SDCC 2016: Paul Dini Talk Truth Behind Dark Night Tale
Paul Dini is a legend in both comics, games, and television, having written many of the prominent DC Comics shows of the 90’s and recent titles like the first two Arkham games. However, as he revealed in his Dark Night: A True Batman Story, his life wasn’t always perfect, even after his success.
You can read the full details of the panel at SDCC here, but here are some snippets to show just how dark things got for Dini. Mainly how an attack by two assailants left him wounded in many ways.
“The loneliness of it was what I was dealing with more than anything,” Dini admitted. “When I look back at my life at that time, part of me thought I had it pretty good. I was working in cartoons, I could go to Comic-Con, buy the Hal Jordan ring, I could buy animation cels. But at the end of the day, I come back to an empty apartment… and when I was broken, my world was broken.”
Cunningham then turned the discussion to what he called “the most shocking moment in the book,” a sequence where Dini revealed that he once committed a stunning and disturbing act of self-inflicted harm, slicing his torso to bloody shreds using the sharp edges of his Emmy Award. “I debated a long time whether I wanted to put this in the book,” Dini said. “I had a conversation with Alan Burnett, and he said, ‘That’s really powerful.’ I thought about it, and thought it was kind of the smoking gun I had to put in there as to why this guy would devalue himself so much, and when two people who really don’t care about him go after him, now you’ve really got something to cry about. Now, you’re a callow and selfish person. It boomerangs back, and you see yourself as someone who needs to be punished. At the time, I was lost in my own pathos, lost in my own drama, and I felt I had to work through it that way… I wrote the book because I’m well aware of people who take it out on themselves…and in some cases they take their own life… I wanted to show them that at some point you’ll probably laugh or forget it.”