"Origin stories don't clarify, they justify"

Josh Williamson and Bruno Redondo are writing Batman: Justice Year, an origin story for Bruce Wayne's first days in the Justice League. This is not neutral casting. These two spent years on Injustice, a series that treated prequel-writing as a philosophical problem rather than a narrative convenience. That distinction matters more than DC's announcement suggests.

Injustice didn't ask why the team fractured. It asked what kind of intellectual work origin stories must do to make fractures feel inevitable in retrospect. The series mapped this thoroughly: you show the founding moment, then you show the ideological positions that will later divide them. If you're skillful enough, readers forget which came first. The origin doesn't explain the split. It justifies it retroactively, making future conflict feel like the only possible outcome of who these people fundamentally were.

That's what makes this assignment so deliberate. Batman and the early Justice League's relationship is already continuity-damaged. Decades of stories have asked whether Batman was always the skeptic, always the contingency planner, always the one who couldn't trust, or whether he became those things because Superman and Wonder Woman disappointed him. Different writers have answered differently, and each answer requires rewriting his entry into the team.

Williamson and Redondo know this territory. Injustice's whole architecture proved that you can't answer this question with a prequel. You can only choose which philosophical framework to install first, then show how everything else follows from it. Either Batman arrives already fragmented and the Justice League fails to hold him, or he arrives whole and the team breaks him. Either way, the origin story doesn't discover what happened. It builds the logical apparatus to make one version feel true.

That DC hired them for this project means something. Either they want to deploy this understanding deliberately, making the philosophical construction visible to readers who notice it, or they've learned nothing and are cycling through Injustice's structure without comprehension. The prequel won't answer whether Batman's isolation was inevitable. It will decide what inevitability means.