Tom King is the Dave Grohl of comics. One of my favorite bands of all time is Grohl’s Foo Fighters, so that’s a compliment coming from me. Some of the best rock songs in past couple decades have been by them. None of the members are the absolute best at their instruments and their songs are not all that deep, but in those songs that eventually become unmistakable pop rock hits, there’s an energy that is unmatched. Lead singer and songwriter Dave Grohl is the epitome of that dynamic. He is not the best vocalist, lyricist, or guitar player, but he executes each of those things in a way that, with the rest of the band and their collaborators, create compelling songs. However, sometimes they decide to veer from their pop rock formula with middling results. While Tom King’s actual words-on-page are not the main feature of any series he’s involved with — like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, or Grant Morrison — he manages and completes the ensemble. With the right collaborators and execution, his books are some of the best in the superhero genre. “Batman” #50 is not one of those. It takes a nice, focused, three-minute rock song and balloons it into a bloated 15-minute jam band monstrosity.
King’s writing style is almost uniquely suited for comic books. It’s also inherently musical. Together with his artists, his books become rhythmic through devices like the nine-panel grids, dialogue repetitions, and staccato back and forth conversations. When that format changes, or he’s not playing with the nine-panel structure, those other familiar writing tics start to stick out because they start getting relied upon too heavily, distracting from the reading experience. In this case, King and Mikel Janin’s core story is expanded with a series of splash pages by a host of guest artists. King is then tasked with anchoring those splash pages with lots of prose to attempt to tie them into that core story.
I think it will be easy to become enamored with all the eye candy in “Batman” #50 from Janin and the guest artists, but the issue as a whole is a complete mess. Janin does a great job, like usual, as the main artist. His pages are a perfect example of Tim King and an artist working well together. The mirror storytelling in the script and panels help show the emotional journey that both Bruce and Selina go through. It also makes the eventual divergence of the two all the more impactful. I didn’t actually realize that Selina had left Bruce at the metaphorical alter until Janin’s pages, even though the reveal had technically already happened in Joelle Jones’s splash page.
The series of splash pages by guest artists throughout the issue just made it feel overstuffed and ruined it. There was no rhyme or reason to them other than showcasing each artist’s era of Batman. I read digitally and honestly thought it was a mistake in the file after the first two, that they had put the variant covers in the wrong place. Many of the different art styles were really fun to look at but they had no place being in the issue itself. This kind of art gimmick can be used effectively, like in Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason’s story in “Action Comics” #1000, where they showed Superman in different eras of the character, but it needs to come organically from the story being told, not despite it. Because the pages had no connection to the story other than featuring Batman and Catwoman together, the brunt of the narrative work fell on King’s words, and there were a lot of them. King’s writing does not work in longer prose; the repetition and short sentences make for an extremely choppy reading experience. The fact that the content was superfluous only made it worse. Bruce and Selina’s letters to each other didn’t really communicate anything new that wasn’t already in Janin’s pages. I can totally see how those intimate and vulnerable letters over scenes from Bruce and Selina’s life together could be poetic if handled by a better writer, but it fell flat with King’s script. He’s like a guitar player good at playing little riffs, asked to do an extended guitar solo. He’s good at what he does but not equipped for the more heavy lifting.
Continued belowNot only was King repeating the same cadence of dialogue from Batman to Catwoman in that longer prose, he was repeating the same emotional beats from the non-splash pages. For repetition to work, it needs to be revealing something about what it’s repeating. A frequent example of this in music is a dynamics change. In the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong,” the band drops everything out and Grohl sings the words in the chorus over just a single guitar at the end of the song. Up until that point, you didn’t hear the vulnerability behind the words, “If everything could ever feel this real forever/if anything could ever be this good again.” In “The Vision,” King opens issue #12 with the same exact captioning that was in #1. Only this time, Gabriel Hernandez Walta and Jordie Bellaire depict Vision himself in a dark and somber color palette, instead of the neighborhood in the light of a fresh morning. By this time in the series, we know how Vision has “made the compromises that are necessary to raise a family,” and it takes a much more sinister tone. By design, the splash pages are unable to accomplish anything like a dynamics change or a tone shift because they’re not anchored to anything. The artwork on the pages is arbitrary, so there’s no meaning behind them for the captioning to reveal.
