all of his characters speak in exactly the same distinct voice! You know. With the broken speech pattern. Haltingly. Fragmented. Like this. They talk like this. Drives me NANNERS
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Many of the greats, I think, have that problem- a voice so distinct that they can’t change up dialogue for different characters. Where someone could quote a random character and you could probably guess the writer. Off the top of my head: Brian Michael Bendis, Chris Claremont, Peter David…
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I only ever noticed it with King and Steven Moffat, but you’re probably right.
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Nanners, you say? Watch out that Grodd doesn’t text you. Or Congorilla. If Titano knocks on your door, don’t answer it.
To your point, I’ve not noticed that speaking pattern of characters in King’s writing. Maybe he has an affinity for that for some reason?
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That’s one of the things that turned me off to his Batman run far earlier than most. It’s incredibly monotonous, and I think that good writers by definition don’t have that problem, because it’s simply bad writing. Unlike other well-regarded writers who’ve had the same problem to varying extents (Marv Wolfman, for example, did it a lot in the first few years of New Teen Titans), however, I don’t think King even makes up for it with coherent plots.
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It’s called Style, it’s a take it or leave it kinda thing. Comics aren’t really suppose to be a dialogue driven medium anyway. King is really good at playing with story telling devices.
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I don’t think it’s JUST style. Distinguishing character “voices” from one another is super basic. But I mean, like I said, I think he more than makes up for it in other ways.
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He just went too edgy at one point
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I definitely agree, it drives me bonkers. When all the characters start sounding the same, I’ll drop a book so fast. I’ll tell you who I think is fantastic at writing characters with their own voices though, Tom Taylor. 10/10 in humor and writing style, would recommend.
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In his defense, nobody writes Kite Man like King does.
Hell yeah.
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@Vroom. Truer words have never been spoken. Tom King will go down as the Kite Man writer of this generation.
And as for the dialogue, well, I do see the problem. I think he almost tries too hard to make the dialogue sound like people actually speak. Usually what we say is fragmented, with umms and… pauses, especially is super stressful situations. But just because it’s more realistic, that doesn’t mean it’s going to look great on the printed page, and instead results in almost unnatural sounding dialogue. I love Tom King’s work, but this is why I usually read just one issue at a time instead of bringing the whole thing.
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All writers have their things, much like Greg Rucka writes mysteries starring tough military women and Warren Ellis writes about hard-drinking, swearing bastards dealing with Transhumanism.
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