Like Grant Morrison, whose reverence for the Silver Age led to wacky characters like Zur-En-Arrh receiving a deathly serious rendering in the Modern Age, King borrows amply from those older stories. When his Batman tore through a series of goons, King took to juxtaposing the scenes of bloodshed with captions either from Bruce’s personal letters, literature, or, in one memorable arc, a Russian bedtime story.īatman and KGBeast apparently shared a similar taste in bedtime stories as children, as readers learned in Batman #57 from writer Tom King and artist Tony S. For a book that is the equivalent of a summer tentpole in the comics market, King could not have seemed less interested in widescreen action. Joker, a mainstay of Scott Snyder’s horror-tinged time on the book, was sidelined in favor of Bane, a character who King formally treated as Batman’s equal intellectually, if not physically. King elevated Catwoman to the level of co-star, turning her on-and-off romance with Batman into the story’s centerpiece. What unfolded over the next three-and-a-half years was one of the most polarizing runs in recent comics history. Here was a hotshot creator, fresh off of penning Vision and The Omega Men, two of the more ambitious books to ever emerge from Marvel or DC, and he was going to write Batman? Sign me up. When DC Comics first announced in March 2016 that Tom King was taking over the flagship Batman title, fans like me were elated. The 85-issue epic spun its wheels in an often laborious effort to comb Bruce Wayne’s psyche.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |