The secret history of Gotham City begins to be revealed in Detective Comics #1,063 as “Gotham Nocturne” continues. Batman checks in with an obscure foe, the Orgham family’s history is further revealed and Barbatos returns. The lead story is written by Ram V, drawn by Rafael Albuquerque, colored by Dave Stewart and lettered by Ariana Maher. In the backup, Jim Gordon continues investigating a mysterious disappearance. Written by Si Spurrier, drawn by Dani, colored by Stewart and lettered by Steve Wands.
In the first of a series of villain-centric one-shots, the Riddler kills a man on the street seemingly at random, and now Batman must figure out why there seems to be no riddle. Batman: One Bad Day: Riddler is written by Tom King, drawn and colored by Mitch Gerads and lettered by Clayton Cowles.
For all of the darkness that surrounds Batman, it’s sometimes easy to forget that Batman is for the children! Or at least he is in the new book from DC Graphic Novels for Kids, Batman’s Mystery Casebook. In this book, readers follow Batman on a series of cases where they can try to solve the crime alongside Batman while learning about how crimes are investigated in the real world. Written by Sholly Fisch, drawn by Christopher Uminga, colored by Silvana Brys and lettered by Deron Bennett with Morgan Martinez.
Matt Lazorwitz: After a couple weeks off, it is good to be back!
Will Nevin: Yessir! Back at those Bat books that never seem to take a week off. Assholes. God, one of the books this time out has me in a real swear-y mood. Apologies for the foul language to come, Loyal Content Consumers.
First Movement
Matt: So, with the stakes set last issue, we go into this issue with some serious weirdness. Gotham as a city has so much dark history, I’m not sure it needs another layer to it, but adding a secret history to the Arkham family? I might be OK with that, especially since Amadeus appeared pretty fully formed and we don’t know where he came from. Making the Arkhams a part of Gotham’s history aside from the asylum isn’t a bad pitch; Geoff Johns tried to do it in Earth One too, but I won’t hold that against this book.
Will: I do appreciate how committed this book is to being different — ’Tec is always better when it has a reason for being, a mission statement that separates it from Batman. The purpose here is to be a gothic superhero book — the Arkham stuff is part of that, I think — and it’s damned ambitious. The execution is rough in some spots, especially in Batman’s prose-y internal monologue that would read better as omniscient narration, but it’s admirable as hell.
Matt: Ram V is nothing if not ambitious. His The Swamp Thing is poetic, which suits that book with its history of Alan Moore and Vertigo, and his other superhero work always has a feel of reaching for something different. That’s not even taking into account his creator-owned work, like The Many Deaths of Laila Starr. I was expecting something like this, and I was not disappointed.
What impressed me is the deep dive into continuity that even stumped me! Payne Cardine, the Maestro, appeared once before, in Batman #149. I didn’t know that, but it was one of those moments of, “Huh, I wonder …” so I looked him up and lo and behold he was an existing character! But it wasn’t winky and it wasn’t necessary to know. That’s the best way to use obscure characters and continuity.
Will: What, you mean you can do that without being obnoxious? What if I just decided to kill off a major(ish) villain in a throwaway line of dialogue? That’s the same thing, right?
Matt: Yeah, that is less good. By a lot.
You also can’t talk about this book without talking about Rafael Albuquerque’s utterly stunning art. This is a guy whose work on American Vampire was astounding, and the occasional fill-in or backup on Bat books made it clear he’d be great at this, and I’m glad he finally got tapped for it. His Barbatos, the demon bat, is next level.
Will: Agreed! What did you think about Harvey’s appearance here and what they might be doing with him?
Matt: It does seem to be building off his face turn (get it!) in Task Force Z, that when that series wraps, Harvey will be in a more heroic place. And of course he couldn’t stay that way. Two-Face has had more brushes with the light side than any Bat villain this side of Catwoman, so it’s not unexpected. The gold half-mask is certainly a striking look, too. If you were going to have one Bat villain be the mob boss catspaw of our new villains, and Penguin is off the table thanks to the events of Batman, I can think of very few who would be as good a choice as Two-Face.
