DC Black Label’s Batman: The Imposter Puts the Dark Knight Into a Real World

There’s a new Caped Crusader in town, and unlike Bruce Wayne, he doesn’t have any rules. DC has shared the first details for Batman: The Imposter, a new Black Label miniseries that finds a young Bruce tangling with a mysterious doppelgänger who has no reservations about killing.

The mature readers series winds the clock back to Bruce’s first year as the Dark Knight. And while Gotham has improved since he began his war on crime, one of its power barons has a plan to take the city’s new protector out of the equation for good. That’s where the titular “imposter” comes in. It’s bad enough that this counterfeit Batman doesn’t live by Bruce’s code. But when he starts executing criminals live on camera, it puts the full weight of the GCPD on Bruce’s tail.

Mattson Tomlin is writing The Imposter, after previously working on the script for The Batman alongside director Matt Reeves. Tomlin also wrote Netflix’s Project Power and recently made his directorial debut with Mother/Android, which hits Hulu later this year. Andrea Sorrentino (Gideon Falls) is handling the story’s artwork. And together, Sorrentino and Tomlin are conjuring up a “gritty, hard-boiled version of Gotham City, where every punch leaves a broken bone and every action has consequences far, far beyond Batman’s imagination!”

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“As a lifelong Batman fan, putting my spin on Gotham City has been a dream come true,” said Tomlin. “Taking the question of ‘What if Batman was real?’ as far as narratively possible conjured incredible potential that hasn’t recently been explored in the comics. Batman: The Imposter treats Bruce Wayne and the people around him as tragically flawed and vividly real, with the obstacles Batman faces coming from a reality that closely mirrors our own.”

“I’ve worked on Batman as a supporting character in a couple of books,” added Sorrentino. “But this was the very first time I had the chance to work on a Batman title, and it was amazing. I’ve been a huge fan of Batman ever since I was a kid and saw Tim Burton’s Batman movie in 1989, so having the chance to work with Mattson and Jordie on this take on the Caped Crusader was like an early Christmas present!”

Batman: The Imposter #1 hits comic shops on October 12. DC is also planning to release a hardcover collection of all three issues on February 22, 2022. You can view artwork from the series in the gallery below.

Are you looking forward to exploring Tomlin and Sorrentino’s version of Gotham City? Let us know in the comment section!

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