‘Wonder Woman’ Writer Tom King Returns To Batman In 2026, Says New DC Story “Will Have The Best Art In Comics” And “May Be One Of The Best Things I Ever Wrote”
In perhaps one of the most heartbreaking confirmations to hit The Dark Knight’s world since the news of Heath Ledger’s passing, former Batman and current Wonder Woman scribe Tom King has revealed that thanks to a direct request from DC, 2026 will see him return to the streets of Gotham with a wholly original tale.
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King, who in the years since helping his fellow CIA agents plan the 2003 Invasion of Iraq has contributed his self-aggrandizing writing talents to a number of DC books like Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow Vol. 1, Rorschach Vol. 1, and perhaps most controversially Batman Vol. 3, broke the news of his upcoming reunion with The Caped Crusader during a recent appearance on The Batman Book Club podcast.
Near the end of their time together, the DC mainstay was asked by his host Ryan Lower as to whether or not he had “more Batman stories in you”, to which he bluntly confirmed, “Yes. I just wrote a Batman story. I’ll keep keep writing Batman stories until they kick me off.”
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“I got approached, I was in the [DC] offices doing whatever, meeting with editors, and the editor of Batman [Rob Levin] came up to me and he’s like, ‘Hey man, I got 40 pages of Batman, you wanna write it? You can have any artist you want?'” said King, recalling of the events that led to finding himself back in Gotham. “I don’t think I can announce the artist, but I was like, ‘I have an idea, and [the artist I want] may be the best artist in comics”, and they said ‘Yeah, and the artist said Yes, and I wrote the story. It may be one of the best things I ever wrote. It’ll be out next year.”
Pressed by Lower as to whether the tale would release in as part of the main Batman series or as its own separate one-shot, King admitted, “I think it’s a standalone issue. I have no idea. [Levin] was literally like, ‘You can have 40 pages to do whatever you want with Batman. It was on a whim. I was walking by his desk.”
“It was a little bit of existential crisis,” the Wonder Woman writer continued. “When you’re like ‘It has to be Batman and Elmer Fudd [a reference to his previous work on the Batman/Elmer Fudd Vol. 1 #1 one-shot]’, then your story is limited as to what you can write. But when someone’s like ‘It can be Batman, any era, anything you want, whatever you want, suddenly you’re like ‘sh-t, it’s too much, give me some restraints.'”
“I’m not a guy who has trouble coming up with ideas – knock on wood – I can always come up with a good idea,” King explained. “I’m good at that part of the game, and I just could not could not think of an idea for this Batman thing. Because obviously more bad stories are written about Batman than any fictional character ever, so first you have to have a good idea. And then you have to check it against your knowledge of Batman to be like ‘That’s been done before.’ So between those two things, I kept coming up with ideas and being like, “No, Tom, you’ve already done that. No, Scott [Snyder] already did that. No, Grant [Morrsion] did that. No, Steve Englehart did that.”
“What I was going for was like Whatever Happens To The Man Of Tomorrow, a story that’s just stands alone but is like a perfect story,” King further detailed of his creative process. “I just couldn’t come up with it. And finally, I was on a plane and I was just sitting there, like ‘Tom, think, think, think’. And I was like, you know, ‘This reminds me of this stupid thing…’ and I went ‘Oh that’s it.'”
“I was so relieved,” he concluded. “It was such a moment of relief, like with that core of an idea you could do something. I’m really really proud of how it turned out um and and like i said it’s going to have the the best art in comics when it comes out.”
At present, DC has yet to officially announce either when or in what format King’s Batman story will hit shelves, as well as the identity of King’s artist collaborator.
However, given that the last time he handled The Dark Knight he wrote a scene in which Catwoman one-shots three generations of Flashes, it’s likely fans are not waiting with baited breath for that information.
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