![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinOkay, I'm going to slap a spoiler warning on this one, because this comic ends on a major WHAM note that I'm going to be discussing, albeit obliquely. Also, the title of the book is "Detective Comics", and there is more of a mystery implicit in the plot than there was in Action Comics (not counting the accidental mystery of What The Hell Happened There With The Train/Phone Thing.)
A lot of the reviews I read of Detective Comics #1 said basically that it was more of the same. Some of them were complaining, some were lauding it, but there seemed to be a general consensus that this the least rebooty, least retconny, most recognizable book out there. Nothing to re-imagine here, move along.
And that matched up to the pre-boot buzz, which said that Batman was going to be more or less the same. Even the highly uniconic deviations of recent years (Jason Todd, Batman Incorporated, and Stabula the Boy Wonder) were remaining as part of the statu quo.
To these people I ask, did you see the last panel? Did you understand the implications of it? I don't pretend to know exactly what it signifies--I can think of two scenarios off the top of my head, no pun intended--but I don't see how it could fail to herald one of the most major change to the status quo that the new universe gives us.
Superman changes his pants and the internet shits a brick. (And possibly, vice-versa.) If Batman changed his animal motif to something else nocturnal and scary there would beriots rants in on the street internet.
So... where's the reaction to page 24 of Detective Comics?
I think a couple different things are in play here. One is that people don't want to spoil it. That's probably part of it, but I haven't even seen people talking about the ending of the story that much, even to say there's something to spoil. So maybe people are reacting to the image primarily as a visceral shock. In fact, the only direct reaction I've seen to it only mentioned how disturbing it is. If people aren't engaging with it because it's too disturbing to contemplate... or because they think there's no point to it except to shock them... that might explain it.
Whatever. The point is that it looks like the first arc of Detective Comics is going to show us a "re-imagining in process". We start out with Batman and Joker, and neither one is exactly "AS YOU'VE NEVER SEEN THEM BEFORE!" I could draw comparisons to various points in the characters' canons, but I think the best way to sum them up is that somebody started with the Frank Miller versions but threw out quite a bit and then built them back up using the DCAU incarnations.
One way I judge a Batman/Joker story is if when I read it, I hear Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill in my head. If I don't, it doesn't mean it's bad. If I do, it doesn't even necessarily mean it's good. But at the very least it means the creative team have hit on one way of doing the characters "right". This story passes that test.
Batman is perhaps the character that needs the least introduction of any DC property. Superman is arguably the more iconic and legendary one, but the non-comic-reading public knows his legend better than they know him. Batman has been a bigger and steadier part of extracomicular pop culture for decades now. Superman's latest smallscreen romp didn't even dare to speak his name for 10 years.
But while Batman doesn't need any introduction, that doesn't mean there's no need to get us up to speed. This issue is fairly skillful when it comes to establishing the status quo. Batman and Joker have been fighting each other for six years now. A younger, red-haired Commissioner Gordon is on Batman's side, but the police force isn't. Batman makes mistakes. Joker is fast and deadly with knives. He uses bombs, too, though he also makes use of gags like a deadly joybuzzer and what Batman merely terms "homemade laughing gas".
Mark Hamill's Joker was found in the space between previous incarnations: the prankster and the murderer, the cold and calculating master criminal and the buffoon. This Joker is a brand new mix of the same elements, which is what we should want in a reboot of a character who's basically solid... not more of the exact same thing, but a reshuffling of the elements that make him work. His debt to Hamill is never more clear than in the moment he looks over his shoulder and huffs "Amateurs" as he walks away.
Batman is... not quite the triumph that Joker is. He works, but when he shouts "I OWN THE NIGHT" when Joker's fleeing a seedy motel room, it feels as cheap as you'd expect when a grown man in a black hood is yelling something at a naked man running out of a seedy motel room.
A high point of the issue comes when Joker, having sought to hide among the crowd boarding a train, is momentarily disconcerted by a little girl talking about how scared she is of the strange man. It's not that the Joker is worried about scaring a child, of course... he's worried when he realizes the darling little moppet is actually talking about the man who came in after him... the one in the scary bat costume.
The girl's dialogue is a little awkward, and this is the sort of scene that only works in sequential art (because if it played out in real time we'd realize it depends on Batman standing dramatically posed in the doorway while she says her lines and nobody else notices him), but the art sells it.
The low point of the issue is on the same page. This would be how Batman spots the Joker boarding the train when he's got the collar of his trenchcoat turned up and has an umbrella held low on a night where the sky is clear and full of lovingly rendered stars (which is a nice way of showing how dark Gotham gets at night, I suppose).
You might think it's the fact that said coat and umbrella are in a shade that in DC Comics can only be described as "Archvillain Purple"... unless Lex is field-testing a new battlearmor with an impressive attempt at urban camouflage, that's got to be the Joker.
