DC Comics has announced that writer Tom King and artist Phil Hester are set to explore the secret origin of Gotham City with the six-issue limited series Gotham City: Year One, which promises to detail “how it became the cesspool of violence and corruption it is today, and how it harbored and then unleashed the sin that led to the rise of the Dark Knight.”
“Having written a ton of Batman comics, I can say it’s incredibly rare to write book like this, where you can add something large and essential to the mythos of the Dark Knight, as Scott did with Court of Owls or Grant did with the introduction of Damian or Frank did with, well, everything he touched,” said King. “In Gotham City: Year One, Phil and I will take you to a noir drenched past, where the secrets that made Gotham become Gotham, the sins that made Batman become Batman are finally and violently revealed.”
“Tom has crafted a story that will echo across Batman lore past and present and I hope the storytelling techniques Eric Gapstur, Jordie Bellaire, Clayton Cowles and I are bringing to bear will augment his razor-keen approach,” I’m honored to play a small part in bringing Siegel and Shuster’s landmark creation to a new audience, and in giving one of DC’s oldest legends the white-hot spotlight he deserves.”
There once was a shining city on the water, a home for families, hope, and prosperity. It was Gotham and it was glorious. The story of its fall from grace, the legend that would birth the Bat, has remained untold for 80 years. That’s about to change.
Taking place two generations before Batman, private investigator Slam Bradley gets tangled in the headline-grabbing “kidnapping of the century” as the infant Wayne heir Helen disappears in the night…and so begins a brutal, hard-boiled, epic tale of a man living on the edge and a city about to burn.
Check out a first look preview of Gotham City: Year One here…
Gotham City: Year One #1 will go on sale in October 2022.
