Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka talk about their impending arc on Marvel’s blind vigilante
By Kiel Phegley and Danny Spiegel
Posted 2/20/2008
Two of the most criminally inclined minds in comics have switched beats from Gotham City to Hell’s Kitchen, as the writing team behind the award-winning Gotham Central—Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka—are set to reteam on an upcoming arc of Daredevil.
And while Brubaker and Rucka will be reteaming not only with each other but also with the art team of Michael Lark and Stefano Gaudiano, don’t expect their four-part arc—which starts with May’s Daredevil #107—to be a procedural drama like their previous series.
“The idea that my editor and I had come up with for to do after the current Daredevil arc was to do a legal thriller with Matt Murdock taking a penalty case,” explained Brubaker. “I thought, ‘It'll be fun to do a legal thriller with Greg, especially.’ So it was nice to just talk to him and get the juices flowing again just like the old Gotham Central days where we kicked ideas around and really kind of bounced stuff off of each other.”
And while it was Brubaker who extended the initial invite to his former co-scribe, Rucka jumped in with two feet. “Ed called and it was no-brainer. The chance to collaborate with him and Michael again is one that I couldn’t resist. The fact that it’s on Daredevil is just icing. For me, the real pleasure is being able to work with those two guys again, and I’m really looking forward to people seeing what we do,” he said.
“He just got back from working on a movie so I thought ‘Maybe he's tired of collaboration now,’” laughed Brubaker of Rucka’s recent involvement with the big screen adaptation of his Oni Press graphic novel Whiteout. “It seems to be going great. I think he's excited about doing it.”
Brubaker went on to explain how the division of labor would work on this new collaboration as opposed to the team’s previous work. “We’re co-plotting this whole thing and kicking all the ideas around, finding the right twists and the right beats and everything and deciding who needs to write what scenes, and Greg is writing a lot of the cops and detective kind of stuff and the legal aspects, and I'm writing more of the Matt Murdock stuff because I’ve been writing Matt for a couple of years now.
“For Gotham Central we did an arc that the two of us would plot and write together. Then I’d do an arc, he’d do an arc, and then we’d team up again for like, four issues. We did that three times for Gotham Central where we teamed up and wrote a big Red Ball case—like the first two issues was a thing where Mr. Freeze kills a cop and there was the Joker storyline that was four issues long, and then we did the dead Robin thing where we teamed up. So we did those three that we really liked working on and we plotted those together. We always knew with Gotham Central that it was formulated so that it would be a way where we could both work on the book and have it be our book and at the same time not step on each other’s toes by having different casts and alternating arcs and things like that.”