No, instead he makes an attempt at crowd psychology, running through the reactions that will go through an innocent person's mind in a crisis (roughly: personal safety, curiosity, voyeurism.), and concluding with the factoid that a guilty person will do one thing: flee.
And that's how he knows that the guy cleverly disguised as Rainy-Day Joker is actually the Joker. Because he reacts like a guilty person outside the site of the Joker's latest bombing.
This is a problem, because the Joker's personality could pretty much be defined using the phrase "Not guilty by reason of diminished capacity." That is, his capacity to feel guilt is greatly diminished.
In the context of the story, the Joker has a good reason for vamoosing and trying to disappear on the train. The whole bomb thing is actually a distraction. And he even has a good reason for not getting away cleanly... okay, that's a pretty specific spoiler, but this is the Joker. You'd be disappointed if it were simple. And it explains why his attempts at disguising his presence were so half-assed.
Everything about the scene works except for Batman's crowd psychology. The lines would work if he were chasing down a mundane arsonist and he had no idea what the person looked like. They don't work here, and they don't work with the Joker.
The weirdest thing in this issue is that Alfred first appears through the medium of a holographic interface outside the Batcave proper. We next see him inside the cave, but the fact that he never physically interacts with anything or anyone and makes a reference to his "distress meter" left some fans (myself included) wondering if he'd been re-booted J.A.R.V.I.S.-style. Say it ain't so, Didio! It would make no sense, it would be derivative and obvious to the point of parody... it's the sort of thing that if they hadn't done so many other things that were unthinkable and awful I would have snorted and said "Of course not. It's just a series of weird coincidences that make it sort of look like this."
Luckily, Batman & Robin #1 appears to have resolved this... we have a reference to Alfred dusting the Wayne family portraits, and we see him handling objects.
I do have wonder if there wasn't a subversive urge to fuck with readers a little there. I only wonder this because I've been known to indulge in that kind of impulse.
All in all, I'd rate this one a B... but it's not like a solid B. There are soaring A+ moments and a couple of places where it droops down into C and D territory. It does accomplish the impressive trifecta of giving us a good classic Batman vs. Joker story, giving us the new status quo, and very likely kicking off an important shift in that status quo. Where does it fail? It's hard to judge this, not being a newcomer, but I'd say it's probably not a great issue to start Batman off with, post-reboot. It's not a #1, in any sense of the word. We're dropped into Batman's career already in progress, Batman's vendetta against the Joker already in progress, and we're supposed to be processing changes. Even the particular story is already in progress. It's more like we're reading issue 882 of another universe's Detective Comics than issue 1.
Basically, if they wanted to hit the ground running, it would have been better to do it with a single self-contained story.
In contrast, this week's Batman & Robin #1 gives a much better introduction, focusing on Batman's origin and his plans for the future while also giving us action and a look at Batman's M.O. Readers who don't know anything about Damian Wayne get to know a lot about his personalityevery time the little bastard opens his mouth. Frankly, this is the most uneven aspect of the reboot (well, other than the whole "good idea/bad idea" balance): what they've led with and how they've started things. I don't know anyone who read Justice League #1 and thinks it was a good idea to push that out first, especially after they saw Action Comics.
I'm sure logistically they probably couldn't have had all the finished #1s in hand and then figured out which ones to lead with, but... they really should have done that, or else better mandated how people handle the whole "#1" thing.
Another quick reaction:
Grifter #1
This one I like. When I read the original Wild C.A.T.S, I just thought "Grifter" was a cool name and had no idea what it meant. I believe the same may be true of Jim Lee, because Grifter was never shown actually grifting, just being cool and having guns and motorcycles. And hey, if he didn't name the team "Wild C.A.T.s" because it sounded cool and then figure out what it stands for (Wild Covert Action Team...s), I will eat all of my hats.
But in the nearly four years* since Wildstorm debuted as part of Image Comics, the internet made it a lot easier to look up what words mean and so now we have a new version of the character who is not just a Cool Guy With Guns Called Grifter... he is an actual con man.
Actually, I think rather than dictionary.com, the credit for this direction belongs to shows like Leverage, Burn Notice, and The Human Target for making cons cool.
In the original, Grifter was the ostensibly human member of a team that was populated mostly by aliens and alien hybrids. Stripped of that team and much of the Wildstorm Kherubim/Daemonite mythology (How much? We don't know yet), his story becomes more of a sci-fi thriller. There's no friendly aliens to explain what's going on when he suddenly becomes aware of "demons" in our midst. It's got shades of They Live! (though it doesn't have the shades from They Live!), Skrull Kill Krew, and those really creepy Stephen King stories like "The Ten O'Clock People" or the one where the schoolchildren are monsters or the teacher is crazy.
