‘Batman: The Imposter’ Writer Mattson Tomlin Hasn’t Let The Dark Knight Go

Mattson Tomlin had a hard time shaking Batman. A year after he worked with filmmaker Matt Reeves on the script for The Batman, Tomlin would be going about his day-to-day life, and the Dark Knight would pop into his head.

“I still was taking notes on my phone and still having all these, ‘What if you did something with this or that?'” Tomlin tells The Hollywood Reporter. “[I thought], ‘Why am I doing this? There is nowhere for me to put these thoughts.'”

So, Tomlin  put in a call to DC Films and said he was interested in writing a comic. To his surprise, he soon found himself meeting with Jim Lee, the artist and DC executive. The meeting in Lee’s office took an adventurous turn when the executive needed to run to his house last-minute — and invited Tomlin along for the ride.

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“It kept escalating,” Tomlin says with a laugh. “He and I were driving around Burbank together and talking about Batman.”

That conversation ultimately led to Batman: The Imposter, a three-part series that debuted in October and is in stores Tuesday as a collected edition. Imposter picks up a year or so after Bruce Wayne first donned the cape and cowl, and finds him faced with a mysterious enemy, a person pretending to be Batman.

Celebrated artist Andrea Sorrentino and colorist Jordie Bellaire brought their own twists to Tomlin’s scripts, which he penned during downtime on his directorial debut, the Hulu sci-fi film Mother/Android. Tomlin wrote issue one during prep, issue two during principal photography, and issue three just before postproduction began.

“Every Monday morning, I would wake up with new Andrea pages,” says Tomlin. “That lasted through the whole shoot and was Christmas every week.”

Before launching a comic and becoming a feature film director, Tomlin was a prolific screenwriter, penning original scripts for the Netflix superhero movie Project Power and selling big-budget sci-fi spec 2084 to Paramount. And in addition to The Batman (in theaters March 4), he has played with other established IP, writing a Mega Man movie and an upcoming Terminator anime series for Netflix.

Tomlin values all of his experiences — whether it be serving Reeves’ vision on The Batman or working with talented artisans to make Mother/Android a reality. But he notes that there’s something special about comics that you can’t get in film or TV.

“The lovely thing about comic books is that you are dealing with three or four or five people, max. On a movie it’s three or four or five hundred people,” says Tomlin. “This book is exciting for me because it is so much more of my voice than anything else that has come out that has my name on it so far. It’s me, Andrea Sorrentino and Jordie Bellaire.”

Tomlin hopes to continue in the comics space moving forward, and ideally would have something come out once a year, whether that be an established IP like Batman or something creator-owned.

Says Tomlin: “If I had my way, I’d be in that world to stay.”