DC Nation Super Sampler: Beware The Batman #1

From Free Comic Book Day 2013.

Title: DC Nation Super Sampler: Beware The Batman #1
Issue: #1
Date: July, 2013
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Mitch Watson, Scott Beatty, J. Torres
Artist: Luciano Vecchio, Todd Nauck, Larry Stucker
Colorist: Heroic Age
Letterer: Wes Abbott, Phil Balsman
Cover: Dave Bullock
Editor: Alex Antone, Sarah Gaydos, Jeanine Schaefer, Tom Palmer Jr.

This is DC's all-ages offering for Free Comic Book Day 2013. The main story here is a fairly typical Batman tale, with the Batman taking on a gang led by a villain named Tobias Whale, who looks like Marvel's Kingpin and talks with the same random scattering of nautical terms as the Penguin in the 1966 Adam West Batman film.

The Batman takes on some thugs, they get the better of him for a brief time, then he uses his various skills and devices to turn the tables, with Alfred and the Bat-Sub(!) lending a hand to (literally) torpedo Whale's weapon-smuggling plot. At the end, a new threat is revealed, which turns out to be a new look for a familiar villain.

Luciano Vecchio gave this a very nice look, and the pacing and action were good. The dialogue could have been better, and there was nothing particularly groundbreaking plot-wise, but it served its purpose as a good introduction to Batman action and the Beware the Batman series.

The backup story was a Teen Titans Go! reprint featuring the team doing battle with a villain with a stage magician gimmick and real magical powers. The action was a bit confusing, and the villain's plot seemed a bit uninteresting. He could do all of this nifty stuff and chose to use it to rob a bank. Robin gets hit with a spell that makes him speak in Zatanna-speak (but without her powers; he just says everything backwards), and a fair amount of the story is just jokes around nobody being able to understand Robin. One interesting gimmick that I had never seen before: A maze and a connect-the-dots puzzle incorporated into the artwork. Clever.

There were a couple of other short backup features: A character profile of Cyclops, and a two-page introduction spread featuring the characters of Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld. I don't know much about this character, but I did like her origin as an introverted video game designer. Might have to give this version of Amethyst a look sometime.

Rating: 6/10