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Relationship Compromise in Batman/Catwoman

(or: I’m not sure Tom King knows just how bonkers what he wrote is and I don’t know what to do with that)

Batman/Catwoman concluded this past June, and I did not enjoy it, and it haunts me.

Just… when I read a story and what the author apparently thinks is happening does not align with the events on the page, I can’t help but feel some fascination. The final page, in B/C #12, is definitely the most dissonant:

What a romantic scene, the pin on a tale of love triumphant! If you ignore many of the events around it!!

I try not to be too much of a dick even about things I don’t like. Regardless of my opinion, Tom King wrote twelve dang issues interweaving three different time periods, so he put some measure of thought into it. So at the conclusion of my first read, when my reaction was “lol what,” I still thought maybe the spliced time periods were hiding something from me. That narrative tactic is typically used so that an event that happens in one period of time can directly comment on an event that occurs much earlier/later, and there was some of that in B/C, but its main effect was muddling the story. Plus I read it over the course of 17 months! Maybe I missed something, something that made it allllll come together.

So during my second read, like a sane person, I cut up all the panels and sorted them into the three different tracks. And then I read the story again chronologically, and this time my reaction was… *resoundlingly* “lol what.”

And I will explain why at length under the cut (with many many spoilers, as well as remarks on dismemberment and suicide).

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