This July, The Dark Knight’s adventures will be under new management. DC Comics has announced that writer Chip Zdarsky and artist Jorge Jiménez will take over creative duties on the main Batman title with July’s oversized issue #125. The duo, which succeeds the current creative team of writer Joshua Williamson and a rotating group of artists, will kick off their run on the series with a six-part storyline titled “Failsafe.”

The wraparound cover to Batman #125 by Jorge Jiménez

Batman won’t be the first time either Zdarsky or Jiménez has worked on the caped crusader. Zdarsky previously wrote a six-issue storyline in Batman: Urban Legends, and currently has the ten-issue Batman: The Knight origin storyline coming from DC. For Jiménez , it’s a return to the main Batman series, which he worked on with writer James Tynion IV in 2020 and 2021.

In a new public-facing installment of his newsletter, Zdarsky described taking over the main Batman series, and working with Jiménez on the title:

Joining me on the title with the over-sized issue 125 is the immensely talented Jorge Jiménez, who’s already had an awesome tenure on that title, so he’ll be the expert I ask all of my questions to, like, “where’s Alfred” and “why a bat?”

Early on in the process I let him know I’d be going a little darker with the scripts and Jorge immediately grabbed onto that and turned in pages that were gritty and intense, but still had the bigger-than-life energy of a Jorge Jiménez drawing. He’s the best! Truly the best. And yes, he is putting up with my bullshit, thank god.

For all those asking, yes, this is for the long haul. Or at least until DC realizes their mistake. I’ve been cooking up plans that will be felt through all the bat-titles, which have an amazing roster of talent on them, and I think readers will be pretty happy.

Elsewhere, Zdarsky told comicbook.com that Robin Tim Drake would play an important role in the series, something that makes this Batfan very happy to hear:

“The past few years have had a lot of Batman on his own, with so many (SO MANY) Robins, etc. in his orbit,” Zdarsky explained. “But I wanted to really highlight the “Batman & Robin” aspect of the characters while still maintaining the darker feel we’re going for. Tim Drake is a favourite of mine and being able to highlight him here has been a lot of fun.”

The word “failsafe” has a fairly specific meaning when it comes to the dark knight. The 2000 JLA storyline “Tower of Babel” by Mark WaidHoward Porter, & John Dell saw Ra’s Al Ghul utilize a series of failsafe protocols that Batman had devised in order to take down each member of the Justice League. The logical question becomes, if Batman has failsafes in place for all his fellow heroes, who has a failsafe for Batman? Zdarsky describes Failsafe as “Batman’s Doomsday,” and if that’s the direction this storyline is going in it should be very interesting.

Check out variant covers for Batman #125 by InHyuk Lee and Simone De Meo, as well as an interior preview page by Jiménez, below. Look for the first issue from the new creative team to arrive in stores and digitally in July.

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