Detective Comics #1

As you may have noticed, I've been doing some new mainstream releases recently. While I'm not going to review every issue #1 from DC's "New 52", I've been taking advantage of the ongoing buy-3-get-one-free deal at Newbury Comics to sample some of the new offerings that interest me. This will continue through the month of September, at which point I'll be turning my attention to books that I pick up at Fall conventions I attend, as well as getting back to the ever-present backlog.

Title: Detective Comics
Issue: 1
Date: November 2011
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Tony Salvador Daniel
Penciler: Tony Salvador Daniel
Inker: Ryan Winn
Colorist: Tomeu Morey
Letterer: Jared K. Fletcher
Editor: Katie Kubert, Janelle Asselin, Mike Marts
Cover: Tony Salvador Daniel

The original run of Detective Comics started in 1937, with the Batman's debut in issue #27 two years later. It ran 881 issues and holds the record for the longest continuously published comic book in the US (although Action Comics reached a higher issue number before DC's relaunch due to periods where it was published more frequently than Detective).

Unlike the Superman reboot in Action Comics, this book gives us classic Batman as we've come to expect him. In fact, I'd describe this story as a perfectly typical Batman vs. Joker tale from the modern era of Batman.

The Batman has been tracking the Joker, and he's located his quarry in a squalid hotel room, where a man in surgical garb menaces the Joker with a knife, but the Joker quickly turns the tables on the man in bloody fashion. The usual mayhem follows, and the Joker escapes when the Batman must save an innocent life and then finds himself pursued by the GPD.

But all is not as it appears. Writer Tony Salvador Daniel is clearly planning some major plot twists here, and he lays the groundwork pretty nicely. There are clues that the Batman (and the reader) are picking up on that there is more to the Joker's latest scheme than meets the eye.

We get a second Batman/Joker battle later in the issue, and then a pretty nasty gross-out scene for the surprise ending (which actually was pretty shocking, but made at least some degree of sense upon a second read of some of the key earlier scenes). I had mixed feelings on this ending because it was highly unrealistic, and it seemed to be going for gross just for the sake of gross. But it was reasonably set up, so if you're willing to buy into the plot twist, there could be an entertaining ride ahead in this series.

Aside from the ending, the main problem I had with the book is that we've seen an awful lot of Batman vs. Joker stories over the past few years, and this one didn't really do too much to stand out. It was good, most of the book was nothing exceptional.

Rating: 6.5/10