so I just put ‘Hell yeah.’ Just out of nothing? I liked him just saying his own name, ‘Kite Man.’ He steals stuff ‘Kite Man, hell yeah.’” “He had added an extra panel ‘Tom, just add some dialogue to this’. just added Kite Man ‘cause I just needed someone for Batman to punch, or for Gotham Girl to punch,” King told me at San Diego Comic-Con. “Ivan Reis drew an extra panel in a comic book I was writing, and I had. ‘Good Dog’ is one of the best Batman stories of 2016Īnd at the time, King admits, Kite Man was. He wasn’t a consistent joke - but it sure seemed like he was Tom King’s favorite punching bag. Can people really change? Can trauma truly be healed? What the heck is even Kite Man’s deal?” “There’s so much more to the quick tale than you might guess. I made a joke about it when I wrote up the story’s Eisner nomination. At the center of a beautiful story about how anyone can come back from trauma, is this Kite Man gag: “Kite Man.” Tom King, David Finch/DC Comics One such moment is now enshrined in an Eisner Award-winning story, “Good Dog,” which ran in the 2016 Batman annual, in a montage of Batman puzzling over Gotham crimes while, unseen and unappreciated, Alfred attempts to gentle an abused dog. This set the tone for a series of recurring appearances: a running (or perhaps gliding) gag, in which Kite Man would appear in a montage of equally feeble Batman villains getting their comeuppance. He is immediately captured, plucked out of thin air by Gotham Girl, a very powerful superheroine that Batman has taken under his leathery wing. Hell yeah.” (See the top image on this post.) He steals a woman’s pearls, shouting “Kite Man!” He leaps out another window and glides away. He smashes through the window of a building. Kite Man’s first appearance in King’s Batman lasts all of two pages. Tom King took the joke of Kite Man and made him into a riddle. And he did all of it without letting on that he was setting up for a punchline - and that that punchline would reverberate back through his Batman run. Over the past 17 months, Tom King has taken Kite Man from a poster child for the silliness of mid-century superhero comics to something much, much more. “This character that everyone’s laughing at is actually a character that everyone’s crying at.” “The history of taking old ideas seriously, that’s what comics is about,” King said, while answering my question. Batman has partnered with the Suicide Squad, overthrown the might of Bane, met his living father from another dimension and proposed marriage to Catwoman. In 17 months, he’s written what he purports to be just the first third of a story about Batman discovering whether he can ever move past the trauma of his parents’ death, the very narrative core of his character for the better part of a century. Tom King’s ongoing run on Batman is best known for its big movements. That would be saying the punchline before telling the joke revealing the answer before asking the riddle. I won’t tell you all of what he said next, yet. Tom King looked me straight in the eyes, grinned, and went: “Hell yeah!”
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