Last weekend, "Batman" scribe Scott Snyder hosted his own panel at Boston Comic Con for the third year in a row. Fans eager to see the acclaimed writer waited patiently in a line that wrapped around the hotel lobby and filled the panel room to the brim. During the hour-long panel, Snyder took questions about Batman, his writing technique and his long, winding road to comics.

"I love coming here. I have such a blast every year," he said right at the start. "You guys have been such a wonderful group of fans... This is a chance for you guys to ask anything you want; there's nothing off-limits for me with this stuff. It's my way of saying thank you so much for everything. I have my dream job, and you guys are my bosses. You make that possible. I want you to get to feel like this is a place where we can talk frankly about any of this stuff."

Referencing a few of his past story arcs, he addressed how long he and artist Greg Capullo planned to stay on DC's main "Batman" title. "I will answer as honestly as I can: Every arc, we have been ready to [leave the series]. At the end, if people really didn't like what we were doing or we felt tired on the book... My feeling is, this is my favorite character in the world, and you guys, as fans, deserve someone who's going to bring their A-game. Everybody has a Batman story they're dying to tell.

"I feel like, to do a book like Batman, you've got to swing for the fences because there are more than a thousand other writers out there who would swing for the fences if they got their own shot on the book. They deserve it and you guys deserve it and the character deserves it," he continued. "I'd rather swing big than miss -- swing big, then play it safe. With this arc, with 'Superheavy,' I have plans for at least another year on "Batman." It brings a lot of stuff full circle and a lot of new things into the book... There are no plans to be like, 'We're done at #50 and you'll never see us again' or 'We're done at #50, then we're going to go to Marvel.' That's not going to happen. We're going to go to #50, and then we're going to see where we are. And, honestly, I think I have some stuff that I would really like to get to do on the book that has a slightly different tone.

"Greg and I are a team that goes beyond 'Batman.' He is one of my closest friends. He's like a big brother to me at this point... If he left and wanted to do something else, I would do something else with him. Right now, we are discussing how long we'll stay and the way that I have stories, there's a possibility that Greg might stay; there's a possibility that we both will stay for a while. There's a possibility that one of us might take a break for a little bit to finish some other stuff and then come back for bigger stuff together. Right now, we're just trying to figure out what makes the most sense for us as creators. We're a team."

Snyder also touched on his latest "Batman" arc, "Superheavy," which finds former Commissioner Jim Gordon behind the mask. "I want you to know something: we would never try a kooky idea like this unless we thought we had a better story for these characters through it and on the side of it, including Bruce and everybody. We love him as much as you do, and the last thing I would do is be like, 'Let's shake it up and kill Bruce and the Joker and put Gordon in the costume' if I didn't think there was a way of exploring Batman. This story, deeply, is about that for Bruce. What if Batman died and was gone, and that spectre is gone and that shadow is gone? [if] Bruce is healed of that, what happens? Who would he be? That's fascinating to me, when Alfred talks about it and says, 'What if he's the boy none of us saved? Who would that be?' I love that aspect of this.

"On the flipside, with Gordon, it asks, 'Could Batman be real? That Batman died. What if we bring him back in the real world?'" Snyder continued. "The story is deeply about why Batman matters to a world full of these problems that we deal with. Why do we love him? Why do we care? Does he really stop crime? No. Does he really stop police brutality or socioeconomic divisions? No! So why do we care? What if somebody tried to be Batman and do those things and approach real problems? Obviously, that can't work, so you know he's not going to be successful at that. He doesn't suddenly make the city a Utopia! What's the backlash? What does it really matter? Why do we love him? What is it about him that matters to the world? That's what it's about.

"It's a pretty short story, this story, as much as I would love to go longer with it. I won't tell you how this resolves or whether Jim stays Batman or Bruce comes back, but this arc -- this 'Superheavy' arc -- is a wonderful ride and I'm finishing it now as you guys are starting it," he said. "I think of this as a vacation for all of us, where we just had this brutal thing with the Joker and it's the end of Batman and our Batman died and Joker really died and we have plans for a way -- for a surprise -- that I think you'll like with that stuff. Ultimately, we wanted to burn all of it and say it's done. Let's explore this mythology from an angle that's exotic and totally different than anything you've seen. Every part of it!"

