@Master Bruce would your rank your opinions of Tom King, Scott Snyder and Grant Morrison?
Oh, wow. My favorite kind of question!
I'll start with Snyder, since he's my favorite of the three when it comes to Batman. Snyder's Batman arcs, particularly
The Black Mirror,
The Court Of Owls,
Death Of The Family, and
Zero Year, are among some of my favorite arcs in the entirety of Batmandom. He blends the larger-than-life conceptual stuff that I only wish I could pull off with the psychological study of Bruce Wayne type of storytelling that, again, I'm very goddamn envious of. It's taking the best of both worlds in terms of my preferred method of telling Bruce's story and mixing it in a blender. Snyder's work had such an impact on me that for a couple of years, I've been wanting to write my own fan-scripts for entire 13 episode seasons of a live action Batman television show that re-arranges his work so that it starts with a Zero Year inspired origin season, delves into the Court of Owls in the second, and has The Joker wreak havoc in the third. He's one of my favorite Batman writers ever, honestly, for his ideas alone. The only criticism I have is of his dialogue, which can be too wordy at best and too repetitious at worst (never try to play a drinking game where a Snyder-written character ends a sentence with "Dammit!"), and that his run ran out of steam a bit whenever he had Gordon take up the mantle. I appreciate trying new things, but he went a little far with Robo Bat-Cop.
Grant Morrison, meanwhile, I have an immense love-hate relationship as far as Batman goes. His storytelling is absolutely incredible and he taught me so many things about the character's mythos that I never knew just by re-introducing them to the canon, such as the Zur-En-Arrh thing and the importance of the "Robin Dies At Midnight!" story from the Silver Age. There are quite a number of issues of his that I absolutely adore and cite as some of my favorites for the character, specifically "Joe Chill In Hell", which has Bruce remembering one of his earliest cases while in a coma that plays out like an episode of Twin Peaks. However, the hate part comes in whenever it comes to his actual characterization of Batman. He can be a little too out there and all over the place, at once playing Batman as the no-nonsense serious detective that he's been portrayed as for the majority of the modern era, but also really leaning heavily into the sillier aspects of the canon to create a more "rounded" portrayal that just comes off as inconsistent. His swan song with Batman, Incorporated honestly just read as Bruce doing his best Tony Stark impression, and I didn't really like that at all. Also, while I love a majority of what he did with the supporting cast, and I do really like Damian Wayne when written correctly, I never really liked how he made Talia a full-fledged villainess. She went too far down the rabbit hole and became too irredeemable, when the point of her character was always the conflict between her father and her love for Bruce. And lastly, the tone that he established with the stories that he told, even though they are meant to be way different from the Batman stories told since the 80's, got way too tiresome to keep up with near the end. I was so relieved when the book got relaunched with Snyder and that immediate feeling of tone from something like
Batman: The Animated Series came back, because Morrison had made it a different, nigh incomprehensible animal for a long time.
Tom King... Christ. This is where things get alot murkier, because King is probably one of the most celebrated Batman writers of recent memory that I just absolutely loathe for some parts. I was down with his run at first, but immediately noticed something was off whenever he started sprinkling in his own little affectations (My Bruce is never going to call Selina "Cat" because I find it so goddamn annoying) into the story and started trying to make it a bit too much of his own thing. I honestly gave up on the book after the second arc because I wasn't feeling it, and felt like he didn't really have a good voice for Bruce at all. Then the book turned around for me after his supremely dumb "War Of Jokes And Riddles" arc, which I despised. Once that was over, he started focusing more on Bruce's relationship with Catwoman, bringing the engagement thing to the forefront. Now, while I was resistant to Bruce and Selina ever settling down at first, eventually I started to really love the idea as King wrote it. He writes an amazing Selina Kyle, way moreso than Bruce, and she easily became the best character of his run whenever she had to tackle the realities of potentially being Batman's wife. For a long time, I've been of the opinion that Bruce would always put his work before everything and never fall in love, but I always had that spark of something that wanted him and Selina to just say "fuck it" and marry for the sake of throwing aside the tedious love affairs Bruce always gets into. Selina is his true love, and I wholeheartedly believe that Batman's gotten to a point where he can reconcile that and still be who he is. They've done the dance for too long not to be soulmates. But, King's handling of Bruce's character just still reads as a little too off-script for my liking, and his dialogue is insanely pretentious. Reading an issue of his Batman really kicks off my Writer's OCD, if that makes any sense. He just gets too far up his own ass sometimes, which was basically the entirety of the War Of Jokes And Riddles arc.
But yeah. Snyder, Morrison, King. I wouldn't say those are my top three of the entirety of writers that have tackled the character. Paul Dini and Dennis O'Neil vastly outrank all three of them, for my money, and I have favorites like Chuck Dixon, Mark Waid, Jeph Loeb, and a few others that would probably round out my ideal list. But Snyder's up there, and Morrison's not too many notches behind him. King I'm alot more iffy on.
