Hasta La Ideas

It’s no secret that Chip Kidd is a big Batman fan. In fact, just a couple of years back, we were talking about exactly that, when we wrote about the famous design keeping tabs in his journal of all things Batman-related at that year’s Comic-Con. Now it seems that Kidd is making that love official, with the news coming last month that DC Comics had brought aboard Kidd to pen a full-length graphic novel and artist Dave Taylor to visually bring it to life. Though the news about Batman: Death By Design, which is set to be released sometime next year, has been circulating since mid-October, there have been a number of great interviews with both Kidd and Taylor out there, with new illustrations popping up from the book here and there. We point you first to Newsarama, who recently interviewed Kidd, learning that one of the story’s main villains is a new creation made by the designer himself. Named Exacto, Kidd describes him as “an architectural critic as a Batman villain.” Comic Book Resources also has a great talk with the designer from right after the NYCC event, wherein he talks a bit more about the artistic direction the book will be taking. Here’s a bit about coming up with the name and where it all goes from there:

I actually came up with the title first. I thought, “If it’s me and you know who I am and what I do, then I’m going to come at this whole thing from a design standpoint.” I’ve said for many years that Batman himself and especially the way he’s evolved is brilliant design. It’s problem solving. And we get into that in the story. Beyond that, it became about me going “What if?” What do I want that I haven’t seen? And really, the overall Art Direction for the book is “What if Fritz Lang made a Batman movie in the late 1930s and had a huge budget? Go!” There’s the visual platform.

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