fans don’t even like seeing comics covered in the mainstream press or hate when we talk about diversity because they feel like these are lessons being forced down their throat, as opposed to us just telling contemporary stories. Which I guess the biggest point about any of these things is that we’re just trying to tell contemporary stories. We’re just trying to tell comics that feel like they exist in the world today. And in the world today we have people of all shapes and sizes and races and colors. Comics should reflect that.

BSR!: What sort of stuff have you done to prepare yourself to jump into the world of Africa? I talked to Josh Dysart about “Unknown Soldier” and he’d actually gone over there some. Have you gone over there? Have you talked to people about it?

JW: I’ve actually been lobbying DC to send me over there, but they seem to keep pointing to my computer and my telephone saying research. Research is good. I’ve been talking to a number of professors and heads of African studies from universities. I’ve been talking to people who live in Africa past and present. That said, Africa is an enormously big continent with a variety of cultures. The United States is a country and Africa is a continent. We begin looking at it like “This is the Batman of North America” and what that would possibly mean.

BSR!: You can have stories that happen there that range from Casablanca to the Unknown Soldier.

JW: Exactly. To make this in a way that one could wrap their arms and head around the story I chose to sort of localize it in a way. It’s taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is an actual country. The fictional capital city of Tinosha, which is one of our tropes at DC, we create fictional cities. It’s a westernized city, which allows it to have a certain look and feel to it. Meaning that you can have universities and businesses. Not skyscrapers, but what is considered modern architecture. Outside the city there will be what is considered rural areas and villages. It’s true to what life in Africa is in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And we’re doing everything we possibly can to get it right. No I haven’t gone to Africa, but I’m doing everything I possibly can with the exception of going to Africa. Reading, talking to people, talking to more people, writing, asking them what they think about the writing, going back and forth. Ben Oliver has been going back and forth researching and pulling more reference than you could possibly imagine. It’s hard work, but we want it to feel real. At the same time it is a guy flying around in Bat armor fighting bad guys. There are a lot of leaps into fantasy. At the end of the day it is a comic book story, but we do want it to have that feel. We just don’t feel like it should do something that’s just transplanted, like it could be happening in Austin, Texas and it wouldn’t be a problem.

BSR: The level of violence and sort of the timber of the culture is different than Batman where the worst thing he has to deal with is the Joker or criminals killing a whole bunch of people, but, on a sliding scale, that isn’t as bad as warlords abducting children and putting guns in their hands. Do you see this book as being darker than the Batman books which are already renowned as being the darkest in comics.

JW: Yeah, if you consider that we’re coming from a starting place that this is a batman who lost his parents to AIDS and was a boy soldier. That’s square one for us. In the first couple of pages Batwing is talking about the fact that one of the things Batman has to do is instill fear. And Batwing points out that he’s not really sure that a man dressed up as a bat is really going to scare the average criminal in Africa. Batman just tells him that “you’re just going to have to sell it.” And that’s the point, it’s a different world. I’m treating it like even the fact that he can drop out of the sky and is wearing all this armor, a criminal in Africa who isn’t some guy who is gonna rob a liquor store or a bank, has seen and done terrible things. He’s not gonna cower back and scream “Ahhhh it’s a bat,” it’s just not gonna happen. Things have to be more frighening. So it’s less about him instilling fear into criminals than it is just trying to fight the fight. It’s a little bit of a war. That’s what Africa is, it still has many many wars going on right now.

BSR!: As a writer what is the difference between writing this compared to Catwoman, which you are relaunching?

JW: It’s apples and Volkswagons. It’s an entirely different book. Catwoman lends itself to a lot more humor than this book does. I’ve got my ears boxed over the years for making some of my super-hero books too funny or too snarky here and there. That isn’t the case with Batwing. Does it have leavity? Yeah, a little here and there, but it’s fairly serious subject matter. Or rather a fairly straight ahead super-hero story in that way. I like quips. I like joking around in that respect. And Catwoman is a criminal. She steals things. There is more of an Ocean’s 11 stance on that book. So it’s a little bit of dark fun whereas Batwing right from the first issue the stakes are enormously high. And I feel that sort of speaks true to the climate of Africa. It is considered high adventure, it’s out there and a lot is happening. It’s walloping fun in the sense of the high end nature that we’re detailing.

BSR!: As far as even just moving around the continent, like I said earlier you have the different extremes of Africa with the Casablanca sorts of stories and Unknown Soldier sorts of stories. And it sounds like in the beginning you’re more toward the Unknown Soldier side of the spectrum. Do you see yourself doing more in the Casablanca end of the spectrum? I don’t know if you like Casablanca at all, but it’s just a point of reference of a great movie that just happens to be set in Africa.

JW: No, I love it. To put it quite simply you will see times where Batwing is zipping around the most rural parts of Africa. And on the flip side you definitely see him in moments of wearing a suit and tie going where he needs to be going. Because of the nature of Africa and because of the many different cultural aspects of this entire continent. From it being a very western sort of place and very rural in other parts. Very high end and in some aspects regal. We kind of want to tap into all those things. We have the ability to do so, so we shall.

BSR!: Although it’s still a super-hero book do you think there is going to be a take away for readers that will make them feel as though they’ve learned something about this place?

JW: I hope so. Is it our goal? No, this book is not about it being a learning experience. The best stories do that just by immersing yourself in a culture that is not your own. I think some of our readership are unaware that Africa is actually considered a continent not a country. Or as it was mentioned early on when someone questioned why the pyramids of Egypt were on a cover because its in the Middle-East, we had to point out that it was in Africa. There are small lessons to be learned just about geography, but beyond that I would hope that it serves a true sense of what it is to be in Africa in 2011. Again, this isn’t “The Lion King.” It’s not about him out there swinging from vines and what not. We’ve moved very very far beyond that. Especially with our readership. Even are youngest readers are infinitely more sophisticated than they might have been in the past. The world is a much smaller place than it was in the 50’s and 60’s when you might have had a black character from Africa who did just that. Who had a lion as a best friend and sort of communicated through African mysticism and things among those lines. I don’t think young people or even our older readers would look to that and wouldn’t find it just more than a little childish. So I think that by portraying it in a real sense there’ll be an education there.

You can view an entire preview of the book on the Huffington Post.