Kate Kane is a legend among legends. DC’s breakout LGBTQ+ character has won a legion of fans since Eisner Award-winning writer Greg Rucka reintroduced her in the pages of 2007’s much praised Batwoman: Elegy. Now, after almost twenty years, Rucka is returning to continue the story he started and to bring Kate to a new generation of thrill seekers.

Fresh off the success of his red-hot Cheetah & Cheshire Rob the Justice League, Rucka sat down with us to discuss what we can expect from his Next Level Batwoman…

Is the new Batwoman a culmination of ideas you've had over the years you were away from the character?

When we reintroduced Batwoman, I had a plan. There were three stories that I really wanted to tell. Unfortunately, I only got to tell two of them. So, when the opportunity came—“Hey, you want to do Batwoman?”—I was like, “Yes, I would.”

In this industry, when you miss the bus, you don't tend to see the bus ever again. So, the chance to actually be able to tell the story that I wanted to tell—the last of these—was a really good place to start a new series. It's not definitionally the same story I wanted to tell, just because I’ve changed as a creator. And to mix metaphors, you don't enter the same river in the same place twice. So, it's grown, it's changed. But it's a really wonderful opportunity.

Then to work with DaNi, who is just an incredible collaborator, who just brings such beautiful energy… Her visual sense and her visual storytelling is stunning. We've got Matt Hollingsworth coloring it. Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, his lettering is just sublime. He is doing things with lettering that I think are just remarkable. The editorial backing on the book… It's really a remarkable opportunity, not only do I get to come back to Kate and continue telling her story, it's also an opportunity to re-engage with her and reintroduce her to new people, and then aggressively and actively move forward from that point.

We've got a first arc that is, I am hoping, new reader friendly. If you’ve never read anything about her before, you'll be okay. But if you have read what I’ve done before, you'll be like, “Oh, okay, I get it. It makes sense.” Then we're going to go from there out into the broader DCU.

One of the things that comics constantly struggle with, or DCU comics struggle with, is that when characters evolve, they can only evolve so much. We very effectively move things around. It looks like things changed, but they didn't really change. “Oh, we introduced a new Robin,” and it’s still not really that different.

With Kate, that was 2007. That's almost twenty years ago. The surrounding cast has changed, the world I’m writing in has changed. I look at somebody like Renee Montoya, and when I started really working with her in Gotham Central, and how she evolved… We all grow at different rates and in different ways. The fact that some of these characters have matured more than others is one of the things I want to engage with—what is it that holds some of them back?

Kate is an arrested character. She is, to me, caught in a moment of trauma, like many members of the Bat-Family. There's a personal tragedy and they're locked to it. The ability to navigate that tragedy into something that is not self-destructive, but is productive, matters. More than ever, I believe that when we write stories about superheroes, the “hero” part is the operative word. The “super” is just the modifier.

I say this as a guy who just wrote the Cheetah & Cheshire Rob the Justice League miniseries. I'm more than happy to write bad guys, but we’re also quick to point out that the bad guys who kill, in that miniseries, ​​it has nothing to do with the actual crime they're doing. Issue #1, that's the only issue with a body count, and that's them at work. In the whole heist, they don't take a life. I don't even think they take a swing. I'm kind of proud of that. I did these villains and they didn't actually punch anybody! It's elevated superheroing, and I really do think we need stories that are aspirational in that sense, and we really need heroes.

Kate is not the only queer hero out there, but it's not like there are a lot of them. So that visibility, that representation, especially in this moment we're in right now, is vital.

Does Next Level allow for even greater freedom in telling Kate’s story?

I am not yet at a point where I have to worry about sexual content. I haven't thought of it as R- rated. We write melodrama. We write soap opera, and we write soap opera with a fair amount of punching and kicking, and there's blood. This isn't soft stuff.

The first story is not a gentle story. It is a story about trauma, and it's not simply physical trauma. There's a scene at the end of the first arc, with one of the characters, and if it executes the way I hope it executes, it should be one of the most disturbing things in the entirety of the run. But what makes it disturbing should be what's happening emotionally and what's happening psychologically. It's not a question of a character is strapped to a chair and electrocuted or the knives come out and they’re carved to pieces. There’s none of that. It's simply somebody battling with their mental health and losing, and losing rather hopefully in a heartbreaking fashion.

Is it darker in tone than Elegy?

Yeah, it’s definitely darker than Elegy, simply because this is the coda to Elegy. The arc is called “Eschatology,” because let's use great big words that people will have to look up. But it is a question of what is life after those things. That's what it is. Because this arc is very much about that initial trauma. It's about Kate and her sister being abducted when they were 12 and what happened to each of them as a result. We know what happened to Kate. We don't really know what happened to Beth. We don't really understand, and then she's kind of forgotten. I was like, “Yeah, you know what? I'm just not doing that.” This was the story I wanted to tell about them.

Sometimes when creators step away from an acclaimed work, they return to it years later with mixed results. But you've already proven, with Rebirth Wonder Woman, that when you come back to a character, you can actually improve on your previous work. Do you find that in the time spent away, you’re able to recharge?

You know, this sounds a little precious when you hear writers talk like this, but these characters are alive to me. They live in a heightened world. They live in this operatic world. But our job, when we write these things, is to embrace the truth of the world. The truth of the world is, “That guy can fly. These aliens are in outer space. This cult exists. Gotham City is a crap place to live, except when it isn't.” These are the truths. If you don't accept those, if you're not willing to embrace them, then you're not really doing your job because you can't get to an emotional truth.

Yeah, I have had a lot of time to think about these characters. It's not to imply that that's all I do every day, all day long. But they live in my head. So yeah, you get the benefit of that.
 

Batwoman #1 by Greg Rucka, DaNi and Matt Hollingsworth is now available in print and as a digital comic book.