Whether you say “Rahs” or “Raysh” its hard to find a bat fan that isn’t familiar with the leader of The League of Assassins, and yet, until recently, this fan favorite was missing in action in the New 52. Luckily, writer James Tynion is looking to change that in a big way. In a recent interview with Newsarama, Tynion spoke about bringing the character back for villain’s month and for an arc in Red Hood and The Outlaws.
The relationship between Ra’s and the Bat-family has always been incredibly fascinating to me, just the weight of the relationship he has with Batman — and it’s also fascinating when he comes up against Batman’s protégés. You know, they have the potential to become a man like Batman, but they’re not there yet. So it’s something where he’s equal fascinated and unimpressed by them. And I think that’s right at the core of this story.
But there’s an added element with Jason, which is Talia’s role in Jason’s resurrection, which we’ve been playing up in this run. It will take a central role as we move forward. We wanted to play with both the facts that Ra’s has never really understood why Talia made the decision to intervene in Jason’s life, and he definitely doesn’t know why Talia, at the point of her death at the end of the “Leviathan” story, that she would leave her League of Assassins to Jason rather than turn them back over to him, where he feels they rightly belong.
Those were the pieces we wanted to play with and slowly build toward, as we’ve been establishing the core pieces of how Red Hood and the Outlaws are tied to the League of Assassins and Ra’s. And the fact that Ra’s trained with Ducra, just like Jason did. And that she entrusted him with the Well of Sins, which was the thing that gave her her powers, and also the Untitled their powers. And also happens to be the original Lazarus Pit in the world. We wanted to tie together all these elements in the mythology, and bring them together for a really big, magical story that would run across the DCU. I’m very happy with what we’ve been able to pull together.
Tynion also spoke about what will be in his Zero Year tie-in next month.
One of the opportunities I saw when they started talking about the Zero Year tie-in is that Scott [Snyder,Batman writer] has introduced an incredible new addition to the Batman mythos with the Red Hood Gang. And it seemed like this was the perfect opportunity to tie up that thread that’s left from the end of Batman #24 about what happens to the Red Hood Gang after the Red Hood leader falls in the vat of acid. And also, tie into, like, what was Jason’s first encounter with the Red Hood Gang? And how did that shape him?
The issue’s going to deal with a lot of questions regarding Jason, like what sort of person he’s going to be when he grows up. And the Red Hood’s going to play very heavily into that. The thing that’s always been very interesting about Jason is that all the little details in his life should have led him to a life of crime, but he ended up becoming Robin, and going on this path toward heroism. And even though that plan didn’t exactly pan out the way he expected. He has this inner battle between the light and the dark that we really wanted to play with very heavily in this issue. And then there’s also the looming figure of — I think we all know what happens to the Red Hood leader once he falls into that vat of acid. So we might be touching on that a little bit.
It seems Tynion really enjoys his bat-lore and has some great plans for that universe. What do you think, will you be picking these issue up?
Source – Newsarama