Paul Dini has lived the geek’s dream life. He’s won the Emmy. He invented a Batman character that was immediately accepted, added to the permanent canon, and will likely be around for decades after he leaves us. He grew up loving the character Zatanna, and was eventually hired by DC to actually write for Zatanna, and then in an even wilder twist of fate, met and married a woman who looks and dresses exactly LIKE Zatanna. He’s done everything, met everyone and made the kind of mark in history most nerds can only dream of.
He’s also been brutally mugged.
In 1993, fresh off writing some of B:TAS’s greatest scripts, Dini was walking to his home in Los Angeles when he was suddenly jumped and assaulted by two thugs who robbed him and left him with severe injuries that took weeks of hospital therapy to recover from. At this time he found himself questioning everything he ever believed and wondered if he could ever write a superhero story again.
What makes Batman and what makes other superheroes work is the myth that when life is at its lowest, and when you need a hero, a hero swings down and helps you. And I didn’t have that.
Here I am writing these stories for an audience that loves this form, in comics, in animation, but now I was saying to myself, ‘I can’t go on with this. I don’t believe in it anymore. There is no hero for me. Where is my hero?’
The answer is: you have to be your own hero.
He’s now put the story of his recovery into graphic novel form, Dark Night: A True Batman Story. As Dini slowly heals and tries to put himself back together, various Bat-heroes and villains appear to represent his thoughts and anxieties. As you can imagine, this was a very hard book for Dini to write and he could barely bring himself to look at the illustrations when they were finished.
Illustrated by Eduardo Rizzo, Dark Night will be published through Vertigo in June of 2016.
[Source: The Hollywood Reporter]
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