Art by: David Marquez
Colors by: Alejandro Sánchez
Letters by: Clayton Cowles
Cover art by: David Marquez, Alejandro Sánchez
Cover price: $4.99
Release date: August 2, 2022
Batman: Killing Time #6 concludes the mystery with a lengthy sequence of events detailing exactly, precisely, and in minute detail how Clock King orchestrated the theft of the Prize.
Is It Good?
Batman: Killing Time #6 appears to be, depending on your interpretation, Tom King's magnum opus for showing how you can create a 6-part Batman story that serves fundamentally no purpose other than to kill some time. There is no lesson to be learned or development of the characters in new and exciting ways that makes you love the heroes or hate the villains. As the Clock King points out, this series is "just something to help pass the time."
Whether or not Tom King passing the time in excruciatingly intricate, tedious detail helps you pass the time or wastes your time is up to you.
For this reviewer, it always comes down to a combination of the journey and the destination.
Was the journey worth it? For the art, yes. For the writing, no.
Marquez's art in this issue, and the series as a whole, is brilliant. Every panel screams high-quality cinema, from the panel compositions to the lighting (read: coloring from Sánchez) to the pristine linework. Say what you will about the writing execution and the plot; there's nothing to criticize about the art.
The journey King takes us on is nothing short of painful. Of all the Rogues to pick, it was clear based on the obsessive schedules and record-keeping that Clock King was the likely narrator, so his big reveal in the previous issue failed to come as the surprise it was meant to be. Now, we get a full accounting of Clock King's plan, and it's nothing more than Click King executing an intricate plan to steal something with no intrinsic value (a stone eye) for lack of something to do. In short, this pointless adventure was dreamed up by Clock King because he was bored.
You might think a dangerous obsessive like the Clock King would be a genuine threat, but the story that King dreams up falls short in two areas.
First, King never attributes motivation to any characters (past or present) for wanting the prize. The prize has no value other than the legends built up around it, yet, King has everyone chasing after it as if it was the most valuable object on Earth. Thousands of years and hundreds of hands can't get the prize's true worth so consistently wrong, and King expects the reader to buy into the lie without giving a plausible way to accept the lie in the first place.
Second, by telling the story from the Clock King's schedule-obsessed point of view, the reader experience is downright painful AND doesn't make sense for the character. A time-focused, schedule-obsessed thinker plans in sequential order with margins for error. By sporadically, randomly jumping back and forth through time, King tells the story from the Clock King's point of view but tells it in a way that's contrary to how the Clock King thinks plans, and works. In other words, King gets Clock King wrong from the start, and the reading experience suffers for it because the zigzag narrative is excruciatingly tedious.
Was the destination worth it? No. This was a pointless albeit beautiful waste of time.
About The Reviewer: Gabriel Hernandez is the Publisher & EIC of ComicalOpinions.com, a comics review site dedicated to indie, small, and mid-sized publishers.
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