"One of the things that's so fun about the art is that it lives or dies by Greg's and my enthusiasm for it. There's no safe place. When you write Batman, you always know to throw in a shot with the Batmobile of him driving at night in the rain. It's crowd pleasing," he continued. "This arc, there's nowhere to hide because everything is new. If we don't make you guys love it the way we love it, you're going to drop it; there's nothing familiar about it. Batman doesn't look like Batman, the villains aren't the villains you know, the cave isn't in it, the Batmobile's not in it... All of it's different. I love that challenge of saying, 'Look how much we love this. Our enthusiasm will hopefully win you over.'... That's the whole thing with this 'Superheavy' story. And there's robots and someone gets hit with a shark next issue... I love it."

"The story focuses on Jim Gordon, but it really also focuses on Bruce and Duke Thomas, who was introduced in 'Zero Year.' It's more characters than I've ever juggled having main storylines in a book. I've always been punishingly only about Bruce. Since I did 'Black Mirror,' it was the only time I really had two characters. This was sort of an experiment for me to see if I could juggle three and make it all about one thing. I have so little breathing room that I'm leaving a lot of the peripheral stuff, like Barbara's reaction and Nightwing, in those books for now."

The writer also discussed "Batman" #44, a special issue he is co-writing with Brian Azzarello to be drawn by his "Wytches" co-creator, Jock. "It's an issue kind of about Batman in his early years, when he thinks he knows things about Gotham but... if you go away for fourteen years and you come back to Gotham and you're like, 'I know this city,' you don't know it at all, right? I wanted to do a story that's deeply about social issues. I don't mean like a preachy issue. I wanted it to be like Batman comes back and he thinks he knows all these things, he read up on the city. He knows why this neighborhood, the Corner, is a slum. He understands that African-American people living there weren't given the opportunities to move to suburbs, for example... it's almost forcible segregation. All this stuff is in the book. Basically, I'm telling a Batman story, and as I'm telling a Batman story, this information starts to come in that he knows that he doesn't want to think about, because he just wants to catch the bad guy. It's actually done as text in the book, so it's like ripped into the book, these textual things that he's thinking about."

Speaking on recent events in "Justice League," which have changed Batman's status quo, at least for now, including a surprise moment when a newly god-like Batman discovers the "answer" to the question of, "Who is the Joker." "I knew it was coming," he said. "[Geoff Johns] loves the Joker the way I love the Joker. I don't think we're particularly interested in, 'He's this person.' You know what I mean? It takes away some of his mystique. We collaborate in a way that I was aware that was happening. The point of that scene is to be like, 'There's nothing off-limits in the Mobius Chair for Batman.'"

While discussing Batman, he recounted a story about the difference between writing for Dick Grayson's Batman as opposed to Bruce Wayne's Batman. "The funniest thing about writing Dick Grayson is you get all these requests all the time for him to be shirtless or butt shots. I'm like, 'This is a very serious story.' And then you're kind of like, 'I'm going to test that out' and put, 'Uh, you can leave his shirt off, Jock.' And then the readership is like, BOING! 'Alright, fine, more of that!' The funniest thing was that, when I started writing Bruce, I was like, 'Bruce! Okay, shirtless Bruce!' It was like crickets. Bruce is sexy, dude! There's one shot in 'Zero Year' and it's a butt shot where he's in a towel and Alfred's stitching him up and I was like, 'If this doesn't do it...' Nobody said anything!

"I remember talking [about this] to Ming Doyle and Becky Cloonan," he continued. "I was like, 'When we do this Gordon story, I'm going to make Jim Gordon Batman and I'm going to have Bruce come back in this particular way where the idea is if what if Batman died and Bruce Wayne came back and he was free of the ghost -- of the weight. Give this whole new spin on him that you've never seen.' And they really liked the story, and I was like, 'And he'll have a beard.' And they were like, 'Oh! A beard!' We started talking, and it was like, 'What does he wear?' And I'm like, 'He's going to wear a plaid shirt.' I got the images of him, which just came out in #42 and #43, and I sent them to them. I said, 'Check it out! Does this look good?' I got back 'emoji heart heart heart heart.' Ming was like, 'LumberBruce!'"

He also weighed in on his approach to writing Batman. "It's paralyzingly scary to write Batman because he means so much to you guys and to me. He always has. You have to pretend to write your own character you made up, and you're making him up every day as you go and you know him better than anybody else; even though you don't know him half as well as many people in this room, you know your version. I know my Batman better than anybody else... Dick Grayson was great, because Dick Grayson was terrified of being Batman and excited by it and all these things I was feeling at the time, and I was like, 'We're getting along great.'"

