Ep: 86 Daniel Dockery on the Batman Book Thirty Years in the Making

Kevin Conroy sat in a recording booth for thirty years playing a man who wore two faces,  and somewhere along the way, that dual identity became personal. Before he ever put on the cowl, Bruce Timm was just a burned-out animator tired of being told kids’ cartoons couldn’t be art. And a Warner Bros. executive gambled the whole look of Gotham City on painting black backgrounds onto cels instead of the other way around. None of it should have worked. All of it did.

This week, Daniel Dockery joins Back to Pop to talk about I Am the Night: The Ultimate Unauthorized History of Batman: The Animated Series (St. Martin’s Press, out September 1, 2026) — his deeply reported new book built on exclusive interviews with the writers, animators, and voice actors who turned a merchandising afterthought into the show many still call the best Batman has ever been on screen.

We go deep on the creative team,  Timm, Eric Radomski, Paul Dini, Alan Burnett, and the fights they had with the network over things as small as a recycling bin in the Batcave. We talk about Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, thirty years of partnership, and what it meant when Hamill said there wasn’t a Joker for him without his Batman. We get into Harley Quinn’s improbable survival past a single episode, the reinvention of Mr. Freeze in “Heart of Ice,” and why, unlike almost everything else from the ’90s, this show has never had its backlash moment.

Daniel Dockery is a Senior Staff Writer at Crunchyroll and the author of Monster Kids: How Pokémon Taught a Generation to Catch Them All. His new book hits shelves September 1, 2026.

I Am the Night is available for preorder now wherever books are sold. 

Get your copy here. 

🔗 https://www.danieldockery.com/

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