Who the hell was the Skeleton?
Solving a 22-year-old Batman mystery!
Happy Friday, you! Did your short week also feel a thousand years long?
Brian here, extremely grateful to those of you who took advantage of this week’s special offer to join The Tower, what we call you generous paid subscribers who help keep Spectators free to read every week.
Tower members also get full access to bonus content like this dispatch, at the end of which one lucky subscriber will win signed copies of these two books, each featuring the exquisite artwork of my longtime collaborator and bickering life partner Marcos Martín:
Marcos and I first met (I think; as established, my memory is for shit) around 1999, when then-Bat-editor Matt Idelson put us together to work on a short story for (deep breath) Batman: Gotham City - Secret Files & Origins #1.
I hadn’t yet started working on Runaways or The Hood or Y: The Last Man or anything that anyone actually liked, I was just a hungry young freelancer desperate to write absolutely anything.
Matt had edited some of my earliest efforts when he was at Marvel, and he very generously threw me this small gig after he started working at DC. I think it was just supposed to be a random back-up story about an existing Gotham character, but I decided that these five pages would actually serve as my audition for taking over Batman, as I introduced a mysterious new villain who every reader would be demanding to know all about the moment they read my groundbreaking tale.
Guess how that turned out?
Still, I’ll be forever grateful to DC and Matt for introducing me to Marcos, who it turned out happened to be visiting New York City from Spain at the time we were randomly paired together for this assignment, and he and fellow artist Muntsa Vicente were staying literally around the corner from my apartment at the time in Manhattan’s West Village.
We all became fast friends, and though I amateurishly covered up way too much of Marcos’ beautiful artwork with my dumb captions in our first collaboration, he somehow let me work with him again, first on Doctor Strange: The Oath at Marvel, and then, even more life-changingly, on Panel Syndicate, the pay-what-you-want digital comics site Marcos created for series like The Private Eye and Barrier (and, I suppose, Friday, his current masterpiece with my old nemesis Ed Brubaker).
But back in 1999, I was just thinking about the Skeleton, the character that Marcos and I created for that first story together.
Basically, the Skeleton was a villain who used his (or her?) abilities and resources to impersonate other Gotham criminals while committing crimes targeting Bruce Wayne, someone we suggested that the Skeleton was “close to” in their true identity.
If I’d been lucky enough to write more stories about this character (owned by DC, who obviously remains welcome to do nothing/something else entirely with the Skeleton), I’d also planned to introduce some new supporting characters as possible suspects, including Bruce Wayne’s personal attorney, private pilot and his executive assistant, close associates beyond a butler that I thought even a carefree playboy CEO would need to have in his life, if only to keep up appearances.
Of course, these new characters/love interests would have just been red herrings, and the Skeleton’s true identity (only IF the rest of the Bat editors and creators at the time had approved, of course) was going to be an existing character from the DC Universe.
But who, you ask?
Find out the long-lost answer right after this Bat-paywall, Tower members!
Everyone else, have a great weekend, and Niko, Fonografiks and I will see you back here on Monday for more free pages of Spectators. Oh, and if you’d like to read my original Skeleton story with Marcos (and some other comics I’m really proud of), I hope you’ll check out that Batman collection we’re giving away this week, still available at your local comic shop, thanks again!