Director and screenwriter Mattson Tomlin ( Project Power, Little Fish) has teamed up with Eisner-winning suspense and horror artist Andrea Sorrentino ( Joker: Killer Smile, Batman: The Smile Killer, Green Arrow) to create a gritty, hard-boiled version of Gotham City, where every punch leaves a broken bone and every action has consequences far, far beyond Batman’s imagination!

The theme is not unseen but the whole atmosphere- think the Joker movie with Joaquim Phoenix, even darker- kind of makes it stand out. And yes, I do like these depressing noir stories. Don’t ask. But Blair Wong and Leslie Thompkins aren't the only characters creating complications in Bruce Wayne's crimefighting life. There's also the title imposter, who appears in the first issue and sends ripples through Gotham City, from the underworld to the police department, with their attempts to imitate Batman. For Tomlin, creating an imposter Caped Crusader was motivated in part by his decision to steer away from direct confrontations with bigger villain names in his comics writing debut, but it was also part of the grounded nature of the story. If Batman really was going on, dressing up in a costume, and actually having an impact on his city, it makes sense that someone else might try to set up a twisted mirror image of that. As a lifelong Batman fan, putting my spin on Gotham City has been a dream come true,” said writer Mattson Tomlin. “Taking the question of ‘What if Batman was real?’ as far as narratively possible conjured incredible potential that hasn’t recently been explored in the comics. Batman: The Imposter treats Bruce Wayne and the people around him as tragically flawed and vividly real, with the obstacles Batman faces coming from a reality that closely mirrors our own.”Not that that’s a bad thing in itself (there’s a detail over why he’s not got access to his family’s billions that’s a clever touch) but I think Tomlin’s fallen into a typical pitfall when writing Batman which is that he's gone much too dark and overly serious. Sure it’s more grounded but it’s also not fun. Sometimes a deathly serious tone works but it’s better if a writer has earned that right by building up to it in a series - which Tomlin hasn’t. In just three years, the Batman has made a huge impact on Gotham crime - but that good work is threatening to be undone as footage of “Batman” executing unarmed prisoners emerges. There’s an imposter out there - but who? Batman and Detective Blair Wong set out to uncover the mystery. Demoted to Extra: Alfred Pennyworth and James Gordon only receive a few mentions, compared to the central members of the supporting cast they are elsewhere.

Where were you in terms of your involvement with the Batman movie when you were working on this? Had you already done your bit on that project before? The story begins with Batman being seriously injured and on the verge of death following an encounter with armed store robbers—the kind of low-level criminals whom, in more mainstream adaptations, he would be able to take down almost effortlessly. Here we see all too well the very real physical risks involved in even the smallest acts of vigilantism. Certainly doing something that was very grounded, and something that was a detective story, that is something I'm very interested in," he said. "But honestly, I think that it might have come from a tweet. You know, the internet goes wild, and one of the memes that was going around is something like 'Bruce Wayne would rather dress up as a bat and beat people up than go to therapy.' And I just thought, that's kind of awesome. Let's send him to therapy! And I hadn't quite seen that in a really head on kind of way before.Meenan, Devin (January 18, 2022). "Every New Batman Comic Released In 2021". Comic Book Resources . Retrieved February 17, 2022. Instead of using an ostentatious vehicle like the Batmobile, Batman gets around Gotham inconspicuously using an elaborate network of ziplines and hidden motorcycles. Even this isn't inconspicuous enough, however, since the GCPD finds and confiscates many of the motorcycles and cuts the ziplines. What I find amazing is the level of detail with the world building that you’ve put in place here, whether it’s determining where these villains are in their evolution, or just where Gotham City is, in relation to having a Batman. There’s there’s a lot of stuff in here about the economic consequences of what happens when there’s somebody like Batman operating. There are hints of a class war element, there’s graffiti that speaks to very timely, real world elements. Is there a Bible for the world that you’ve created? How much of the previous two years of Batman’s life do you already have in your head? A surprisingly solid Batman story. Usually I absolutely hate stories about “realistic” superheroes, but this was well written and the author had a decent voice for Bruce Wayne. It was also helped immensely by the incredible art from Andrea Sorrentino, who continues to be one of my favorite artists in all of comics. Seriously, the action scenes in this book alone make it worth buying at cover price. Batman must clear his name after an Imposter begins murdering cops in the batsuit, but how does one prove their innocence from behind a mask? One of the better Batman comics to come out in the past several years. It’s being touted as a “jumping-on point” for fans of the Matt Reeves movie (though whether any of this is in continuity with that universe remains to be seen). Dark and gritty without succumbing to the nihilism of the Snyderverse. Strong YEAR ONE and GOTHAM CENTRAL vibes, with a few f-bombs thrown in for the grownups.

