Acclaimed comics author Ed Brubaker has joined the creative team behind Batman: Caped Crusader, the animated series in the works at HBO Max and Cartoon Network.

Award-winning animation veteran Bruce Timm is show-running and exec producing the series, which also has executive producers J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, the director behind the upcoming Warner Bros. tentpole The Batman. James Tucker is co-exec producer.

Brubaker is running the writers’ room along with Timm and is acting as Timm’s right hand. He is also earning an exec producer credit on the show, which The Hollywood Reporter has learned will have a 10-episode first season. Brubaker will be the head writer on the series.

 

When the show was announced in May 2021, the producers pointed to Timm’s genre-defining 1990s Batman: The Animated Series as a benchmark and said the goal was to “once again reinvent Batman and his iconic rogue’s gallery with sophisticated storytelling, nuanced characters and intense action sequences all set in a visually striking world.”

Brubaker may be best known as the co-creator of the Winter Soldier, the popular Marvel character that co-headlined his own Disney+ series last year, but in the last decade, he has made a career of plumbing the depths of the immoral mind with his pulpy and acclaimed Criminal and Reckless comic works. (Winter Soldier actor Sebastian Stan last month teased fans with a photo of himself reading a Reckless graphic novel.)

And Brubaker is no stranger to the world of the Caped Crusader. In fact, the books that helped make Brubaker’s name were Batbooks from the early 2000s, among them was the highly regarded Catwoman comics with artist Darwyn Cooke. He was also the co-writer and co-creator of Gotham Central, which took a street-level, police point-of-view approach to Gotham City’s underbelly.

“Here’s something few people know, but the original Batman: The Animated Series was one of the things that made me want to write superhero comics in general, and Batman in particular,” Brubaker said in a statement. “If not for what Bruce Timm and all the talented writers and artists did with that show, things like my revamp of Catwoman with Darwyn Cooke (who worked on BTAS) and Gotham Central with Greg Rucka and Michael Lark, would never have happened.

When Bruce Timm offered me the chance to come work on this new reimagining of Batman with him, James Tucker, J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, I jumped at it.”

He continued, “Their vision for the show, with a slightly more pulpy take on the character, and a new way of looking at the world of Gotham, set in the past but viewed through a modern lens really sold me, and so far every part of it has been a blast to work on. I can’t wait until the rest of the world can see what we’ve been building the last few months in the writers room. All I can say is, it’s not what anyone is expecting … but in a good way.