From Slate: "How Does a Batman Comic Book Writer Work?"
This is one of a series of podcasts on Slate that focuses on the making of Batman comics. This installment interviews writer Tom King. I haven't listened to it yet myself, but the introduction sounds intriguing:
In a recent installment of his eponymous comic book series, Batman gets down on one knee and asks Catwoman to marry him. For all the surrounding drama, it’s an almost subdued moment. And though the issue ends on a cliffhanger—readers still don’t know whether she said yes—that uncertainty feels like a reflection of the fraught history that these two characters share.
As the issue’s writer, Tom King, tells it in this episode of Working, which you can listen to via the player above, simply getting permission to tell that story was difficult. Batman may have been born on the pages of Detective Comics in the late 1930s, but today he’s a multibillion-dollar property. That means any one writer can only do so much with the character and his world. Thus, quiet as that proposal story may have been, King still had to get approval from his bosses, who had to get approval from their own bosses and so on up the corporate chain of command.
It’s an experience that’s presumably familiar to King, who took an unusual path to comics. Though he grew up a self-professed nerd—unable to “throw a ball in a hoop or run using my legs”—and interned at Marvel Comics, his life took a turn after the Sept. 11 attacks. Wanting to do something, he joined the CIA and served in Iraq as a counterterrorism-focused case officer. Ultimately, it was his family that pulled him back. He had, he tells us, grown up without a father, and he wanted his own children to have a different experience.
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...Is there a prose version?