He's a character that there's just some dialogue that will never come out of his mouth, and anybody that goes to therapy, they know, suddenly they're saying things they've never said before," he continued. "So it just felt like a good place to put him because it was new, and kind of puts him on his heels." Parental Abandonment: Bruce Wayne, of course. Both of Blair Wong’s parents were also murdered in front of her when she was a child.

Couch, Aaron (2022-02-22). " 'Batman: The Imposter' Writer Mattson Tomlin Hasn't Let The Dark Knight Go". The Hollywood Reporter . Retrieved 2022-11-22. Although I initially thought this comic would tie in with Reeves’ film, Batman: The Imposter is ultimately doing its own thing, albeit yet another grounded, gritty take on the Batman mythos. The story centres on Bruce Wayne, who has only Batman for a couple of years, and during one night after being a bloody pulp, he finds himself reunited his old childhood psychologist, Dr. Leslie Thompkins. As much as Thompkins is determined to help Bruce with his mental state, a Batman imposter is causing chaos in the city through murder, making the real Batman a target of the GCPD, including Detective Blair Wong. Bruce Wayne’s mission as the Batman has only been underway for a year or so, but he can tell he’s making a difference in this city. Unfortunately, he’s made some powerful enemies–and not just among the colorful maniacs called “super-villains.” All the traditional power brokers of Gotham resent the disruption the Batman has brought to town… and it seems one of them has a plan to neutralize him. There’s a second Batman haunting Gotham’s rooftops and alleys–and this one has no qualms about murdering criminals, live and on tape. With the entire might of the Gotham City Police Department and Gotham’s rich and powerful coming down on his head, Batman must find this imposter and somehow clear his name…but how can you prove your innocence from behind a mask? Rudolph, Casper (2021-10-13). "Batman: The Imposter #1 review". Batman News . Retrieved 2022-11-22.

Holland, Dustin (October 18, 2021). "DC's Batman: The Imposter #1 Comic Review". Comic Book Resources . Retrieved February 17, 2022. I spent a lot of time in the Imposter universe thinking about what the hell Robin would look like. Just kind of thinking about this guy taking on a surrogate child and what that all means. We’ve seen so many different interpretations of it and …there’s a lot of darkness there, and also a lot of light. I haven’t sat down to actually write that story yet. But I certainly find myself daydreaming about what it might look like in this universe. This kind of take on the character is going to feel different from some of the other things that we’ve seen before. That’s about as descriptive as I would get in my writing. Sometimes Andrea would take all of that and add to it in a way that really kind of made it mindbogglingly way more awesome. Other times he would take none of it and instead come up with something 1000 times better. There was never ever, ever a time where I had written something and Andrea delivered something worse. The script was always the worst thing about this thing. Set in the early years of Batman's career, the story grew out of Tomlin's experiences working on the script for writer/director Matt Reeves' upcoming The Batman, which tells its own story of the crimefighter's early battles. For Tomlin, who wasn't part of the entire writing process on the film, it was an exercise in generating a lot of ideas, but not necessarily having a way to fit them all on the screen. So, he turned to another medium. Keeping Batman on his heels for The Imposter also meant projecting a lot of strength onto the Leslie Thompkins character. A pillar of various Batman stories and a frequent ally of the Wayne family, Thompkins is a Gotham City hero in her own right, and it was important to Tomlin to place her front and center in this tale as someone who wouldn't be a Bruce Wayne enabler, but a Bruce Wayne interrogator.Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Due to Bruce's somewhat different circumstances from most other interpretations, he has no close friends or support system, since Alfred quit when he was a child, and Gordon was fired from the GCPD for working with him. He was a highly disturbed child diagnosed with OCD and acute anxiety, who was prone to violent outbursts. As an adult, he remains an emotionally damaged individual, who falls in love with Blair Wong, but has no qualms about manipulating her to gather intel from the GCPD's investigation of Batman. His therapy sessions with Leslie do help him to an extent but by the end he hasn't changed that much, and his circumstances as Batman have gotten even worse since the authorities and the public still view him as a dangerous vigilante at best and a serial killer at worst. We've seen pieces of that around, so it's not anything new, Tomlin said. "But again, really leaning into [the realism] in this way. Does he hold a press conference and say, 'No guys, that's not me. It's this other'? It just creates all of these complications for him that to me really felt like, 'Man, that's going to be tough for Batman to get out of.' And I love making his life hell. So that, for me, was really, it just felt like a very clear kind of obstacle."