The interesting thing is that the design of the aliens (so far unnamed) somewhat resembles some versions of DC's "White Martians". That would be an interesting choice for integrating the Daemonites into the main DC universe. I suspect we'll learn more when the other Wild C.A.T.s survivor, Voodoo, has her DCU debut. She was a Daemonite hybrid in the original series.
*Like Marvel Comics, I maintain a floating timeline so as to maintain my relevancy and demographic appeal.
A lot of the reviews I read of Detective Comics #1 said basically that it was more of the same. Some of them were complaining, some were lauding it, but there seemed to be a general consensus that this the least rebooty, least retconny, most recognizable book out there. Nothing to re-imagine here, move along.
And that matched up to the pre-boot buzz, which said that Batman was going to be more or less the same. Even the highly uniconic deviations of recent years (Jason Todd, Batman Incorporated, and Stabula the Boy Wonder) were remaining as part of the statu quo.
To these people I ask, did you see the last panel? Did you understand the implications of it? I don't pretend to know exactly what it signifies--I can think of two scenarios off the top of my head, no pun intended--but I don't see how it could fail to herald one of the most major change to the status quo that the new universe gives us.
Superman changes his pants and the internet shits a brick. (And possibly, vice-versa.) If Batman changed his animal motif to something else nocturnal and scary there would be
So... where's the reaction to page 24 of Detective Comics?
I think a couple different things are in play here. One is that people don't want to spoil it. That's probably part of it, but I haven't even seen people talking about the ending of the story that much, even to say there's something to spoil. So maybe people are reacting to the image primarily as a visceral shock. In fact, the only direct reaction I've seen to it only mentioned how disturbing it is. If people aren't engaging with it because it's too disturbing to contemplate... or because they think there's no point to it except to shock them... that might explain it.
Whatever. The point is that it looks like the first arc of Detective Comics is going to show us a "re-imagining in process". We start out with Batman and Joker, and neither one is exactly "AS YOU'VE NEVER SEEN THEM BEFORE!" I could draw comparisons to various points in the characters' canons, but I think the best way to sum them up is that somebody started with the Frank Miller versions but threw out quite a bit and then built them back up using the DCAU incarnations.
One way I judge a Batman/Joker story is if when I read it, I hear Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill in my head. If I don't, it doesn't mean it's bad. If I do, it doesn't even necessarily mean it's good. But at the very least it means the creative team have hit on one way of doing the characters "right". This story passes that test.
Batman is perhaps the character that needs the least introduction of any DC property. Superman is arguably the more iconic and legendary one, but the non-comic-reading public knows his legend better than they know him. Batman has been a bigger and steadier part of extracomicular pop culture for decades now. Superman's latest smallscreen romp didn't even dare to speak his name for 10 years.
But while Batman doesn't need any introduction, that doesn't mean there's no need to get us up to speed. This issue is fairly skillful when it comes to establishing the status quo. Batman and Joker have been fighting each other for six years now. A younger, red-haired Commissioner Gordon is on Batman's side, but the police force isn't. Batman makes mistakes. Joker is fast and deadly with knives. He uses bombs, too, though he also makes use of gags like a deadly joybuzzer and what Batman merely terms "homemade laughing gas".
Mark Hamill's Joker was found in the space between previous incarnations: the prankster and the murderer, the cold and calculating master criminal and the buffoon. This Joker is a brand new mix of the same elements, which is what we should want in a reboot of a character who's basically solid... not more of the exact same thing, but a reshuffling of the elements that make him work. His debt to Hamill is never more clear than in the moment he looks over his shoulder and huffs "Amateurs" as he walks away.
Batman is... not quite the triumph that Joker is. He works, but when he shouts "I OWN THE NIGHT" when Joker's fleeing a seedy motel room, it feels as cheap as you'd expect when a grown man in a black hood is yelling something at a naked man running out of a seedy motel room.
A high point of the issue comes when Joker, having sought to hide among the crowd boarding a train, is momentarily disconcerted by a little girl talking about how scared she is of the strange man. It's not that the Joker is worried about scaring a child, of course... he's worried when he realizes the darling little moppet is actually talking about the man who came in after him... the one in the scary bat costume.
The girl's dialogue is a little awkward, and this is the sort of scene that only works in sequential art (because if it played out in real time we'd realize it depends on Batman standing dramatically posed in the doorway while she says her lines and nobody else notices him), but the art sells it.
The low point of the issue is on the same page. This would be how Batman spots the Joker boarding the train when he's got the collar of his trenchcoat turned up and has an umbrella held low on a night where the sky is clear and full of lovingly rendered stars (which is a nice way of showing how dark Gotham gets at night, I suppose).
You might think it's the fact that said coat and umbrella are in a shade that in DC Comics can only be described as "Archvillain Purple"... unless Lex is field-testing a new battlearmor with an impressive attempt at urban camouflage, that's got to be the Joker.
