Under the mask, the next Batman will be black

Fans of DC Comics have been told for months that a new Batman will premiere in January. They were also teased that underneath the costume of the new caped crusader would likely be a person of colour. The identity of the new hero was revealed on Thursday when DC released a cover of the second issue of the new comic: he is Timothy Fox, one of the sons of Lucius Fox, a business associate of Bruce Wayne, the original Batman.

Timothy Fox will appear as the title hero in Future State: The Next Batman, a four-issue series written by John Ridley, the screenwriter of “12 Years a Slave,” with art by Nick Derington, Laura Braga and others. The four-issue series will arrive in comic stores in January and February and is part of a two-month event that puts DC’s regular series on hold and replaces them with new ones that look to the future of the DC Universe.

The leap forward has fresh faces taking on the roles of familiar heroes: in addition to Timothy Fox as Batman, Jonathan Kent, the son of the Man of Steel, is Superman, and Yara Flor, who is from Brazil, is Wonder Woman. Some of these future characters are already having ripple effects. The new Wonder Woman, who was created by writer and artist Joëlle Jones, will be getting a Wonder Girl series set in the present following the event. The character is also being developed as a series for the CW.

Timothy Fox originally appeared in Batman No. 313 in 1979. He most recently appeared in October, after the Wayne fortune, which pays for Batman and all his wonderful toys, fell into the hands of Timothy’s father, Lucius Fox.

In a recent interview, Ridley talked about the target audience for his Batman story: his sons.

“They appreciate the things that I do,” he said. “They’re happy for me. They’re great supporters. But they would much rather see ‘Black Panther’ than ‘12 Years a Slave,’ let’s be honest. So to be able to write the next Batman, for them to know that this next Batman is going to be Black, everybody else on the planet can hate it, have a problem with it, denigrate it, but I have my audience and they already love it.”

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