Talking to Comic Book Resources, Bryan Q. Miller has talked revealingly about just how close we came to seeing Batman's small screen debut in Smallville and goes into great detail about his upcoming introduction in DC Comics' digital series, Smallville: Season 11. He also mentions that Vandal Savage was another character who almost turned up in the show and comments on both how the Caped Crusader's appearance would have differed from this series to the TV show and why he ultimately decided to use Stephanie Brown as Nightwing rather than any of the other well-known sidekicks. For more, be sure to click on the link below to read the interview in full.
On Whether There Were Ever Any Serious Discussions About Including Batman In The Smallville TV Series:
I don't think we actually ever got down the road with what the story would be, but at the beginning of each season -- especially in the latter years, after DC Entertainment formed -- there was always that hope that it would happen. "Maybe we'll get to do Batman this year." And then inevitably, it was like, "No, sorry. No Batman this year." We'd have that with certain characters every now and again. We'd ask if we could do something with a character but he or she would be tied up with a feature or something else. A lot of ducks had to get in order for that to happen. At one point, we almost had a Vandal Savage episode -- it was the one that we had with Dean Cain -- and literally at the last minute, features said, "We have a feature in development." It was years ago when I think New Line had something cooking, so we had to change it to a generic character named Curtis Knox and it was inferred that he was probably Vandal Savage. Stuff like that would come up all the time, not just with Batman.
I think just from a basic logistical standpoint, yes. The four-part story "Detective" that we're doing is an action movie, essentially. It's "Lethal Weapon," it's "Bad Boys," it's a buddy cop movie with Bruce and Clark as they go through the adventure. And it gets exponentially bigger and bigger and bigger as we go along through the four issues. So again, from that standpoint, no, we could not have come close to telling this story on "Smallville." Maybe, maybe, there is an action sequence that ends the first 30 pages and starts the second 30 that would have probably been the culmination of what we could have afforded to do with the Blur and Batman on "Smallville" at that point, but not the whole thing. From an emotional standpoint, there is certainly a character journey that Batman goes on when he comes to Metropolis, which is definitely, I think, what we would have done with him on the show. But it's certainly not anything that we planned to do because we never got that far down the road.
On How Long The Batman In Smallville: Season 11 Has Been Operating And His Different Costume: Batman has been doing the Batman thing for probably a couple years longer than Clark was doing the Blur thing. I would say age-wise Bruce is on par with Oliver and Lex, if not slightly older than the two of them. He has definitely been rooted in his war on crime for a while. The first bunch of designs and pages we got in featured very fierce line work, and that works because, specifically, at the beginning of the story, Batman is in a very intense place. I think Cross definitely brings his artistry to the project. He's also a big fan of the show, so he certainly knows the look of the show and the approach to "Smallville" storytelling. His action is great. As for the design of the armor, a lot of that is Cross and the rest of it is story-dictated. This is a Batman that has been doing this urban warfare for a while, and he is not wet behind the ears. He knows what it takes to get the job done and he has a lot of money to spend on it.
On Deciding To Use Stephanie Brown As Nightwing: From a writer's standpoint, I felt I couldn't get any deeper into this without having Stephanie somewhere. This is the Stephanie that people who read "Batgirl" came to know and love. Not much of her has changed. She's just wearing a different costume. Choosing Nightwing as opposed to Robin just seemed like the nice kind of take we'd have done on the show so it's not exactly the same thing as the comics because there are a bunch of other comics where you can get that. We're doing our own take, which isn't too far from, in quotation marks, "how it's supposed to be," but it's our little corner of the world.
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