Tom King

“All stories are just stories of a character changing.”

“My dad left when I was young. I didn't have a dad. I'm part of that divorced generation and didn't want to do that to my kids, so I took a year off and became a full-time dad, changed diapers and all that while my wife worked.”

“What eventually you find in comics is the only thing unique you can bring to a character who's been around for 80 years is yourself.”

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

“I still feel it's kind of weird to say, 'I'm a comic book writer.'”

“I think sometimes you go through an experience, and you don't feel the impact, especially in a war experience, until way past it.”

“That's my whole point as an artist - I'm trying to get you to turn a page.”

“It's good to be a cynic. I'm a cynic. But the best part of being a cynic is somebody proving you wrong.”

“My first book is called 'Carry the Three.' It's definitely in a drawer, and it's terrible. I never sent it to anybody. My wife read it, but nobody else.”

“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.”

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

“My scripts, they're pretty serious. I basically just describe stuff. I don't put too many notes and letters to the editors. But when I wrote 'KGBLT,' in parentheses I wrote, 'Well this is the best thing I've ever written. It will all be downhill from here. I'm so sorry for the rest of my career.'”

“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 wanted to write about the Trump era, but I didn't want to write, 'Fascism sucks' or 'Trump sucks.' That doesn't get you anywhere.”

“Honestly, I grew up a huge Peanuts fan.”

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

“I've said this before, but I don't like putting captions in my comic books. I feel, for me, they become a crutch, a way to ignore the essential fact that our medium is a visual medium, and the greatest pleasures to be derived from comics are how stories can be told with pictures.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”