“I wanted to explore that moment,” Miller tells Den of Geek magazine. “I don’t know if it’s a blown line or just a stub left over from one of the rewrites, but I’m going to take the line as it is and see where I can go with it.”
Such niggling questions helped Miller write Batman: Resurrection, a novel that explores the aftermath of Batman. Miller takes readers through a city still reeling from the Joker’s attack, now vulnerable to a new threat.
“I decided to deal with the question and come up with something where we have more than one meaning to the word ‘resurrection.’ I looked at the model for the Burton movies and borrowed the “Re” from Batman Returns for Batman: Resurrection,” he explains. “Exactly what or whom is being resurrected, we won’t say yet.”
However, Miller will reveal one person caught in the wake of Joker’s destruction: a frustrated actor who takes the name Basil Karlo and, after an encounter with Smylex-tainted make-up, transforms into Clayface, a grotesque shape-shifting monster from the comics.
“I wanted a protagonist/antagonist who fits the Tim Burton aesthetic,” Miller says of Clayface. “All of his characters are broken in some way, shape, or form. I took the Golden Age Clayface Basil Karlo and made him more sympathetic and tragic. I wanted to tie his tragedy to something from the first movie.”
Miller cites a line from legendary critic Gene Siskel’s review of Batman Returns as a guiding principle when making his version of Clayface. “He called it ‘an opera about loneliness.’ I thought that was wonderful because the movies are about lonely people versus people who have someone. They’re all on paths and colliding with one another, hoping to get to some position where they can be whole.”