Curious to ask; what are your opinions on Issue #54 of Tom King’s Batman Run, the one where we get flashbacks to what seems like the first few weeks after Dick moved in to Wayne Manor and Bruce was doing his darn beat to make Dick feel comfortable in his new home?
Surface level? It's meh. Not the best, not the worst. Definitely not my favorite art. And then there a few fanon-type cliches and Nightwing's characterization that just rub me a little the wrong way... on first read. But if you read through it a few times, you start noticing things. Sure, Dick is shown in-story as a brat at first, but it's obvious he isn't really one; he's hurting, and his personality isn't exactly meshing well with Bruce and Alfred at first. It's the same way with the Nightwing characterization; that isn't really how Dick is, he's playing a role to help Bruce. King is being a bit too subtle and a bit too heavy-handed, both, in the same story, just perhaps with the wrong things. He could have gone subtle with the fanon and a little heavier with the "let me help" and "it's fine and I'm here if you don't want to be" parts. After talking with King at conventions and hearing him in interviews and panels and podcasts, I know he can get at least some aspects of how Dick has been portrayed over the years, when other things don't get in the way. I think he does a better job with Dick than with Bruce, honestly. But yeah, sometimes things get in the way of telling the story creators want, and there are absolutely some issues in that run I had problems with. It might have been nice if he'd been limited to a 12 issue run or if he'd had a chance to write the story out without interruption so we could see it all unfold at once, if he'd gotten to finish what he had planned. Definitely, pulling him off the story just so they could hand off to someone so they could start tugging it in another direction doesn't make for coherent storytelling overall. The biggest thing I remember from that one convention was that even though Metal was announcers and you'd think that would be the biggest secret that they wouldn't want to be spilled, early, I don't remember anyone sitting in on Scott Snyder's panels making sure he didn't tell things ahead of time. But there absolutely was a DC publicity higher up sitting front row in his panel, keeping an eye on what he shared. That... didn't sit too well with me, honestly, but maybe that's just me trying to make Dan Didio into the villain of my personal villain origin story, too much 😁
