Written by Tony Daniel
Illustrated by Tony DanielHe makes dolls out of his victims — and he’s tired of being referred to in the media as the Gotham Strangler. His moniker is the Dollmaker, and he and his insane family are going to hunt down Gotham City’s public figures and turn them into the ultimate collectables. As the Dollmaker ups the stakes, Batman finds himself in a race against time — because one of his allies is the Dollmaker’s next target!
I ranted and raved about Batman #1 when it came out, but when it came to Detective Comics, I kept my mouth shut. My mother always told me that if I don’t have anything nice to say, I shouldn’t say anything at all.
I’m going to review Detective Comics anyway, after the jump.
Every week, I go to a comic book store and buy a whole bunch of comics. The other guys make fun of me, but on any given week I will read probably forty books minimum. Maybe it’s delusions of grandeur from working on this site for a few years now, things that I tell myself to further trick myself into thinking I need to keep up with certain titles (“need” being the operative word). I do get asked a fair deal of comic-related trivia, so it doesn’t hurt to keep up to date on everything. Plus, part of me will always remember that show on Comedy Central, Beat The Geeks (remember that?), and I’ll also remember my secret wish to be a contestant on that show. Imagine if the Comic Geek was there that week, and I got to the final round and could challenge him for the grand prize? Oh man. That’d be awesome. If I read more comics, then I’d be able to beat him! I could win things! Knowing what happens in the fourth Batman ongoing currently being published could someday lead to money!
Except that it won’t. What would lead to money? I don’t know. Probably something more productive. But you know what definitely won’t lead to more money? Reading Detective Comics and then talking about it. If I was trying to come up with a real use for Detective Comics, I think the best way to put it would be “a not-so-creative way to kill the minutes between commercial breaks while watching Modern Family on ABC, Wednesday nights at 9 PM EST.” I guess it’s better than watching a commercial, and that’s something for the book to be proud of, right? I can see the pull quote now: “Detective Comics — more interesting than that Free Credit Report Dot Com commercial you’ve seen a zillion times (though just as repetitive).”
Sometimes I wonder weird things, like “does it just suck to get shot by a bullet”? Seriously. I saw in a YouTube clip shown on an episode of Tosh.0, this guy shoots himself in the leg and barely even reacts. He just says, “Ow, I shot myself in the leg!” and walks over to the camera to turn it off. That’s kind of like reading Detective Comics; I’m fully aware I’m figuratively shooting myself in the foot, but it doesn’t necessarily hurt – it’s just a huge inconvenience. Granted, I don’t really know how to remove bullets from my own leg, so I’d have to go to the hospital (driving myself or getting a ride is still up for debate), but at the end of the day all that would’ve happened is I’d just have wasted a whole bunch of money that could’ve been avoided by just not playing with a gun like an idiot, or remembering to leave the safety on. In the comic book world, “leaving the safety on” would be equal to “not picking the comic up off the shelf.” Once you pick it up, you just inevitably invite trouble in, sort of like that little boy/girl from that Swedish vampire movie they remade with the girl who played Hit-Girl (neither of which I bothered to see).
The funny thing about all this is that I’m writing like someone with a chip on his shoulder, but I actually don’t care. I don’t think I could care less, in fact. I’m really not that moved by Detective Comics – I don’t like it, but I don’t hate it either. It’s just incredibly mediocre, a filler book created to be filler because for some reason someone thought we needed “filler” and called Tony Daniel, and I’m saying that as a fan of his previous work (in art, mind you, not in writing). If a Batman book wasn’t on the shelf on a weekly basis from DC Comics, I imagine the universe might divide by zero, or perhaps Cthulhu would wake up and destroy us all. If that’s the case, then we probably need more Batman books, but — and I’m going to go out on a limb here — on the off chance that Cthulhu doesn’t actually exist? Well, then maybe it’s time to trim the fat (last time I checked DC Comics isn’t run by Paula Deen).
Continued belowIf I try to talk about the book in a fairly honest fashion without making stupid references/jokes at the books expense, more legitimate critiques would boil down to these brief points:
- The book is called Detective Comics, and there is no real mystery for Batman to solve here. It’s just a series of annoying situations and stunt-based sequences with telegraphed crimes and uninteresting villains, aka what Daniels did when writing adjectiveless Batman.
- This is a high profile book, but the title feels like amateur hour from a creator that (for all intents and purposes) should know better at a time when (for all intents and purposes) DC should know better.
- Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s adjectiveless Batman book is running circles around this, and that’s making this look that much worse.
- The coloring of the book is really rather off when compared with Daniel’s past color collaborators. He’s still working with Sandu Florea on inks, but instead of someone like Guy Major or Ian Hannin coloring, we have Tomeu Morey giving the book a nice “vomit beige” glaze.
- What reason is there to even remotely care about this? Literally nothing about it matters (Joker is fine, so is Gordon), and I say that in the most polite way a rude sounding sentence like that can be said.
But don’t take my word for it — I’m rather open to not thinking Batman is all that great of a character. Perhaps I’m more jaded than I’d like to admit. However, if you can’t even get the World’s Most Prominent Batmanologist Slash #1 Batfan to give it higher than a 0.0, then I’m just calling it as it is and declaring all bets are off.
I wrote an article calling Tony Daniel the worst writer of October 2011, and with the first week of November here, I wouldn’t change that. I hate to sound like some angry guy attempting to lead a mob while chasing Daniel into a windmill with sticks on fire, but the man’s strength isn’t in the writing, and he’s losing it in the art. I loved his work in Batman RIP, but what he’s doing now is the equivalent of me eating a wonderful and fresh apple, and then being pelted in the face with a rotten one by Daniel. But even then, I suppose that’s not that bad; I’ll get over having a rotten apple thrown at me, because whatever, it’s just my friend being dumb and there’s no reason to stay mad because we’re still going to hang out and play Nintendo later. Daniel can still get back on that proverbial horse and illustrate some good looking comic, and I’ll be more than happy to recommend it on this very site whenever that happens. What Daniel needs is his own How Stella Get Her Groove Back moment, and I’ll patiently wait until that comes.
But at the same time, I don’t have to sit by for this, and I’d definitely recommend to anyone else curious to not do so either. It’s on the same lines that I love John Carpenter’s The Thing but will be damned if I pay money to see that new one starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, because who cares that she was Ramona Flowers if she can’t grow Kurt Russel’s beard? Translate that to a more Batman-related scenario, and the moral is clear: just get a different Batman book if you have to get a Batman book, emphasis on “if”. And by that I honestly just mean “buy Snyder and Capullo’s Batman.”
What gets me at the end of the day is this (I say, stepping up onto a soap box and grabbing a megaphone) — there were a lot of great creator-owned books out this week. Seriously: American Vampire, the Fear Agent finale, the Goon, a new Hellboy OGN, Heart, the Infinite Vacation, Invincible, Irredeemable, Last of the Greats, Our Love Is Real, Rachel Rising, the Strange Talent of Luther Strode, Sweet Tooth and Witch Doctor, to name a few. All of them fresh, all of them new, all of them great. Yet, there is also Detective Comics on the stands, and it will be going home with a fair deal of people I imagine, sometimes instead of the books I just mentioned. That’s just rather sad. I get that Batman is popular and all, but even Batman deserves better than this — and so do you.
Final Verdict: 0.0 – On the plus side, Modern Family was hilarious this week. Eric Stonestreet cracks me up.
