Originally Posted by
millernumber1
Okay, I'll try to go point by point.
1) Is Batman ever a very emotionally expressive character? I don't think King's is significantly less emotive than other writers. And the way he's written his love for Selina is pretty effective for me. (It's also frustrating to me that people are making the same argument about King that they made about Tynion - that both writers hate Batman - when the claims being made are the opposite - King's Batman doesn't have emotion, but Tynion's is too soft and hugging everyone. Why can't the argument be about whether the interpretation is compelling, rather than using crummy shorthand like "clearly this writer hates this character?)
2) I'm not quite sure if you're saying that King relishes telling rather than showing, or that Batman does. If the former, I think your next complaint invalidates this - that Seeley is doing the heavy lifting - indicates that King is being very parsimonious with his telling. That's because King is going for emotional effect, not for completely detail oriented mechanics. (more on this later)
3) Seeley IS answering a lot of questions that I have had about King's setting up of the wedding. I do think that it probably would have been helpful to know the things Seeley is putting out there several issues ago. But again, King's stories are really heavily dependent on the endings, so it's going to be 53 issues after #50 until I will feel able to actually make any real analysis on what the purpose of, so , Booster Gold's arc, or the Superfriends arc was. You can make some guesses now, but until the whole picture is in focus, I want to focus on trying to get the feelings that King is trying to share. And that's one of the reasons I don't like the Booster Gold arc - because I don't feel anything for anyone in it. But I do feel pretty deeply for King's Bruce and Selina, or Bat Cat.
4) The collection of the trade is frustrating, but I think largely because of the demands of double shipping. The ability of artists to keep up is really shaping this narrative's building blocks. You can see King trying to impose a standard arc size of 5-6 issues for the first three arcs, and that drove his main artist, David Finch, away from the title. I don't know how he kept Janin, but possibly because he demanded the Kite Man issues to give Janin time to work. The structure of the last four or so months has largely been about trying to shape much smaller arcs - 2-3 issues - so that they can be done by one artist, and inserting one-shots and other things to get the whole thing done.
Lastly, how does claiming knowledge of how hard King is working helpful to the discussion? I think it's much more justifiable to say that King doesn't seem competent than that he's lazy. I would disagree, but I've made similar claims about other writers, without making any assumptions about their moral character.