No, instead he makes an attempt at crowd psychology, running through the reactions that will go through an innocent person's mind in a crisis (roughly: personal safety, curiosity, voyeurism.), and concluding with the factoid that a guilty person will do one thing: flee.
And that's how he knows that the guy cleverly disguised as Rainy-Day Joker is actually the Joker. Because he reacts like a guilty person outside the site of the Joker's latest bombing.
This is a problem, because the Joker's personality could pretty much be defined using the phrase "Not guilty by reason of diminished capacity." That is, his capacity to feel guilt is greatly diminished.
In the context of the story, the Joker has a good reason for vamoosing and trying to disappear on the train. The whole bomb thing is actually a distraction. And he even has a good reason for not getting away cleanly... okay, that's a pretty specific spoiler, but this is the Joker. You'd be disappointed if it were simple. And it explains why his attempts at disguising his presence were so half-assed.
Everything about the scene works except for Batman's crowd psychology. The lines would work if he were chasing down a mundane arsonist and he had no idea what the person looked like. They don't work here, and they don't work with the Joker.
The weirdest thing in this issue is that Alfred first appears through the medium of a holographic interface outside the Batcave proper. We next see him inside the cave, but the fact that he never physically interacts with anything or anyone and makes a reference to his "distress meter" left some fans (myself included) wondering if he'd been re-booted J.A.R.V.I.S.-style. Say it ain't so, Didio! It would make no sense, it would be derivative and obvious to the point of parody... it's the sort of thing that if they hadn't done so many other things that were unthinkable and awful I would have snorted and said "Of course not. It's just a series of weird coincidences that make it sort of look like this."
Luckily, Batman & Robin #1 appears to have resolved this... we have a reference to Alfred dusting the Wayne family portraits, and we see him handling objects.
I do have wonder if there wasn't a subversive urge to fuck with readers a little there. I only wonder this because I've been known to indulge in that kind of impulse.
All in all, I'd rate this one a B... but it's not like a solid B. There are soaring A+ moments and a couple of places where it droops down into C and D territory. It does accomplish the impressive trifecta of giving us a good classic Batman vs. Joker story, giving us the new status quo, and very likely kicking off an important shift in that status quo. Where does it fail? It's hard to judge this, not being a newcomer, but I'd say it's probably not a great issue to start Batman off with, post-reboot. It's not a #1, in any sense of the word. We're dropped into Batman's career already in progress, Batman's vendetta against the Joker already in progress, and we're supposed to be processing changes. Even the particular story is already in progress. It's more like we're reading issue 882 of another universe's Detective Comics than issue 1.
Basically, if they wanted to hit the ground running, it would have been better to do it with a single self-contained story.
In contrast, this week's Batman & Robin #1 gives a much better introduction, focusing on Batman's origin and his plans for the future while also giving us action and a look at Batman's M.O. Readers who don't know anything about Damian Wayne get to know a lot about his personality
I'm sure logistically they probably couldn't have had all the finished #1s in hand and then figured out which ones to lead with, but... they really should have done that, or else better mandated how people handle the whole "#1" thing.
Another quick reaction:
Grifter #1
This one I like. When I read the original Wild C.A.T.S, I just thought "Grifter" was a cool name and had no idea what it meant. I believe the same may be true of Jim Lee, because Grifter was never shown actually grifting, just being cool and having guns and motorcycles. And hey, if he didn't name the team "Wild C.A.T.s" because it sounded cool and then figure out what it stands for (Wild Covert Action Team...s), I will eat all of my hats.
But in the nearly four years* since Wildstorm debuted as part of Image Comics, the internet made it a lot easier to look up what words mean and so now we have a new version of the character who is not just a Cool Guy With Guns Called Grifter... he is an actual con man.
Actually, I think rather than dictionary.com, the credit for this direction belongs to shows like Leverage, Burn Notice, and The Human Target for making cons cool.
In the original, Grifter was the ostensibly human member of a team that was populated mostly by aliens and alien hybrids. Stripped of that team and much of the Wildstorm Kherubim/Daemonite mythology (How much? We don't know yet), his story becomes more of a sci-fi thriller. There's no friendly aliens to explain what's going on when he suddenly becomes aware of "demons" in our midst. It's got shades of They Live! (though it doesn't have the shades from They Live!), Skrull Kill Krew, and those really creepy Stephen King stories like "The Ten O'Clock People" or the one where the schoolchildren are monsters or the teacher is crazy.
The interesting thing is that the design of the aliens (so far unnamed) somewhat resembles some versions of DC's "White Martians". That would be an interesting choice for integrating the Daemonites into the main DC universe. I suspect we'll learn more when the other Wild C.A.T.s survivor, Voodoo, has her DCU debut. She was a Daemonite hybrid in the original series.
*Like Marvel Comics, I maintain a floating timeline so as to maintain my relevancy and demographic appeal.