Batman/Catwoman #1 discussion

[charliehustle415]

I can now better understand why Those In Charge of DC Comics decided to decline this being Batman #86 given the long flashforward. I doubt they want things locked into a certain future as it limits how new writers can approach the characters, their freedom to do so a hard & fast rule in comic books ("put the toys back in the box as you found them when you are finished for the next person")

Yeah totally, and it gives the writer more freedom to what they want since they aren't tied to continuity either.

[captchuck]

I love the depiction of an older Joker. He seems so nice!

[blunt_eastwood]

It is part of King's Batman continuity.

For me this is Batman #86 because you can stop at Batman #85 and just read this

Can you? It doesn't really seem to flow all that well IMO. Maybe I need to read it again.

[fin5]

You can tell that comic goes the past,Present and Future.one thing i dont get bruce said Alfred is dead but behind him he is alive
Is it supposed to be canon or not

[BatmanJones]

It's not. I don't think any Black Labels are.

It all depends on how it's received. The Killing Joke was an "elseworlds" too before it wasn't.

[BatmanJones]

King continues to underwhelm me.

If you don't like his Batman or Heroes in Crisis, may I recommend The Vision, Mister Miracle, Omega Men, Strange Adventures, and/or Rorschach? Because every one of those series is fantastic. They're also each 12 issue stories, which is the format at which he most excels and which is not incidentally the format too of Batman/Catwoman.

[BatmanJones]

I can now better understand why Those In Charge of DC Comics decided to decline this being Batman #86 given the long flashforward. I doubt they want things locked into a certain future as it limits how new writers can approach the characters, their freedom to do so a hard & fast rule in comic books ("put the toys back in the box as you found them when you are finished for the next person")

That's a pretty sucky "hard and fast rule." It means that characters don't grow or change and that nothing lasting every happens to them. If it truly were a hard and fast rule, Batman would still kill people with guns like he did in his first run.

As for this #86 business, it's not at all that simple.

Before King got removed from Batman, he had a 105 issue story to tell. Then he had to cram that story into 85 issues. At the last minute he had to change his careful plans in a very short period of time. Then he was down another issue when DC decided to make Alfred's death stick (King was set to revive him in those 85 issues so, again, he had to rewrite on the fly).

But he had to wrap up a 105 run with 20 issues cut out of it, which was extremely frustrating for those of us that were invested in the story and wanted to see how it ended. And there were indeed a lot of people that felt that way, regardless of the piling on here, where he's just flat considered a bad writer though his 12 issue maxi-series' have won the highest awards.

But what we got was not his Batman run's intended ending. As such, City of Bane was rushed and schizophrenic and the worst arc of the entire run, because he had to wrap everything up in a neat little bow.

BTW, in that way, he did put the toys back in the toy box, especially when you understand that he hadn't intended to kill Alfred.

But Batman/Catwoman is not the story that was planned for #86-105. It's him making the best of a bad situation and IMO he's doing that exquisitely well.