Batman: City of Bane, Tom King Final Story Arc Wrap-Up

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How Tom King's Batman run has built up to 'City of Bane'
https://ew.com/books/2019/07/17/tom-k...

Writer Tom King’s run on DC’s flagship Batman comic was initially one of the main highlights from the publisher’s DC Rebirth initiative when it launched back in 2016. Three years later, it has become one of the longest-lasting of the initial Rebirth creative teams, and one of the most celebrated — but it all comes to a head this week with the beginning of the “City of Bane” arc.

As City of Bane suggests, this week’s Batman finds Gotham City overrun by Bane. Tom King’s run has gone a long way towards catapulting Bane into the top-tier of Batman’s rogues gallery. Though he first appeared early in the run, Bane was only getting started.

EW spoke with Tom King recently in a long-running conversation about his run and what it’s been building towards. Some of it was about the epic Batman-Catwoman reunion that will take place during City of Bane, but we also discussed how the new story builds on seeds that King has been planting for years.

The very first arc of King’s Batman was called “I Am Gotham,” and found the Dark Knight confronting a very unusual situation for him: The arrival of two superheroes with actual superpowers in Gotham City. The brother and sister duo called themselves Gotham and Gotham Girl. Though at first, they seemed like a welcome presence in Batman’s life, the dark truth was soon revealed. Their magnificent powers were slowly killing them and driving them insane. Gotham did not survive that first story, while Batman went to great lengths over subsequent issues to save Gotham Girl’s life.

Flash forward to the present, where Gotham Girl is allied with Bane now. Not only that – she’s one of the main reasons he’s able to control Gotham City at all.

A few years before DC Rebirth, the publisher reinvented its entire line. Previous continuity was erased, and every comic series started off from a new issue #1. This initiative was called “the New 52,” and it was accomplished through an event series titled Flashpoint in which the Flash went back in time to try to save his mother’s life; in doing so, he created massive changes to the time-space continuum. Before things settled down into the New 52 status quo, readers glimpsed an alternate what-if universe with radically changed DC heroes. The most interesting element of that Flashpoint world was that the Batman mantle was worn not by Bruce Wayne, but his father Thomas. In that world, it was Bruce who was killed that fateful night in Crime Alley, while his father took a vow of revenge and declared a war on crime.

In May 2017, King’s Batman briefly crossed over with The Flash for a story called “The Button,” in which Bruce finally came face-to-face with the version of his father from this alternate dimension. Thomas, who in this incarnation has lived his own lifetime as Batman, declared that he did not want his son doing the same.

It all comes back to Catwoman. The romance between “Bat” and “Cat” has been a major part of King’s Batman so far, and will strongly influence his endgame. One of the standout issues from the run was issue #49, the one just before the attempted wedding, in which Catwoman found herself in an hours-long stand-off with the Joker. As they both laid on the ground clutching their bleeding wounds, the two reminisced about the old days in between threatening to kill each other. It was a beautiful mess of divergent tones that also made perfect sense.

“Comic books are fundamentally absurd,” King says. “They make no sense if you read them, especially if you read them under the presumption that all of this happened to one person. It’s completely nonsensical. The thing that mitigates that is that life itself is fairly nonsensical. So the absurdity of comics can become a metaphor for the absurdities we go through every single day — which is good because a lot of movies give you these straight-ahead plots where there’s a first act, a second act, and a third act, and it all resolves. That’s not life. Life is like a comic book. Life is ongoing and, at least to you, never-ending. So, that’s what I do. I take that absurdity seriously because when we look around everyday, we take absurdity seriously.”

King continues, “That’s just like one day in your job, where you’re talking about some stupid TV show. Then you go home that night you have to talk about your father dying of cancer, and then later that day you have to talk about the groceries. Your brain has to process it all. And then you turn on the news and everything’s falling apart.”

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