Snyder briefly mentioned his Image title with Jock, "Wytches," which recently wrapped its first arc. He shared a few details about the second arc, revealing, "The second arc takes place in the American Southwest at first. It takes places in the desert -- there's no trees. Sailor, the heroine of the first arc, has joined the Irons, which is the group that hunts wytches all over the world. You learn much more about the mythology and the history of them. She starts to believe that it's possible that the wytches have a place where they keep people that they're punishing, that have betrayed them, and that Charlie might be in that state somewhere. If the first arc is largely about being a parent, this arc is largely about when you're a kid or you're an adult and you have to let go of your parents in some way. The wytches think they're safe in the desert, and the wytches -- this other breed -- start coming out of the sand. I'm really excited about it. It's super dark."

Asked how much direction he puts into a script, Snyder imparted some advice about writing for comics and working with other creative people. "It's different for every artist... You have to get to know your artist. You're a team, sometimes against editorial, sometimes against the world. What I learned from [Rafael Albuquerque and Jock] is that you become a team, and you have to talk to your artist about what they like.

"For example, Greg likes panelling when it comes to talking scenes, because he likes certain dialogue emphasized so he can get flow. He does not like Panel One, Panel Two, Panel Three, any of that stuff. He likes to be given more room," Snyder explained. "I've learned to do that, so I'll write, 'Page One through Ten, here's all the dialogue.' It's not so important to direct the thing, especially if your artist doesn't like that. What's important is to give them direction with what the scene is about emotionally, psychologically, what the tone is and what parts are the emotional beats along the way. For example, in the scene at the end [of 'Endgame'] where he fights with the Joker and he's fighting in the cave, I love that fight. I would write to Greg, 'This needs to be the most punishing fight you've seen between those two characters because this is the end and I want everything to feel like it's burning and I want the colors to be like bramble and everything is just apocalyptic, every Batman story ending at once with this. I want it to be bloody and gory and brutal. Here are a couple moves. Batman uses his ears to ram him like a bull (that was my favorite)!'... So I gave him like three things like that, but I gave him five pages to do it and I don't tell him beat-by-beat. I just say this has to feel more and more brutal.

"Jock, on the other hand, likes panelling. He goes off-panel. He wants all that in there. Everything! And then what he'll do, which is so great... he'll change it, but he wants it there to begin with. He likes Panel One, Panel Two, like that, and he likes going off from that, so I love writing it for him that way.

"If you're an aspiring writer, one of the most important things to do is think of your artist as your creative partner," he advised. "As much as you want to get your story out, they want to make it shine and bring it to life. What you need to do if figure out what they get excited about on the page, and work with them and compromise. You will get story and pages back that make your stuff so much better. That's the fun of comics, is that it's collaborative... Sometimes, you'll get a bad note. I'm not particularly public about my fights and that stuff, but there are a lot of fights coming along with the way with certain things in the stories when we were starting. In 'Black Mirror,' there were some and there was certainly some at the end of 'Court of Owls,' where I had to call Greg and we really had to lock arms and be like, 'You're not taking that out. If you take that out, we'll quit.' Having that camaraderie is key, not just for strategic stuff. It is you guys making something together. It's like a living animal. You make it and you go back and forth... I don't miss prose at all for that weird reason. When I'm alone working on prose all by myself, it doesn't work as well for me and I can get in a bad place. Figure out ways of working with your artist that make them happy to work."

Snyder also discussed his winding road to comics writing, sharing a few anecdotes that had the audience roaring with laughter. He recounted how, after he graduated with his undergraduate degree, he went to work in a publishing house. "So I graduated and my parents were like, 'If you want to be a writer, you've got to go work at a publishing house' and I did that for a while. It was awful. I read the slush, you know, the stuff that comes in... the unsolicited manuscripts. If you write a book and you send it to a publishing house right off the typewriter, I would have read it there. It was such a deadening, depressing job. You read these things that are half formed and you know you that aren't great and they're not going to go through because you're just an intern. I still remember my favorite one. It was about this guy who finds the Shroud of Turin and realizes they can clone Jesus from this thing -- it's actually close to 'Punk Rock Jesus'... and they do. He's very small and dark-skinned (I can't believe I'm telling this story) and there's this big controversy. These people are trying to kill him and these other people are ferrying him around he's kind of like ET, where he's all wrapped up. I love this book... This'll be my next arc of Batman. The best part is, at one point in this book, they're on a swamp boat with Jesus in the back and these people are chasing them in a swamp boat and a guy's like, 'Somebody needs to shoot!' and Jesus throws off this blanket and takes the machine gun. It went from this is good book to genius."

