After coming off the high of Animal Man, let's get this one out of the way. Before the relaunch, Tony Daniel had kind of an erratic run as writer/artist on Batman where he covered a lot of different ground He returned The Riddler to being a villain--which is fine because his reformed period didn't seem to lead to much--and gave him a girl who's allegedly his daughter to run around with called Enigma. As to what her point is, she doesn't seem to have much of on yet. He did an arc with I-Ching, an old Wonder Woman character, centered around a Maguffin called the Beholder Mask that was okay. Essentially, the stories were mostly forgettable, but not acutely terrible. Now, Daniel is serving as again both writer and artist here on Detective Comics, and this is, in fact, terrible.
Even with the ever expanding supporting cast, Batman is by his nature an insular character, and Batman books are often heavy with internal narration. It can certainly be done well. Frank Miller, obviously, pretty much made a name for himself and created much of the modern idea of Batman using the device, ("Two ribs broken... must not pass out... use the pain!") and even though some find it overrated, I've always loved Jeph Loeb's heavily narration-boxed Long Halloween as well. That brings me to the narration at the beginning of Detective #1 Here's a sample: "His modus operandi changes with the wind... and it's been windy in Gotham City." Really? That's what Batman's thinking? Since when does Batman think like David Carruso sounds at the start of a CSI: Miami episode? The comic gets more bizarre from there. Batman tells us through narration that he's been pursuing the Joker for five years, (according to DC, five years is the amount of time Batman's been active in the new reboot, which doesn't seem like enough time for everything that's still in continuity to have happ--you know what, it's comics I'm just going to go with it) and yet later it's as if Batman is entirely unfamiliar with him. For some reason, Daniel feels the need to have the Joker be naked as he's killing a dude, which leads us later to Batman thinking to himself "What was the Joker doing naked? Does he always remove his clothes first?" Wait, what? In the five years he's been pursuing the Joker, has he never been up close to him? How would he not have determined this at some point in the past five years already? And would a serial killer having a sexualized component to what they do really be that confusing to Batman? Can Batman get a torrent of Red Dragon on his Bat-computer?
The story seems set up to be a reintroduction of the iconic and unending conflict between the Batman and the Joker. Good vs. evil, rationality vs. insanity, order vs. chaos and all that. And yet, this is quickly upstaged by all the gratuitous gore in the book, and the Joker himself, the guy who's supposed to be the villain-of villains in Batman lore, is upstaged by a new character based on cheap grotesquery. On page 4, we see a guy wearing human skin over his own face, and before we have any idea who it is, we see the Joker biting out his own throat. It happens in five panels. There's no tension or genuine horror in it, it's just gross for grossness sake. By the end of #1, Batman has caught the Joker and thrown him back into Arkham, as he always does, although Daniel is not done yet. Our as yet unnamed new villain breaks into the Joker's cell. The Joker tells him "get on with it", the mystery man says "This will hurt--a lot." and in a last page reveal, we see the skin of the Joker's face nailed up on the wall, with the rest of the Joker off-panel saying, "That was fangasmic!" Ugh.
Issue #2 is more of the same. Bruce Wayne bones a just-introduced reporter named Charlotte after the unbelievable sexual tension set up by these lines:
"My eyes are up here."
"I can see that, and they're shooting daggers!"
"Then kiss me before you bleed to death."
Shakespeare is reborn in Tony Daniel! If anything of substance is to come as this relationship it'll be in a latter issue. Bruce swaps back into the cape and cowl and sets out to find our new villain, who's revealed to be The Dollmaker, and he ends up looking a lot like Ragdoll from Secret Six, wish makes me opine even more for a better comic than this. Turns out that he has a whole slew of henchman that all have creepy skin masks on their faces, and there's a creepy girl in a nurse outfit speaking as if she's his daughter talking about cutting out Batman's eyes. The last page reveal here is Batman clutching what looks like Jim Gordon, only all patched up with a bunch of different grafts of skin on his face and not looking in any way alive. This reveal at least has something of an "I honestly have no idea how this ends well" element to it, although knowing how dumb this comic has been to this point, I think it's entirely likely that this isn't actually Gordan, and The Dollmaker just made up an already dead guy to look like him.
Between this, and Batman: The Dark Knight #1, which is also written and penciled by one person (David Finch), and which is similarly uninspiring, I'm thinking DC should stay away from letting one person have free reign on Batman books for awhile (although, theoretically, somebody is supposed to be editing these, right?) Daniel's work here through two issues is truly pretty distasteful. I'm a grown man with no kids, and so I don't really care about how violent a comic book is, so long as there's a point to it. Scott Snyder's recent Detective Comics run before the reboot featuring centering around The Joker and James Gordon is notable in comparison to this both because it manages to tell a story with the Joker and another antagonist concurrently without the Joker seeming to be completely upstaged, and for its use of violence that actually has a purpose. There's a last panel reveal in one of Snyder's issues that's really about as graphic as the face nailed to the wall, but it's violence that's used quickly and effectively in a genuinely terrifying way. The violence here is splattered everywhere up close and personal to the point where it becomes meaningless. Batman comics should have a healthy amount of darkness to them, but they should never, ever be torture porn. This was an all-around awful reading experience and it's getting dropped from my pulls. Luckily, Scott Snyder is writing Batman, and if his first issue is any indication, he hasn't lost anything since his Detective run.
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