Scans_Daily

"That happened simultaneously with the Watchmen TV show coming. That was, to me, eye-opening in the fact that it was so good, you know? I feel bad for saying this, but I really wanted to hate it, you know? I wanted to be like, "How dare you?" All the stuff I think people are gonna say about me when Rorschach comes out, I wanted to say to the Watchmen TV show, and [instead] I was like, "this is so good." It's not Watchmen, but it's using that vocabulary to talk about huge themes that are happening in our society. And it's using Watchmen almost as a symbol to say, this is important. The HBO Watchmen is not about the same things that '86 Watchmen [comic] is about, it's about completely different themes of race in history in America. That kind of opened my eyes where I was, oh, this is possible, this can be done." - Tom King

( Read more... )

"I also tried to see the things that I'm starting to lean into and that make me comfortable. I was like, okay, I'm getting rid of repetitions. I'm not going to use repetitive dialogue on this -- almost on an architectural level, I was like, I'm going to use longer sentences and word balloons. I'm going to use a character in the detective that has no background story for the first time. You know, absolutely zero background story. I'm going to take the things I'm sitting on that make me comfortable and make it easy to write, and I'm going to throw those out the window and try to start again and do something new and try to push myself in order to make better comics. I feel like people just become sort of comfortable with your style and it's no longer impactful." - Tom King

( Read more... )

"This is a deconstruction of a lot of things, but it's not a deconstruction of superheroes. That's not what we're looking for. This is not trying to examine what a superhero is, or what a DC superhero is, or any sort of those kind of questions. This is looking at who we are as people..." - Tom King

( Read more... )

"I think, for the past three or four years when I was working on Mister Miracle, Heroes in Crisis, and Batman, those were all about a combination of that weird panic attack I've talked about a lot, and mental health, and living in Trump's America, where it's, how do you deal with the absurd?

"In the end, I feel they're very heartwarming books, because they're about how I found solace, my wife and my family in the midst of all this fucking shit, chaos, all three of them. And now with Rorschach, Strange Adventures, and Batman/Catwoman, I feel like I'm trying to move on to a new theme and a new way to write. I'm trying to stretch myself in different directions.

"I feel like I won't find the theme till they're all done, and I'll look back and be like, oh, that's what I was actually writing about. But they're much angrier books. They're much more caustic books. This isn't like, oh man, the world is tough, but at least I have my wife, which is a wonderful thing to write about, but I'm no longer writing about that now. It's like, the world is tough and I want to scream and what do I do with that scream? And how does that affect life in general?"

- Tom King

( Read more... )

"I really didn't want to do a Watchmen cover song, because to me, what Watchmen is about is, it broke down so many storytelling walls by telling a story in a different way, right? This is the kind of story you've never seen before. So if you just tell a story in the same way Watchmen did, you're kind of, you're throwing away the one thing it did, which is creativity. If you just repeat what it did, then you're actually not repeating what it did. It's like a contradiction.

"You know me, I fucking love a nine-panel grid, but I was like, 'alright, we're not doing nine-panel grids. We're not doing the quote at the beginning.' We're not — the thing about reading Alan Moore, the transitions are all built on puns. Someone looks at his watch, and then the next thing is a clock. Someone says I'm hungry and the next thing is someone eating. If you read Alan Moore's book on writing, he even makes fun of himself for doing that -- he's like, I don't want to ever do this again. So we throw out all that stuff. Even the back matter. We're not going to do any of this stuff."

- Tom King

( Read more... )

"Like with Doomsday Clock, I think I wanted to channel what my frustration with the political climate in America. With this, the idea for it sparked when I was in Washington DC and they drove by the White House and someone said ‘I can’t stand to look at the White House.’ I was like, ‘Why? The White House is the White House, and the American flag is about the American flag.’" - Geoff Johns

( Read more... )