Review: Detective Comics #873
When Greg Rucka abandoned ship abruptly last year, and Detective Comics shifted its focus away from Batwoman and back to Batman, I lost interest in exactly one half of one issue. I literally did not finish reading the first issue that was about Batman again. I had never before subscribed to DC's eponymous book and I figured that was that, I probably wouldn't have a good reason to do so again.
...That is, until they announced Scott Snyder as the new writer and that Dick Grayson, as the Batman of Gotham City, would be the Batman whose tale was told. I asked my local comics shop to put this title back into my bag but only once Snyder was writing it. We're now three issues into that and this is the issue in which I feel like it found its legs. The others were great, make no mistake, but this one felt right.
Read on for more of thoughts about Dick Grayson's unique ability to re-reveal the point of the Batman myth!
First, I just loved the art in this book. Is there anything snazzier than the covers DC was putting on what I think of as their "core" books in January? Jock's incredibly detailed Batman on that stark white background is so beautifully composed, so well-executed. They aren't just beautiful covers, they're classy. Sometimes (*coughTimeMasterscough*) books have covers so overwrought or so T&A-tastic or just plain bad that I'm a little embarrassed to be seen with them in public. Not this one! This cover - and many of the others like it on last month's DC books - would look just fine framed and hanging on a wall. I kind of want to go buy extra copies of this, Zatanna and maybe JSA, a book I don't even read, just so I can put them up in some inexpensive, minimalist frames on the walls of my home office. How often does one get to say that about a comic?
I wouldn't want to judge a book by its literal cover, though; I really enjoyed the action and the characterization in this issue. The Evil Ebay arc has been fun, yes, and it's a very clever idea, but the thing about this issue is that it allows Snyder to focus on the storytelling element at which I think he's best: remembering the humanity of superhuman figures. Comic books about superheroes very quickly slide off into their own weird downward-spiraling narrative of upward-spiraling power creep. That is, frankly, why I stopped caring about Blackest Night: I felt like the few featured characters for whom I had any affection had all gotten lost in the shoot-'em-up tidal wave the story required. By the same token, a book can quickly become so chatty and swallowed up in character studies, zoomed in so close on the inner workings of some character or another or the relationship between them, that I start to feel claustrophobic. (*coughUncannyX-Mencough*) I start wanting to scream at the page, "Shut up! Just go outside and hit something for five minutes! We'll all feel better!" Maybe that's my redneck upbringing showing itself, though. This book manages to delicately balance the two - action and character - and throw into the mix all the other accoutrements of a great story: roots in the established past, flotsam left behind for future iterations of narrative.
This story, and this issue in particular, also make for a great perspective on Dick Grayson as Batman. I know I've been going on about this for, well, a year and a half at this point, but it's an evergreen: Dick Grayson really is a different kind of Batman and his stories are different but they reveal the same core themes and lessons of the Batman myth overall. Guibourg makes an excellent foil for Batman: moving among the city's elite, inciting them to frenzied worship of Gotham's history of terrible crimes. He also provides an interesting opposition in superficial appearance, in that he appears only to conceal his mouth and nose, the same parts of the face that Batman leaves exposed. The final big reveal on Guibourg is taking things a bit far, to be honest, in that it drives home a touch too hard (for my tastes) the whole twisted-reflection theme of Batman villains in general, but the resolution of this arc is yet another example of Dick Grayson having acquired a villain of his own, one in perfect harmony with the Batman story but specific to Grayson in interesting ways.
Grayson continues to experience the role of Batman in ways that make it fresh all over again for us - his comfort with improvisation, his ability to turn his own unique training to the task of being Batman in a way that is flashy and based on showmanship instead of Bruce Wayne's habit of sticking to the shadows - and it is incredibly refreshing and human that Snyder doesn't forget to let Grayson experience that, too. There were things in this arc that could have driven a lesser story towards cynicism and despair but Snyder knows Grayson and knows people, as he's shown over and over again in American Vampire. Whereas a lesser hero might question their mission, Grayson is shaken not by loss of hope but by the realization that Guibourg's clientele are still just people, like anyone else, led astray but not permanently morally bankrupt. Wayne's Batman will always be one in search of revenge, in some ways, no matter how hard one tries to spin it as "justice." Grayson's Batman can afford empathy in ways and in quantities that Wayne's never could. Even Grayson's horror at the hallucination he had upon waking - a hallucination that reveals deep currents of guilt and fear over Barbara's injuries without anyone speaking a word about them, a very grown-up presentation of an inescapable train of thought - is touching, even humble in its simple emotional truth.
The history nerd in me also loved that the auctioneer's pseudonym was Étienne Guibourg, a blaspheming priest imprisoned as part of 17th century France's "Affair of the Poisons."
Bottom line, the reworking of the Batman myth that DC has allowed to happen, with Grant Morrison at the helm, has revitalized this property like nothing else. I - someone who grew up loving Batman in all forms except the comic, because it was unavailable to me, never subscribed to a single Batman book once I started regularly reading comics in general. Now I'm subscribed to three. Issues like this are why Detective Comics is one of them.
Klarion
Posted to Comics on 4 February 2011
· Comments (0)
Other stuff like this: Batman, Detective Comics, Dick Grayson, Scott Snyder
Post a comment