Why do you hate Tom King so much? I know he's not perfect but come on he's not atrocious!

He’s pretty bad! Ended his Batman run horribly ( and don’t say it’s because it was cut short since he got 15 issues to wrap it up) and Heroes in Crisis was awful. His writing has gotten so bad that after he is done a series, DC has to put out books to make sense of things and/or try to make them better! This book, Flash Forward and Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy!!! He is overrated and is a one-trick pony who is finally being exposed for the hack he is!

I can agree his ending of Batman was indeed disappointing. Fine! But he's a good writer who at least does some interesting and unorthodox stories that often prove more entertaining then just another super hero book! Read his Vision series,Mr. Miracle,Swamp Thing and issues 36,37 and annual 2 of his Batman run. I promise you'll enjoy them.Dislike the end of his batman and Heroes in Crisis of you want, but going after the writer himself for a few bad issues? That's pretty shallow.

I read all of those and everything ends up being the same sadness and misery! The Swamp Thing issue ignores the simplest of Swamp Things powers (he is surrounded by evergreen trees but can't access the green because it's winter????), Mister Miracle is just Vision at DC and starts with a suicide and ends with an ambiguous ending where Mister Miracle decides to stay dead instead of doing the hard things and the Superfriends arc was 100% meaningless fan service that did nothing !

i love how you assume I never read any of those! You didn't mention the second half of the Superfriends with Wonder Woman where he completely ripped off an Action Comics issue! Annual 2 was pretty good, but he admitted it was an Elseworlds story (you can tell by the characters involved). You can repeat the group speak of "interesting and unorthodox" but he is a 1 trick pony and a ton of people are tired of his game

Everything he writes involves death and misery and his characters only show extreme anger or depression. His only tool for character progression is through death and misery as well...try to name one that isn't

Nihilist - beautifully summed up as always! nice touch with the comparison of the Dio hologram. brilliant analogy.

when i buy cheap cash grabs . . . you know they always bring me down . . . they’re not free and i see that it's me . . . who's lost and never found.

Right no writers ever reuses similar themes or ideas! Every writer tells a story that's so different it might as well be a different writer. Right? So what Tom King's stories are always dark! It's better then seeing stories where the hero randomly comes up with a plan that's so crazy it just might work to save the day. And for the record DC Stuff I was just trying to help you out with the recommendations!! I'm sorry I didn't know I was talking to Tom King #1 not a fan!

DC Stuff We could go back and forth on this but I like Tom King and you obviously despise him. That's your opinion and I respect that.

ey! ey! EY!!! . . . DC Stuff is NOT "Tom King #1 not a fan". . . . . . no. that title proudly belongs to me!

I respect yours as well (though King used the crazy it just might work to save the day over a dozen times in his run!) but I think "despise" is too strong a word. I just loathe him with every part of my soul! It's funny that you didn't mention the 2 things of his I did like - Grayson (which a lot hated) and The Sheriff of Babylon which was really good. I just think he recycles his same tropes and cliches and will likely do that with Strange Adventures

myconius takes the crown!

I'd just like to take the opportunity to mention the impetus behind this issue was completely manufactured by DC editorial, not Tom King, He was not going to kill Alfred, he was just going to do a fake out, but then DC editorial made it real because... I guess 5G? I don't know, but this is one case where Tom King doesn't deserve the hate.

Sorry for the delay in response, it's been a long, long day. @Crimson Knight - I don't hate King, in fact I really enjoyed his first few arcs of Batman series. Since then, however, it turned into a shallow, meaningless incoherent mixture of filler and repetitive deus ex machina infested shell of a plot. He had 80 issues to build and close a big story, and he didn't. Events written by others tried to explain what he forgot about, like Gotham Girl's motivations in the 2nd crossover with Flash.

I don't hate him, I'm just continuossly disappointed with his writing, being constantly reinforced in my negativity towards it. I'll pick Batman & Catwoman series up, for sure, but I'm not excited for it. I'm burned out by King. @DC Stuff beautifully dug into more details and examples of what in King's writing leaves a lot to be desired. But either way, we do not despise him. This is too much of a narrow generalization.

Also, you're right, YourGreenMuse, but still, he wrote the scene. He received directives from the editorial, so here come usual Didio jokes, but not blaming him for how bad it all turned out, would be a cop out, I think. We're talking about the same guy who gave Robin a deus ex machina to overpower Gotham Girl, with no explanation, foreshadowing, just nothing. Alfred's death was equally poor from the narrative perspective, and didn't impact the characters in the series. Hence this "filler" book.

It seems like you are criticising this book using problems you had with Tom Kings run, and thats hardly fair. Sure your problems with his run might be valid but what does Tomasi and this book have to do with it?

Since all the negative opinions jumped in about Tom King and his Batman. I am just here to say you aren't alone Crimson. I loved almost all of King's work (really only dislike HiC) and even recently his run on Batman was voted 7th best of the top 100 comics of the decade on CBR or Newsarama, one of the two. I can't disagree either. I have loved the run, and the ending was unsatisfying closure wise, but sorry... having your run cut is a legitimate excuse. Editorial have been bastards this whole t

ime.

thank you DC Stuff. i promise to always honor the crown.

Toonstrack - you cannot overlook the problems of King's run and NOT see this book as a waste of time & money. this book ONLY EXISTS as a DIRECT RESULT of a terrible story choice MADE . BY . KING !!! . . . and i don't buy into that editorial forced him to kill Alfred. that cowardly worm needs to own his $#!%.

I totally trust that DC editorial decided to kill Alfred... same way they chose which characters King could use in HiC. I'm not saying King is completely void of responsibility here, but I think he's moreso just a shill for editorial in this scenario. I don't like Tom King's storytelling approach most of the time, and he made plenty of bad decisions all on his own. So, don't think I'm discounting that.

