To make the new series Batman: The Brave and the Bold stand out, James Tucker created a fresh twist on the overexposed character by going retro and taking him back to his comic book past. All images © Cartoon Network.

There's no shortage of Batmen to go around these days. At the head of the parade is Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight, with Christian Bale portraying perhaps the darkest version of the "Caped Crusader" yet. Then you've got your cartoon iterations, including 1992's classic Batman: The Animated Series (currently airing on Disney's Jetix) and 2004's The Batman, not to mention his appearances on Justice League and even the classic Saturday morning Super Friends, all of which are still floating around the Cartoon Network/Boomerang schedule.

How do you make a new Batman series stand out from the crowd? How can you possibly come up with a fresh twist on a character who has come perilously close to overexposure these past few years? James Tucker's solution: go retro and take him back to his comic book past, back to a time before Adam West even thought about donning lavender-tinted tights.

In other words: this is your father's Batman.

James Tucker.

Back in the 1950s "Silver Age" of comics, Batman carried quite a bit of weight in DC's lineup. He starred in his own comic, was the featured hero in Detective Comics, teamed up with Superman in World's Finest Comics… and co-starred with a different DC superhero in every issue of The Brave and the Bold.

"Sam Register [the animation producer responsible for Cartoon Network hits like Teen Titans and Ben 10, and the new series' executive producer] pulled me into the project" to serve as its producer, Tucker recalls. "He came to me with the idea of doing a new Batman show. I went 'oh, hell no' because I worked with Bruce Timm for over 12 years. His reputation is built on Batman: The Animated Series, a show that stands on the mountaintop of animation greatness. It's an indelible version of the character.

"I thought, how could I do it different and yet make it good? You can't out-cool The Animated Series -- you have to find another tack and not just change his costume. It's like near-beer; if you don't commit to changing everything, it's just not as good. Sam said, 'It's The Brave and the Bold.' That's different, I thought -- it's Batman and whoever… and whoever is the key to the show. That was my hook."

The "DC Universe" provides a lot of "whoevers" to co-star with Batman. Some are as well known as Aquaman, Green Arrow and Plastic Man, while others are lower-profile heroes on the order of the Blue Beetle and Wildcat. More than a bit of thought went into which heroes would show up -- and how often.

In this series, Batman teams up with such heroes from the "DC Universe" as Aquaman (above), Green Arrow, Plastic Man, Blue Beetle and Wildcat.

As for which comic book version of the not-so-Dark Knight this show focuses on, Tucker reached back to the 1940s and '50s, and in particular the work of Dick Sprang, one of Batman's first artists. "We wanted to strip back the design of the characters and simplify them. We wanted more fluid animation than we usually get from overseas. To help that along, we kind of had to pull back on detail. If you look back at the earliest incarnations of the characters, they were the simplest to draw. The printing wasn't good back then so they had to keep things simple. Those designs suited my purpose better.

"Sam Register, Michael Jelenic, who's our story editor and producer, and I sat down with the DC people" to pick Batman's co-stars. "We decided which were 'gold characters,' who'd reoccur two to three times over the season; 'silver' ones, who'd only appear a couple of times; and 'platinum,' who show up just once in the season. There are some characters that only have one story you can tell with them anyway, but you can throw them in anyway because the fans love them.

"The co-star is featured more. They come in and we learn more about them. Batman's our touchstone -- we know his backstory, we know his personality. In this show Batman is basically whatever the guest star needs him to be. When he's with a young hero like the Blue Beetle, he's a mentor or a dad; when he's with Green Arrow, his attitude is a lot different -- they're like peers, or competitors. And Batman kind of has a protective feeling towards an older character like Wildcat; to him, Wildcat's like a father figure."

Diedrich Bader, Batman's voice on the new series, reveals that the Blue Beetle and Aquaman go for the gold: "We've had a number of episodes with them, but there's a huge amount of turnover, just like the comic book."

"I worked on Justice League and did the version of Green Arrow that most people are familiar with now" -- a goateed Robin Hood look-alike (and self-described "old lefty"); in The Brave and the Bold, GA returns to his square-jawed, clean-cut look. "I look at the new versions of these characters as being younger than their Justice League versions, or else they're new to the superhero game -- fresher and less jaded."

The angst is gone from Tucker's Batman, replaced by a dry sense of humor, often conveyed via voiceover from the hero himself. "In this version Batman is a crime fighter and hero first. As a result, he can be ironic -- he can show more sides of himself than if he's just brooding. He simply has to be more approachable for the premise of this show to work. Otherwise, why would anyone even bother to work with him?"