Quotes from Tom King

Batman's not mine. He doesn't necessarily belong to me. As a character, he belongs first to the audience and second to the hundreds of writers who have been writing him in comics for 75 years.

I'm a comic book writer, so I work with a lot of artists. Sometimes, you get art back, and you're like, 'Oh, no.' Sometimes, you get art back and you're like, 'That's exactly what I imagined in my head,' and you're happy about that.

You throw sadness, you throw depression, you throw horror at Batman, he's like, 'Yeah, yawn, I've done that.' You throw happiness at him? That's something that riles him; that's something that he's not used to.

I grew up in a weird environment. My mother's head of the home video division, basically. She played a big role in the invention of DVD - she won an Emmy for it. Or rather, she's part of a group that won an Emmy for it.

If you actually read the 'New Gods' tetralogy, this epic without an ending, it's like dipping your head into madness. You feel a little bit like the Joker for a little while. And I mean that in the best way possible.

That's all the Joker is. It's Batman without love. The Riddler is the opposite of that. It's the detective in him.

I went to college in New York. I interned at Vertigo, and then I interned at Marvel working for Chris Claremont. Just to age myself, this was in 2000.

'Batman' readers are the smartest readers in the world. I don't have to hold their hands.

When I was 12, I used to ride my scooter two miles to a comics shop, which I can't imagine letting my kids do by themselves through the city.

My novel got published, and I became a paid writer, which was nice, and then it came out, and nobody bought it, so I became an unemployed writer again.

I wanted to look like the most diverse writer in comics! Spy genre, space genre, crime genre, and then you realize that it's all actually the same thing.

I love continuity. I was a continuity nerd growing up. I loved buying a comic in the middle of something and loved digging for back issues or going forward and trying to figure it all out.

I try not to push characters too close to myself because they get harder to write, but as a writer, you try to find odd little personal experiences that you hope are universal or think might be universal.

I started out as a novelist, and I think novels have gotten a little stiff, a little repetitive, and the energy in comics was much more appealing.

I always felt like the 'outsider' kind of kid.

I've been the desperate writer before. I wrote a novel, and they paid me for it, and I've had those calls from my agent, and I'm like, 'Do you need me to ghost-write a vampire novel? What do you need? I'll do Transformers... tell me!'

If you're a writer, you're constantly doubting yourself.

I don't believe in writing for goals, or else I'd write essays.

It's hard to find a unique look for a Batman villain. Everything like a scar on the face, or a skin condition, there are so many unique signifiers taken.

That's what's great about the Batman universe. When you explore Gotham, when you explore the villains, all of them point to this one character. This iconic American symbol for how we deal with pain and loss and how we move forward after it.

I wanted to be a writer, and my mother was like, 'No, why don't you become a lawyer?' That sort of thing.