When it was announced that writer Tom King would be ending his Batman run a bit earlier than originally intended, it didn’t take long for the internet to start speculating about King’s sudden departure. After all, the award-winning Batman and Mister Miracle scribe was well on his way to his planned 106 issues when his run was cut short, with December’s #85 set to be the end of his time on the book. While some corners of the web theorized that King had been “fired” from Batman for one thing or another, the real reason behind his exit comes down to logistics, according to the writer.

“So what’s going to happen is, or what did happen, was that [DC] needed some major DC stuff to be told in the Bat books,” King tells us at NYCC 2019. “And that would have conflicted with the Batman/Catwoman focus.”

This makes sense. While the book has featured a few smaller crossover events in the last few years, King’s Batman has mostly occupied its own corner of the DC universe, and has rarely acknowledged anything happening to the Dark Knight elsewhere in the line. Even the publisher’s big Year of the Villain initiative has largely been absent from King’s epic.

Yet, it seems like DC wants to tell more cohesive stories through its entire line of books by unifying its universe’s timeline and pushing bigger events. If that’s indeed the case, keeping Batman, DC’s most popular book month to month, isolated from the rest of the line just doesn’t make much sense.