This Batman article contains spoilers.

Tom King is all about reflections. He’s the most prominent formalist working in superhero comics today. For him, “how” tells as much of the story as “why” or “what.” So it’s natural that Alfred’s death in his last story arc on Batman proper is a way for King to examine Bruce’s origin. After all, it was the death of his parents that set him down his path to becoming the Bat.

“Yeah, but it was also a way to show what the difference is between Bruce losing his parents when he was young and connected to them, and Bruce losing Alfred having been raised by Alfred,” King says in an interview about this last chapter of Batman.

He tells us that there’s one key difference between those two losses: “To me that was a tribute to Alfred’s parentage of Bruce for all these years and him guiding him through that trauma [of losing his parents]. Because you expect Batman in that moment to bury himself in anger and go insane and do all the things that drove him to be Batman in the first place. But instead of that, he hears Alfred’s voice and he composes himself.”