Likewise, he brought up his time at Disneyworld. Following a failed attempt to work at the Weekly World News tabloid, he got a job as a janitor and then as a character for Disney before attending graduate school at Colombia. "I had a very strong sense of what I wanted to do, and I came back and I went to graduate school in New York against my will. I wanted to stay at Disney World longer... I was loving being at Disney World as a character. It was so much fun! I was Pluto, Buzz Lightyear and Eeyore. Eeyore was the worst because you have padding to make your butt and everything really big and then you have fur, so it's like wearing a fur coat over that stuff and it was bad."

"My best memory of that [is] the last day of characters," he continued. "You trained and they sent you home with tapes of your characters to help you learn your character and every day you go to this gymnasium at the Disney behind-the-scenes place and practice. On the last day, it was the trainer, me, this girl who was Mickey Mouse and this dude who was Chip from 'Chip and Dale.' They were both entertainers; they were dancers. They were great, and I was just like loafing around as Eeyore... Our trainer, Bob, was like, 'I'm going to do something we don't normally do. For the next five minutes, I'm going to play a song and you dance however you want, because after that you will never be able to be out of character in this costume ever again.' So he put on 'Rump Shaker,' and I'm in this Eeyore costume. When you're in the Eeyore costume, you see out of a periscope; that's why you swing your head, so you don't step on kids. So I'm looking through it, and I see Chip -- Chip is out of control dancing; it's really impressive. Then I turn and Mickey Mouse is dancing towards me -- and she was amazing -- it was like in the club dancing. To see Mickey Mouse coming at you like [mimics dance move]. I'm slowly backing away. They teach you all these things to do when your kid is scared of you [as a character]. Like, 'I'm soft, I'm soft!' And I'm short-circuiting with all that's going on and I'm like, 'I'm soft!'

"Anyway, I loved it. I was Buzz Lightyear at the end, which is the best, because he's foam, so he's cool and nobody wants to be him because he's like a robot. Most of the people that are there want to be dancers or actors and he's not expressive... At the end [of my time there], they were like, 'You've done a very good job. We have an opening in Tokyo Disneyland... and over there, you're tall enough to be Prince Charming.' I was so excited! My parents were so done. I was making minimum wage! It wasn't a glamorous life, but it's a system where -- when you're a janitor like I was, you're the lowest caste at Disney World. As you make it up, characters was like -- I had a girlfriend, and she worked in retail! It was like, 'You're the king!' And then my friend came down and was like, 'You have to stop the insanity. We're leaving.' I deferred from Colombia for this, and they were like, 'We might not hold your spot.' And I was like, 'Well, when you wish upon a star'... I came back and went to writing school and I really liked that quite a bit."

He also shared his first meeting with Mark Doyle and Jeanine Schaefer, who were editors at Vertigo and Marvel Comics respectively at the time. "My buddy, Owen King, did this anthology of stories where literary writers make up superheroes. It was called, 'Who Can Save Us Now?' It was illustrated by an artist nobody knew at the time named Chris Burnham. I took this break from writing this book and I wrote this story called 'The Thirteenth Egg'... At the reading for the launch, two comic editors came to the reading: Mark Doyle and Jeanine Schaeffer. Jean was from Marvel and Mark was from DC, from Vertigo. They were like, 'Is anyone here serious about comics?' and I had comics on me. I was like, 'I'm very serious about comics! I've got comics in my bag.' They were like, 'Would you be interested in pitching for Marvel or DC?' And I was like, 'Yes I would.' Then I got a chance to pitch for the Human Torch story and a couple of small things.

"So I went and I pitched and it got in," he continued. "I started working for Jeanine and Mark and, once in a while, I was like, 'Aw, man, my editor at Marvel, Jeanine... I love her, but I can never get her on the phone.' And then she would call like five minutes later. Then I would talk to her and be like, 'My editor at DC, Mark... I don't get a lot of notes from him,' and then the next day there would be notes! Of course, they were dating and I didn't realize it. I have no Batman skills at all. Now they're married, and they have a beautiful daughter named Margot, who we all joke is the great Marvel-DC crossover. Mark is my editor to this day, and Jeanine is editing my second arc of 'Wytches.' They are really two of my best friends in the world."