One part of the main story that can’t be excused by the structure of the issue is what happens on the last page. Yes, it was a surprise that Holly Robinson was working for Bane all along but it was cheap. That’s mainly because the twist wasn’t earned. There was nothing leading to Bane being anywhere near this story in any of the proceeding issues. Besides that, Holly even needing to be at the wedding was a plot contrivance to begin with. King, Janin, and all the creators of the one-shot preludes before “Batman” #50 made it known that it was Batman and Catwoman getting married, not Bruce and Selina. If that’s the case, then there is no chance that it’s a legal marriage and witnesses wouldn’t be needed. It also doesn’t help that the Bane arc was the weakest of the run when King was still finding his voice with the series.
I was desperate to find something redeeming in “Batman” #50. For instance, I think the King and Janin pages were actually pretty good. I only realized this after going back and reading the issue again, this time skipping over all the splash pages. In effect, I edited the 15-minute live jam back into the three-minute long rock song. Reading just the Janin pages furthered my hypothesis the exposition done in the letters was completely unnecessary. Both the main pages and the captioning on the splash pages are attempting to show how Bruce and Selina are going through similar situations and working through similar emotions. Both become more resolute as the night goes on, just with different conclusions. Janin’s character acting communicates those feelings way better than what’s on the other pages. Selina’s ultimate decision to leave Bruce is still heartbreaking and the reveal is even more clear. I completely understand wanting to feature all that great artwork but, if anything, all that extra content could have worked much better following Janin’s main story as a kind of epilogue. This way those emotional beats are being repeated after we know the outcome, so they take on a completely new meaning, the way successful repetition can work.
Clayton Cowles’s lettering also made the issue more palatable then it should have been. He was tasked with getting a lot of words on pages not designed for them in the first place and, for the most part, was successful. However, I’m not sure if it was some bad direction by King but there were a few pages where the speech bubbles were downright confusing. The first ones were in the dual pages of Batman and Catwoman fighting Tweedledee and Tweedledum. The two villains are finishing each other’s sentences, but it’s happening on opposite pages so it’s not clear until after a couple read-throughs that they’re that explicitly connected. Comics do this all the time, but there is usually some indicator to tie the captions or speech bubbles together, like being the same color other than black on white.
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The other instance of lettering confusion was even more egregious. The climax of the issue is a double-page spread where Bruce and Selina are seeing each other for the first time in their wedding attire. Janin masterfully renders the scene like it’s being viewed through an anamorphic lens. The spread should have been wordless; everything we need to know is right on Bruce and Selina’s faces and in their body language. Instead, we’re treated to this cringe-worthy exchange:
Selina: Bat?
Bruce: Cat?
Selina: We shouldn’t…
Bruce: You look…
Selina: Hi.
Bruce: Hello.
That literally adds nothing to the emotional weight behind this loaded meeting. And even worse, because the dialogue is happening on opposite sides of the spread, it reads like Selina says all three of her lines at a time, before Bruce responds with his three lines in reverse order.
It’s a shame that this issue came together the way it did. Mikel Janin is doing some great storytelling work but it gets lost in all the 50th issue celebratory excess. There were some amazing moments in the issue but, like a song that’s gone on too long, it had too much bloat. It was a real disappointment in a run that’s had its ups and downs but was really executing at a high bar of quality recently. The fact that the last page reveal is connecting it back to the worst arc of this current iteration of “Batman” is giving me pause to even continue with the series. I would also be happy to never hear Bruce and Selina refer to each other as “Bat” and “Cat” again.
But let’s be honest, just like I’ll continue to listen to every new Foo Fighters album as they veer further and further away from the band that released “Everlong,” I’ll probably be back for “Batman” #51 in a couple weeks as well.
