Ultimately, the final product is intended to be an intimate look at Batman's neverending battle against crime, and shares similarities with other experiments in pairing prose with comic book imagery. I have a table in my studio where I laid the covers out in order and at a certain point I was rearranging sequences and it took on a life of its own.' This became a thrilling challenge because I had to expand on the original idea as the run progressed. I knew the covers wouldn't come out in the order I intended them to be in my story so I had a list of concepts I needed to execute. 'So there are also requirements that the book has at times to respect the story being told inside. 'The thing about a book like Detective Comics, though, is that it's a monthly title,' Bermejo said. RELATED: One of the Most Iconic Batman Covers of All Time Is Going Up for Auction

The nature of the book just immediately brought to mind classic pulp imagery, the classic detective story on the search for some foe who is taunting him.'īermejo said that he drew inspiration from the letters of murderers like Jack the Ripper and formulated an interlocking narrative that managed to stand on its own while corresponding to covers firmly in the realm of 'iconic Batman imagery, speaking to the huge scope and mythology of the character, as well as to the more street-level day to day of his life.' The overarching story evolved as Bermejo's covers were released, particularly since his variants needed to at least be somewhat representative of the events in each issue of Detective Comics.

I wanted to push something with the covers that wouldn't necessarily be sequential but that readers could interact with and follow as some sort of narrative. 'As soon as the variant cover editor at the time offered me the Detective Comics gig, I knew it was an opportunity to do something different with a cover run,' Bermejo said.

Batman by Lee Bermejo