Ethan Van Sciver And Jon Del Arroz Rip to Shreds Tom King Batman Comic That Implies He Is a Scared Child

JB Augustine |

Apr 5, 2022

A recent Batman comic is getting attention for all the wrong reasons from Cyberfrog creator Ethan Van Sciver who spotlighted a page on Twitter.

The page shows the Dark Knight on a rooftop with Claire Clover aka Gotham Girl consoling him for some reason and telling him it’s okay to be scared.

“Everybody’s scared,” she says as Batman looks at her blankly. “But that just means…we get to fight that fear. We have the chance to be brave.”

Van Sciver had a visceral reaction. “I think I’m going to throw up,” he wrote before calling out today’s comic writers for projecting their mental illnesses onto established characters.

“Hey mentally ill writers?” he continued. “Not every character you’re writing is you. Stop projecting your own personal neurosis onto characters you didn’t create, who already have enough of their own established problems.”

Van Sciver signed off his tweet with “Bat-pussy,” before sharing a screenshot of the issue on his desk.

Writer and Deus Vult creator Jon Del Arroz chimed in on this subject too in a YouTube video.

Del Arroz isn’t impressed by Tom King’s Batman feeling that the would-be New Gods writer reduced the Caped Crusader to a depressed, “mopey” mess of a person – a shell of what the vigilante was.

“It’s not a hero anymore [Batman],” Del Arroz says. “It’s an anti-hero and it’s really sad what they [King] have done with that.”

He further observes that Batman at his best is a multimillionaire who doesn’t mope or second-guess if he’s doing the right thing since he’s too busy fighting crime and doesn’t care what others think of him.

Del Arroz has also noticed for a while the trend of writers at DC and Marvel projecting their own insecurities onto characters they’re put in charge of.

It’s gotten worse since COVID lockdowns, Del Arroz observes, as he suspects these writers are agoraphobic – which they are afraid of the outside, wide-open spaces, and sometimes crowds.

As nerdy introverts afraid of getting sick, Del Arroz points out writers like Tom King, and Chip Zdarsky in another case in Daredevil that emasculated Kingpin, can’t relate to these characters.