Last weekend at the New York Comic-Con, I interviewed Batman writer/artist Tony Daniel, and… well, here’s what it says on the site:

Daniel also talked about working as the artist on the critically-acclaimed “Batman R.I.P” run in the “Batman” comic, where he says he “had a tremendous amount of fun working with Grant Morrison. I knew from the get-go that it was going to be epic. I mean, we all knew, months in advance, that this was going to be a very big storyline.”

Then came the unfortunate interruption, as a random guy walked directly through the interview between the camera and Daniel, and then turned and threatened to “f**k up” our cameraman, Chris Murphy, when he objected. While the threat was not carried out and the man ultimately moved on, Daniel was nonetheless determined to right the wrong, and stopped the interview to have security eject the man from the convention, making it a safer and less douchey place for all.

Which is to say, Tony Daniel totally Batmanned someone at New York Comic-Con.

We can think of no better reason why he should write this book.

Yep. That happened.

The weird thing for me, though, was this: I had no idea what the guy had said to Chris Murphy. We were in the middle of a huge con, so it was noisy, and I was trying to concentrate on what Daniel was saying in case I needed to go for a follow-up question, so all I knew was that some dude walked through our shot. This was, unfortunately, not an entirely unheard of occurrence — Murphy’s camera is small, which is great for portability but not so much for visibility, and we almost always end up shooting in the middle of a crowd. So I, having been raised with the hospitality befitting a Southern gentlemen such as myself, assumed that when the dude stuck his head back in the shot, it was to make an awkward apology, not to tell Chris Murphy he was going to fuck him up. So the only thing that I know was that a dude went through the shot, and Tony Daniel got pissed and had him thrown out.

“Man,” I remember thinking, “This guy does not like having his PR messed with.”

After we were done with the interview, though, Daniel and Murphy explained what had happened, and — sorry, Chris — I thought it was absolutely hilarious, if only because the writer/artist of Batman had totally taken down an honest-to-god bad guy. And for the record, he told us to leave it in the final cut.

Also, at the start of the interview, he apologized repeatedly for making us wait while he took the time to draw a few sketches for kids, and seriously? That is never the sort of thing you need to apologize for.

Tony Daniel: Good dude.