Review: Detective Comics #864
I picked up the new Detective Comics last week without realizing that it's already reverted back to being a Batman book rather than being about Batwoman. When I saw the cover, my heart sank, but I dove in anyway; the last year has taught me that Detective Comics is absolutely still a place where interesting new things can happen and I wanted to give it a fair chance to continue to impress me.
While it isn't a perfect issue, it was pretty good. I'm not necessarily going to be dropping it anytime soon.
Read on for more!
First off, I want to say that I really do like the art in this issue. It's very different from what we've had for a year and it's in a sort of wispy, dreamy style that may not be to everyone's liking, but I felt like a significant shift in art design was an important break to make if they're going to just snap off the Batwoman story and start right back in on Batman with absolutely no preamble. So, yes, it's possibly a jarring visual transition but the art itself is quite good.
That said, whoah but did DC ever just steer that book through a 90-degree left turn with no brakes. I knew Greg Rucka was leaving, I knew that, but I didn't expect it to be immediate. So, we're left with a cliffhanger one hopes is resolved by J.H. Williams III over the summer and we pick right back up with Batman in an entirely new story. Well - I say entirely new, but really this ties into the Arkham Asylum mini-series and, whoops, I didn't read that.
That's my main beef with this issue. It's not that Arkham himself is a bad super-villain - he's as creepy as Republican porn and twice as self-satisfied - it's that this issue isn't really about Batman in the way Detective Comics spent a year being about Batwoman and the person about whom it is is someone developed in another title. So, not only do we get a different central character, we get an arguably inverted take on whether the hero or the villain is the center of the story and we get a narrative imported from a different book. I should have known to expect that there would be some bumps in the road for a book that's transitioned between writers, artists, plots and main characters in the gap between two sequential issues, but I wasn't prepared.
Now, all that said, I actually really enjoyed this issue. Batman has always been about mind games as much as fisticuffs and my favorite Batman stories are always the ones where he uses fear and the psychology of his foes' own flawed psyches to achieve victory. That's definitely what's going on here, as he tries to tear down the walls separating the personalities of Arkham and the Black Mask and it's ruthless and brutal and I need to see that edge to Batman every once in a while to remind me what he's really all about.
However, that raised a question for me - is this the Dick Grayson Batman or is this Bruce Wayne? The things we see in this issue feel a lot more Wayne than Grayson. If Dick Grayson is going to exhibit his own occasionally cruel proficiency with manipulating the emotions of others I guess Detective Comics is the place to do it but it wasn't what I was expecting and it seems incongruous somehow with the current Morrison depiction of Grayson as wafting somewhere between kitschy and contemplative, infinitely more compassionate and humane than Bruce Wayne had been driven to become.
So, yes, there are some problems: this is an abrupt shift, a different kind of book, the story relies on a separate series entirely for full context and the depiction of Batman is potentially open to question. It's still worthwhile reading, though, as it's always worth keeping tabs on a publisher's flagship title and Detective Comics apparently still has plenty of creepy, crazy Batman stories to tell. (See how nice I'm being and not even mentioning that the bomb-in-the-chest thing isn't exactly news to the seventeen billion people who watched The Dark Knight? Oh, damn, I slipped and did it anyway.)
I'm still in mourning for Rucka's departure, though, and that isn't going to change any time soon.
Klarion
Posted to on 7 May 2010
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