10 Comic Book Issues Guaranteed To Make You Cry

Yeah, Tom King again. This time, he and artist Clay Mann reveal the origins of Kite Man, as part of the big War of Jokes and Riddles event running through the Batman title.

Kite Man had already made a number of appearances in King's run, as the butt of a joke; the utterly ridiculous concept of a super-villain whose fetish is kites and wears a giant kite to glide around, who always finds himself on the wrong side of Batman's fist.

So when we get an interlude issue promising to reveal the origin of the character, its easy to expect a laugh out loud absurd little tale.

Instead, we get something utterly heartbreaking.

Kite Man, at the time of the start of the War of Jokes and Riddles, is a minor criminal facilitator, having done some work for the Joker making his Jokermobile more aerodynamic. When Batman finds him in a bar and forcibly recruits him to find the Joker, Kite Man, real name Charles Brown (yes, really), Brown finds himself taken by the Riddler, and caught between the two warring villains.

Ultimately, as part of Riddler's duplicitous and malicious sociopathic nature, Riddler poisons Brown's young son, who dies thinking he's going to hell because he said 'Hell yeah' after being told not to.

Thrown off the deep end, Brown goes home and develops and constructs his giant wearable kite, before joining the Joker's faction as the Kite Man.

The issue takes a joke character, someone up until now seen as just completely ridiculous, and reveals a broken man that it bizarrely relatable and has the worst possible thing happen to him. The reader goes in prepared to laugh, and instead comes out of the issue broken.

Hell, yeah.