In a flashback, the mystery of Prion, the lost hero who studied with Batman, Green Arrow and Black Canary, starts to be revealed. In the present, the heroes do their best to protect the last corporate whistleblower testifying against KlepCorp from dying while Oliver Queen confronts Klep and his attempts to buy Queen Industries. Detective Comics #1,108 is written by Tom Taylor, drawn by Pete Woods and Bruno Abdias, colored by Woods and Lee Loughridge and lettered by Wes Abbott.
Will Nevin: Matt, it’s one of my favorite parts of online culture and obsessive fandoms: Let’s overanalyze a trailer! What did you think about our first peek of Clayface?
Matt Lazorwitz: Anyone who knows me, or has listened to the podcast, knows horror movies are my jam. I love a teaser trailer, one of those 60-90 second trailers that are more about vibe than plot. That’s what this is, and I am in for it. Since the advent of the MCU, Warner/DC has been more willing to experiment with genre for good or ill (ill being Todd Phillips’ Joker films). This seems to be a full-on horror movie, not a superhero movie with horror trappings. And I am down for some full-on superpowered body horror.
Will: You make *one* movie for full-on chodes (two if you count the Snyder cut, three if you count the black-and-white Snyder cut) and everyone’s a critic! Sheesh. Body horror is the only perfect artform there is, and it should be included in everything … and I think I’m only half kidding with that. I’m excited — and that goes double if we get a solid character that can pop up in other projects.
The HatchBat begins
Matt: There are so many Bat vehicles: The Batmobile. The Batcycle. The Tumbler. The Batpod. All those wacky talking vehicles on Batwheels.
Will: But all of those are fairly conspicuous, aren’t they? What if Batman needed a little something more … low profile?
Matt: Well, that’s what we get this week. Enter: The HatchBat, a nondescript hatchback with a full Batmobile tech suite inside, clearly reinforced like a Batmobile, and it can submerge and come out of water on tire floats. Is this possibly Tom Taylor’s greatest addition to the Bat mythos, no matter what else he does in his run?
Will: Sturdy, economical, not really sleek (per se), and it doubles as an amphibious assault vehicle. I’d say it’s the perfect Bat toy that we’ll most likely never see again. Alas! Now, I have two questions for you.
Matt: Hit me.
Will: 1) Do we have any idea as to why Batman, Green Arrow and Canary are hanging out in the flashback? And 2) does it matter if we don’t?
Matt: Answering number two first: I don’t think it does. Do superheroes ever need a reason to team up?
Will: My head canon: They’re a throuple.
Matt: Dinah would be down, Bruce too, probably. I don’t think Ollie has the emotional maturity.
Will: Fine — then off he goes to the cuck time out chair.
Matt: As for number one, more seriously, I think I’ll have to see exactly where Taylor places this in continuity. If they are all hanging out at Wildcat’s gym, then that connects them easily enough. Bruce and Dinah would have trained there when they were younger, becoming heroes, and there have been references to Dinah bringing Ollie there when they started dating for him to get better at hand-to-hand combat. So I think there would be logical crossover in their histories.
Will: Somehow I doubt we’re going to get many answers there. You know, it’s funny that we just talked about this last night — the burning desire to squeeze in a new character somewhere in the formative years of Batman or the Bat family. In Tim Seeley and Baldemar Rivas’ Robins, it was the sad, lost Jenny Wren, and here, it’s Prion. Of all the birds to pick, that’s certainly one. Maybe a favorite of Taylor’s? Or something deeper for us to erroneously read into?
Matt: We know that Prion died young. My familiarity with the word, and the first Google result, has to do with human prion diseases, which are neurodegenerative diseases. I wonder if he chose the name as a double meaning, and he is sick. It’s a bit of a stretch, but you’re right in that it’s an oddly specific bird.
Will: It has to be one of two things, and I will not accept room for a third. Either Taylor picked an Australian bird because it’s pretty and he likes them (which, admittedly, they are a lovely shade of gray), or it has something to do with the much more prominent medical malady. It’s gotta be one of those two things.
Matt: I wonder if Taylor’s run is playing with something more overarching when it comes to its themes. The first arc also had to do with some aspects of Bruce’s past coming back, in that case the Chills and the Waynes having a connection. And his second had to do with a connection between Bruce and The Lion, the new villain he introduced. Maybe we’re just seeing smaller pieces of a bigger whole about the things we forget or think we leave behind and how they come back to haunt us. Or maybe I am completely overthinking.
Will: As a central thesis goes, that’s not a bad one. But as we talked about last time, this run has been coasting along pretty quietly, so I wouldn’t blame us for not picking up on that earlier.
Matt: The other thing that points to me overthinking is that Tom Taylor isn’t a writer I think about when it comes to these sort of longform thematic arcs. He wears his themes pretty much on his sleeve. We get that with Ollie in the final scene here. That’s two issues in a row of Ollie delivering his very Ollie anti-capitalist speeches. Taylor gets an idea in his head and you better believe you’re going to hear about it. But I haven’t read all of his work, so I might be underestimating him, or conflating theme with commentary.
I have to give whoever in editorial got Bruno Abdias to do the art in the middle of this issue a lot of credit. His work is a little different than Pete Woods’, but it’s about as close to a seamless transition between artists as I have seen. I didn’t realize it until I saw that there were two artists credited.
Will: My thoughts exactly. It’s a nice trick when you can pull that off, especially considering how many times we’ve seen that fail so utterly and ruin the visual continuity of a book.
Matt: As for the end of the book, I don’t think it’s really a mystery that the girl who shoved Ollie off a building is Prion’s daughter, right? I am a little surprised that Prion’s family and KlepCorp don’t seem to be directly connected, but there’s still time for that shoe to drop. Or maybe it’s just two different cases; not everything needs to be connected after all.
Will: A wealthy shut-in. A creepy girl. It’s a dadgum mystery, Matt! But, yeah, you’d figure they’re connected somehow. As is Prion dying with his true identity intact. There’s a point in there somewhere.
Bat-miscellany
- Patreon backer Matt McThorn joins the BatChat podcast to talk about three of DC’s Bat-related Future State miniseries.
- I complained about young Leslie Thompkins for so long, I have to call it out when artists get it right. Leslie might look a little younger than she did in the ’90s, but she is clearly older than Bruce in this issue.
Buy Detective Comics #1,108 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
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.
