Nothing is for everyone. This hit me in a way I haven’t felt another comic has for maybe decades… it was, for me, the most real Batman story in years… maybe ever.
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Tom King’s Batman run ends with both a whimper and a wispy post-mortem fart. I didn’t know a musty, moth-eaten clown wig could win four Eisners, but this is the world in which we have been cursed to exist.
I get the need to make Batman “human.” It’s a need that, quite frankly, I agree with. However (and I’m going to put this in bold and all-caps because I want to make this clear):
THERE IS MORE TO BEING HUMAN THAN BEING A COMPLETE TOOL.
Human drama is in someone trying and failing. Someone learning from their mistakes. But Tom King’s Batman never tried at all. He’s an arrogant brute who punches his kids. And don’t hand me that slap-code retcon garbage. I’m too smart for that, and by God so are you.
The guy who shrugs off his son’s traumatic brain injury, sends another of his sons to be traumatized by watching Alfred die (while he’s getting busy on a beach with the lady who left him at the altar), and decks Jim Gordon without informing him that it’s a super-secret punch code has the unmitigated gall to say “I choose family” in this issue when most of them were frozen by Psycho Pirate just off panel where we never see them. I swear to God, King thought we just forgot they were there. That or he himself did.
This is how the final conflict ends:
“I’M BATMAAAAAAAAAAAAN!”
“Gee, I guess you’re right, son. Can’t argue with that logic.”
We jump back and forth between timeframes and the faintest whiffs of storyline, and it all reeks of flop-sweat. Like King has nothing interesting to say and is petrified we’ll sniff him out, so he’s dislocating his shoulder in a frantic and doomed attempt to polish a dry and crumbling horse-apple. He spent eighty-five issues building up Psycho Pirate’s involvement only to have him stand off in the corner and do nothing. He gave phenomenal Godlike power to an unstable and duplicitous teenage girl who walloped Captain Atom and murdered people while holding Gotham in a state of fear for months because… reasons?
After eighty-five issues, we are left with a Bruce Wayne who has learned nothing. He did not arc. He used the people in his life in brutal ways to get what he wants, and they all fell in worship and thrall to him. He did not change. He did not grow. All of the precipitous lows to which he fell are meaningless because there were no highs with which to contrast them. Even the moments of brevity and reprieve are cast in a spare and cheesy artificial gloom; the callow and immature written equivalent of a painting that knocks off Andrew Wyeth. Tom King failed at almost every fundamental tenet of storytelling, found new and experimental tenets of storytelling, and failed at those as well.
But the heartbreaking part… the truly heartbreaking part… is that so many otherwise intelligent people fell for it. They saw a nine-panel layout combined with droning and monotonous human misery, and called it genius. It’s not that Emperor Tom has no clothes. It’s that so few others have clothes either.
May it be consigned to the depths. May the next fifteen years bring someone brimming with talent and holding a grudge, so that they may deconstruct the deconstruction. May its influence find no purchase, save as a cautionary tale.
And may Hollywood treat Tom King the same way it treats every other screenwriter.
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I consider having everything ripped from him at his highest a real struggle. He was beaten down and broken multiple times for this to happen. He came back after having Selina leave him at the alter, after being broken by Bane, after the heroes he had faith in were broken and driven crazy. Yet he still comes back from all of that. He decides that he can be happy and be Batman. You can argue that his children were all at risk, but he didn’t even know that while he was gone. He didn’t know until after Damian got caught and he saw Alfred for himself.
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war of jokes and riddles was the best part of kings run in my opinion. his 85 issue story left too many questions unanswered and the answers for some of the questions were not worth a 35 issue (year and a half) wait.
good bye tom king best of luck trying to hype another bat/cat wedding at the end of your other bat/cat run.
EVERYONE GO OUT AND BUY BATMAN 86 TO SHOW JAMES TYNION IV AND GUILLIEM MARCH OUR SUPPORT!
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I view this run as Banes redemption from a joke of a villain back to the man who broke the bat.
It helped that we had the Bane: Conquest mini.
I enjoyed that bat and cat are hopefully finally together, bat and banes game of who can brake who’s back more. Hated that Alfred died and really hated Damian till we learned Alfred chose to give the all clear rather then let himself be used as a hostage. I like that bane went from joke of a villein to became the man who broke the bat once again.
I enjoyed batman vs flashpoint batman and learning more about flashpoint catwoman.
I also hope for batman to just say screw it and have a big wedding with catwoman, mainly cause i want a series about a boring batchler party were the men of the justice leage get heronapped, meanwhile the ladies of the league plus harlyivy have a batchlerett party at the fortress of solitude and have to save the league well drunk off the butts.
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Absolutely loved it! Great last issue!