Will: We’ll make a wrestling fan out of you yet, Brother Matt. I thought the new look was interesting, but if you’re going for a gothic opera vibe, putting a fella in a Phantom of the Opera mask is a bit like putting a hat on a hat. That quibble aside, if you’re going to have a character be controlled by this nefarious entity, Harvey is a good choice, especially if he continues to struggle in suppressing Two-Face. Maybe by the end of this it’s Two-Face who’s making the face turn?
One Bad Read
Matt: OK, I’m going to state what might be a hot take if I hadn’t said a lot of similar things in recent reviews and podcast episodes about Tom King’s work: I didn’t like this issue. It’s pedantic, it’s overly wordy and it relies so much on structure over anything else.
Will: I’ll take that sentiment and turn it all the way up, because hooooboy, did I ever hate this. Not only is it King at his very worst in re: formalism, but the story is 100% ass. All ass. Whole ass. Nothing but ass. This is someone taking The Dark Knight’s Joker and changing the name … only for this new ultra-violent, thoughtless murderer version of the Riddler to still be a giant ol’ fuckin’ putz in the end. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we got a Dead Poets Society-assed backstory for Eddie that was tiresome and stupid.
This fucking sucked, Matt. If I was Mitch Gerads, I’d punch King in the mouth. These one-shots are out of continuity, right? Please tell me they’re out of continuity.
Matt: I think they’re in that pick-and-choose aspect of continuity; they can be pulled in if someone cares to. Hopefully no one will on this one.
What frustrates me about this is that this really furthers the darkening of the Riddler. The Riddler for years was not a psychotic killer. If someone were to die in his machinations he wouldn’t mourn them, but he wasn’t Joker or Scarecrow, reveling in pain and death. Even Scott Snyder’s Riddler in “Zero Year” wasn’t seeking violence; he was just about proving how smart he was and how everyone was sort of beneath his notice.
This Riddler is a sadist. He has zero compunctions about anything. Why do we need this? Is it a result of the Jigsaw-esque Riddler from The Batman? Or is it just this vibe that, unless the villain is a joke (see Kite Man or Condiment King), any Batman-related villain must kill without a thought? Riddler’s lack of homicidal tendencies made him unique in the upper pantheon of Bat rogues. Now, more than ever, he’s Joker-lite.
Will: I’m not saying he has to be some goofy, toothless buffoon — but, again, what strikes me is we have 60 pages at cross purposes with itself as it builds this sadistic, joyless version of the character, gives him a mewling origin story and beclowns the shit out of him on the final page.
None of the choices here are any good. And we haven’t even mentioned the fact that Batman, Gordon and the rest of Gotham’s law enforcement can be bullied into giving someone a free pass to crime! Who knew it was that fucking simple?
When we finish this discussion, I never want to mention this mess again. I mean, this gave me Sean Gordon Murphy vibes with its talk of how Eddie has been at this for “decades.”
Matt: The logic for how Riddler gets away with it is so dumb. “Oh, don’t touch me or I will escape and kill a random person.” If that worked, why does anyone go after the Joker? He does that on a Tuesday without any needlessly complicated threat.
And Riddler providing Joker with the plan for The Killing Joke? What the fuck is up with that? I don’t know if that is a dig at TKJ, which I’m not averse to necessarily, or just a, “Riddler is better than Joker” thing. Whatever it is, it’s dumb.
Will: But it’s even dumber than you say it is, Matt! Riddler kills a random guy at the start of the story to prove to Batman at the end of the story that he’ll kill a random guy. It’s like a coil of doggie doo curling upon itself.
Matt: Yes. Yes it is. But it sure is pretty. Am I the only one who wants Mitch Gerads to be able to just cut loose? Work with someone who isn’t going to write him these same sets of panels to work with and let him go to town. Admittedly, I might be damning King for something Gerads likes to do; maybe he requests those set layouts. If that’s the case, I’d still like him to stretch his wings. He’s too good an artist to fall back on the same tricks over and over.
