Tom King is leaving Batman.
O.K., leaving might be a bit of a stretch. Words and rumors, suggestions and back-alley talk all point to him being removed from the book. He will end with issue #85, followed by a Bat/Cat mini series that may cover much of the material that would have finished his run. It’s a little odd that a 100 issue plan that DC signed off on would have the plug pulled with the finish line in sight. Why did it happen? One word: Knightmare.
Comic fans, it seems, can only be so flexible with their patience. King’s run has been divisive from the beginning, with vocal supporters on both sides. Where everyone had to agree were the sales figures. That book sold and money talks. With the Knightmare storyline, a book that had taken a sales drop after ‘The Wedding’ went into a steeper plunge. I get it, its easily the worst storyline of the run. It’s also, arguably, the only bad arc of the run. 
Bad runs happen in comics. Bad arcs also happen. That’s why we’re here today. I’m hoping to calm everyone down about this particular change. That includes two camps: 1. The people who are FURIOUS that Tom King got to do anything different with their Dark Knight and 2. The people who are FURIOUS that Tom King got kicked off their Dark Knight because it was different. Camp one, let’s start with you first.
There are people who want their comic heroes to be consistent, non-changing, some could say…stagnant. Any minor change can be enough to throw them into a rage. Batman is no exception. He’s DC’s bread and butter, but we’ve seen this before. At Marvel. With Amazing Spider-Man. THEIR bread and butter. Jeez, you take someone who is basically your version of the devil and dissolve someone’s marriage and everyone gets all bent out of shape. I understand the bending, because I was someone who was bent. In fact, I was the Bendist. I vowed I would never, ever, ever go back to Amazing Spider-Man if they were going to ruin all of the growth and progress that Peter had made as an adult. (Yeah, that was a crazy stance, but there are some people who are soaking in Batman’s Palmolive right now feeling the same way.) Anyway, ASM #546 was the first issue I didn’t buy since I was 12.
I wasn’t going to buy it, but I still had to sell it, so I would flip through to see what atrocities were being committed. Things I had loved were gone, things I didn’t like so much were there. In truth, nothing terrible was actually happening. There were even some really great issues with the Fantastic Four that left with a bit of regret that I wouldn’t own them. Some years later, a two-part time travel, save the world story in issues 678 and 679 struck me as particularly clever and I broke down. I have since gone back and filled those years in, and at higher prices than I might have if I hadn’t been so stubborn. It’s almost like the quality of a book can change over time, story to story, even with the same writer, and that readers will enjoy themselves more if they go with the ebb and flow of that.
Hint hint.
For camp two, I get where you’re coming from, but comics are a business first, art form second. Like most mass produced art, it needs to mass produce a profit, and the profit derived from the biggest characters needs to have more mass than the smaller ones. Sometimes diminished sales on a key character will lead to radical change on a title. Marvel put their foot down after a semi disastrous relaunch of, you guessed it, The Amazing Spider-Man. They had their top tier character disappointing readers, and selling poorly. One of those is a crime in publishing, but they had a solid plan to reverse the trend. They brought in top level creators in J Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jr. They took off some creative restraints, they let allowed some crazy ideas to go through (the spider chose Peter…discuss), and in the end it all worked out fine for the creative and financial sides. The run is the 2nd best on the title, and they filled it with the same creativity and breaking from tradition that King has employed on a good chunk of his run on Batman (Lois and Selina figuring out how to be friends in healthier ways than Bruce and Clark!).
JMS also wrote the arc where Gwen Stacy either slept voluntarily with Norman Osborn and bore his love children (ew!) or was raped into pregnancy by Norman Osborn and forced to have his children (Holy hell. This is a thing that happened.) The cycle repeats.
JMS is a pretty great writer, and he landed on his feet over at Thor when he left ASM, giving that character another classic run. Tom King just announced that he’s co-writing the ‘New Gods’ movie. There’s a good chance he’s going to be ok too. Batman (and Spidey) are also going to be just fine. Not every story with every character we love is going to be great, and if we didn’t hate some there’d be no way to tell ones we love from the ones we don’t. In the era of instant rage over everything (Tom King got real death threats over the wedding. This is also a thing that happened.), its important to remember that not everything in the world is worth being explosively angry about.Now, while I’ve got you here, let me tell you about ‘Last Jedi’…
Knightmare: Fall of a King by Kevin Healy