Also, I just want a sampling: Who here actually puts faith in comic book polls or awards? I do not, at all. I think they're a sham most of the time. A popularity contest, at best. And apropos of that, who puts faith in the comic book critics? Same answer for me. I think they're completely useless as a barometer of quality.

Exactly. Remember that The King's Speech and Black Panther won Oscars. Squirrel Girl won an Eisner. Billboard recently made a list of best rock songs of the decade, topped with Imagine Dragons and 21 Pilots. Kissinger and Obama won Nobel peace prizes. Skrillex won like a dozen of Grammy awards. Don't make me even start with Rock & Roll Hall of Fame snubs. The Beat named Female Furies and Goddess Mode two of the best comics of 2019. Bottomline, popularity contests are corporate circlejerks.

Most of the time i forget that awards in any media exist besides the Oscars. I know there's a lot o stigma and whatever surrounding them but sometimes it's just for entertainment and occasional movie idea.

The same goes for some comics like i know king isn't perfect but i enjoy his work

they can hand out all the awards they want. it won't keep the sales numbers from dropping off. .... no matter how much they polish it up. a turd is still just a turd.

Also quick tangent does anybody else thing Tomasi and Gleason's Batman&Robin was good. Cause i freaking love it!

@Myconius... I dont really care about the circumstances around Alfreds death, nor does this book. As I said all that matters is that he is now dead, and this issue needed to be made as a result. I would much rather have this than for them to just ignore Alfred'a death and move on with no reminiscing. Thats what this issue is about... Reminiscing

sorry. no. . . . the fact that this story totally overlooked characters like Alfred's daughter Julia, or Leslie Thompkins shows that this was not about reminiscing. . . . this was nothing more than a cash grab. . . . . . a cheap memorial, celebrating a cheap and manipulative character death.

It's about the Bat-family as advertised. Why would Julia mean anything now after being gone for years? These are about the people who were in Alfreds life regularly, his real family. And I will just have to disagree that the memorial was cheap, the emotional beats were there. deaths in comics are usually cash grabs IMO, Uncle Ben and Jean Grey are the only ones off the top of my head that arent and one of those characters are alive and well today. And for a cash grab I thougt it was solid.

Gwen Stacy was also pretty good. Albeit her death itself was kind of a cashgrab itself, but then again, it fleshed Peter out, changed him. This, in comparison, feels so fake and artifficially created. Half of the Bat Family didn't even make a single appearance in Batman's comics for years, it's hard to take this reunion seriously when nothing but Alfred's death has been set up.

I wouldn't call Gwen Stacy's death a cashgrab because it was done for plot reasons. They had made Gwen Stacy hate Spider-Man and love Peter, and that became sort of a problem for the writers and editorial. It created a redundancy because that was essentially Aunt May's character. So, they originally wanted to kill off Aunt May.

But the creative team decided she was too essential to Spider-Man, so then they optioned killing off Gwen or MJ. MJ was a much more popular character with the bullpen, so Gwen got the ax.

Gerry Conway thought that Peter and Gwen were the perfect couple, so having them get married and all that would betray what Spider-Man is, so he killed off Gwen Stacy to end what he considered an unfitting relationship and to reinforce the element of personal tragedy that defines Spider-Man. It was, therefore, not a cashgrab, but rather what the writer thought was a necessary progression in the plot.

good point. why would Alfred's daughter (who also worked for Bruce in the Bat-cave for a time) mean anything?

YourGreenMuse - two months before #77 he said, "It's something that's going to change the character for a generation, or maybe more. Maybe forever," he tells The Hollywood Reporter. "I never thought we'd get this kind of stuff approved; when you're working with a corporate character, you think you're going to have to reset. But this is a change that's going to shake the world of Batman and it's going to leave my mark on the charater" If people liked it, he would have stuck with that!

really doesn't sound like a guy who was going to reverse it a couple of issues later!

"leave my mark on a character...for about 3 issues" - he always talks out both sides of his mouth when anything is criticizes - the wedding, KGBeast, Heroes in Crisis...

There is existing evidence that Alfred was not going to stay dead. There are a few messy mistakes in one of Tomasi's issues showing it was originally drawn with Alfred before hastily being replaced with Lucius Fox. Not kidding. He is legitimately still in one background of a panel.

And also, he has since said that it was editorial's idea.

DC Stuff - yeah. King is a fraud and a coward. he can't assume responsibility for any of the terrible decisions he's made, and has to throw editorial under the bus. not to say that DC editorial is not trash.

Yourgreenmuse- he also went on national tv a week before the wedding and said there would be one on #50 - he lies and throws everyone under the bus at every step of the way!

20 issue- i believe they said the detective thing was the artist messing up and accidently drawing alfred when it was always supposed to be lucious.

I believe it's editorial because of what happened with Nightwing. I think you and myconius have undue faith in them for no good reason.

The type of jabs being thrown at Tom King, as well as your "evidence" are almost Trumpian. And that's fun for a laugh, but if we're going to be serious, it's clearly editorial who is at fault.

I'm no Tom King fan, but I'm not a blind hater.

Killing alfred isn't my main gripe of his run, though I do think his quote is funny, "I put it in the script, like, of course, we'll figure this out later and he's not dead." Figure it out later? you are killing alfred and you only have 8 issues left! You would think if you kill him to bring him back, you would have a story idea when you do it!

I liked a lot of Kings run also. Dislike a lot as well. I think the biggest problem DC has right now with it's books and writers is that they are trying to write books/novel like stories and most of the writers just are not good enough to write that long or detail involved story. If King had wrote this as only a 12 issue arc it probably would have been amazing. But he tried to spread it out through his entire run and failed because of it.

I love your profile picture