Will: #FreeMitchGerads
Matt: One final note from me, or a note in two parts based on another bit of this book I found very frustrating.
Part the first: Having the Riddler deduce Batman’s identity? It’s been done. When you’re ripping off “Hush,” I think you’re dragging the bottom of the barrel.
Part the second: Riddler’s little spiel about sneaking into Wayne Manor and basically stalking the Bat family, looking at them while they sleep? One, that is super extra special creepy. Two, with the possible exception of the Joker, no major Bat villain has been as regularly queer coded as the Riddler (Hell, on Gotham the subtext was pretty close to text, and he is presented as canonically queer in the new season of Harley Quinn). DC, seriously, just do it, and stop treating queerness and queer subtext as inherently perverse with so many of your villains. Not cool.
Will: This. Fucking. Sucked.
And Now for Something Completely Different
Matt: After that, I needed a palette cleanser. And fortunately we have one! Batman’s Mystery Casebook is a fun little love letter not just to Batman but to Encyclopedia Brown, I think.
Will: This is just the best. I grew up on a steady diet of Encyclopedia Brown (I still remember the case where he figured out the Army outpost had been waylaid because the flag was flying at night!), and this hit that precise spot. Adorable. Clever. Even if it does maybe represent forensics as “science” and not “art.”
Matt: This has everything I wanted. This book is written by Sholly Fisch, who is best known in these parts for writing The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries, and this book has a lot of the same charm. It’s fun, but it doesn’t talk down to the reader. And it has one very big DCU deepcut, something Fisch loves doing, with the use of Enemy Ace in a story. A story that is 100% a loving tribute to a story from the very first Encyclopedia Brown book, “The Case of the Civil War Sword,” only here you replace said sword with a World War I medallion. That one made me smile pretty wide.
I do see your point about forensics, but we are writing a book for the 6-10 age group and trying to make it digestible. I wonder if you could pull that off.
Will: We certainly can’t have a period-accurate “World War I” medal, now can we? Cute as can be. And I think you’re right about the book not talking down to readers — these mysteries/puzzles could have been patronizing or dumb, but they really do hit the sweet spot.
And I think the age-appropriate response there is something like, “Our interpretation of evidence may be incorrect. So we have to be careful and leave room for doubt and new ways of looking at the same evidence.” I think that’s the best thing you can say without being too copaganda-y.
Matt: That would have been a good way to do it.
There were a couple moments where I thought the book might go all copaganda, and it never did. It talked about detection in the abstract and rarely talked about the police, except when it came to witness testimony. And yet again, as we commented on in a recent pod that has yet to be released, poor Bullock is again not just presented as not put together, but as a slob. He’s a professional and a good detective. But if you’re gonna have somebody eating a sandwich at a crime scene, I suppose it’s Harvey.
Will: We’ve done quite a few books targeted toward a younger demo, and while I’m not prepared to say this one is the best (Batman & Robin & Howard is great too, and to be clear, this one is right up there), this is definitely the coolest and the coolest concept. More Batman detective stories that I can solve, please!
Bat-miscellany
- This week on the BatChat podcast, it’s episode 50! We got together in person for this one and talked about three stories that end with big anniversary issues: “Knightfall” Part 2 (Batman #500), “Resurrection Night” (Batman #400) and “Blind Justice” (Detective Comics #600).
- We’ll try to do a little bit about the issues we missed of books we cover regularly when the next issues roll around, have no fear. There are just too many Bat books!
Matt Lazorwitz read his first comic at the age of 5. It was Who's Who in the DC Universe #2, featuring characters whose names begin with B, which explains so much about his Batman obsession. He writes about comics he loves, and co-hosts the podcasts BatChat with Matt & Will and The ComicsXF Interview Podcast.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
