Lapham's "twelve-issue beast": Newsarama talks with David Lapham about tackling Batman in his upcoming 12-issue run on Detective Comics:

"If they'd have said, ‘Here's the Blue Beetle, see what you can do with him,’ that would have been all right with me. I had in my mind just to have fun and be thirteen again. So, actually, when Bob threw Batman at me, it was at that moment when I let the kid out and let my imagination take off. Really, at first I thought Batman might not be a good character for me. He's such an icon. There's so much about him that is fixed and unchangeable and really unbelievable, that he didn't seem to be enough of a real human being to tell the kinds of stories that interest me. But, of course the more I got into the character, the more I realized the just how much was there. The wealth of mythology -- Batman and Robin, the great villains, Gotham City -- turned into such a great strength. What a rich and dark world I was getting into. It made me smile because then I knew I could interpret and play up on that and bring this character and the world of Gotham City into some frighteningly dark places. After that the stories just came and kept coming until it developed into this twelve issue beast.”