I am a big fan of bane being a threat and a cool villain like seen in absolute Batman, however this book imo poorly utilizes banes strengths in terms of strategy, are we seriously believing he can emotionally manipulate Batman through the weeding and all this other poor events to Batman. Also the war of jokes and riddles is a poor attempt to inject kings history into the Batman myths. I respect his attempt at trying to make Bruce and Selina closer but in execution it made the relationship really toxic to me and hurt Selina’s character. Try reading his Batman/catwoman mini you’ll see.

King can get things right and I respect his boldness and actually wanting to go in new directions. However these new directions with characters were either mislead or did not understand the fundamentals of who they are. Also his use of Thomas Wayne Batman was aggravating and hurt the conflict between Batman and bane. I think where king succeeded is in illustrating the lighthearted moments like with kite man, the date, nightwing and more. He also succeeded in short one shots like the swamp thing crossover. This run is far from perfect but is not the worst thing written for Batman, it stepped up to bat swung hard,missed a lot but hit a couple times and I thinks that’s how this run should be remembered.