Comic Book Review – Batman: The Dark Knight Detective Volumes Two & Three

Batman: The Dark Knight Detective Volume Two (2018)
Reprints Detective Comics #583 – 591 and Annual #1
Written by John Wagner, Alan Grant, Lewis Klahr, Steve Piersall, and Denny O’Neill
Art by Norm Breyfogle, Dean Haspiel, and Klaus Janson

Batman: The Dark Knight Detective Volume Three (2020)
Reprints Detective Comics #592 – 600
Written by John Wagner, Alan Grant, Sam Hamm
Art by Norm Breyfogle, Irv Novick, Eduardo Barreto, Denys Cowan

Unlike Superman, Batman didn’t have a hard reboot following the continuity shuffling Crisis on Infinite Earths. Superman got a stand-alone mini-series, Man of Steel, that retold his origins and reshaped his supporting cast. Batman did get Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s Year One arc, but it didn’t wipe the slate clean like DC did with Superman. Superman also had a reasonably solid writing team during this period, helmed by John Byrne and Roger Stern. Batman has creative teams rotating in and out on his two monthly books in shorter runs.

One of the most memorable runs of this period was Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle. Grant wrote along with fellow British author John Wagner, the co-creator of Judge Dredd. Their vision of Gotham City happened to come along as the hype for Tim Burton’s Batman film was reaching its peak, yet they were not looking to the film to shape their take. Instead, we get a creative team focused on building up Batman’s rogues gallery while telling some non-villain stories. The result is a run of issues that provide a variety of narratives while still feeling cohesive, thanks to the bold art of Norm Breyfogle.

Of all this team’s creations, the most long-lasting has been The Ventriloquist and Scarface, who appeared in their first issue together. The key to a strong Batman villain is something with a gimmick that mixes well with grotesque elements. Many of us will agree that ventriloquist dummies can be incredibly creepy, so the character is immediately unnerving. In the introductory story, Scarface runs a criminal organization that makes a lot of money from a drug called Fever. Batman spends most of the story doing legwork to follow the supply line. 

One of the ways Batman works on the page is in the context of horror. The Ventriloquist & Scarface provide that beautifully. There’s the immediate question of The Ventriloquist’s insanity as he allows his puppet to verbally and physically abuse him. But isn’t the human operating the puppet? That’s what we assume, but writers like to play with the mystery around that question throughout all the character’s future appearances. In 2006, The Ventriloquist was killed off, and Scarface passed into other hands. Still, when the character appears in animation and film/television, it is always this original version. 

Grant, Wagner, and Breyfogle followed that up with a two-parter introducing another new villain, The Ratcatcher. Again, this story is very horror-forward with lots of grotesque moments. Otis Flanagan was an exterminator who was sent to prison after stabbing a man to death in a fight. Upon his release, he used his knowledge of taming animals to round up the men he held responsible for his conviction. The judge who oversaw the trial is one, and he manages to escape to the surface, pursued by hordes of rats who kill him. The body is discovered, and Batman follows the trail into the sewers.

The next arc (a three-parter) introduces a villain who did not have the staying power of many of this team’s others. Derek Mitchell escapes prison and heads out on a revenge mission against an old business partner named Kadaver. He’s chased by the police into a toxic waste dumping site and doused in chemicals. You know the ol’ story. Mitchell emerges as a glowing, corrosive man. It’s not until the second part of this story that we meet Kadaver.

Kadaver was an assassin with a fetish for death making it his gimmick like Catwoman with cats or Two-Face with the double-face coin. While living in a dungeon basement, Kadaver sleeps in a coffin and wears a Dracula-like outfit. While he certainly fit the horror bill, he wasn’t anywhere near as compelling as someone like The Ventriloquist, though. I was annoyed they dragged this one out for three parts as it wasn’t one of the best included in this collection.

There’s a short Poison Ivy story from another creative team that’s pretty generic. That’s followed by Detective Comics Annual #1, featuring a story from legendary Batman writer Denny O’Neill. This globetrotting novel-length story sees Batman going up against his old foes, Ra’s Al Ghul and The Penguin. Talia and Lady Shiva show up along the way. When I talk about Batman getting a soft reboot, I point to stories like this that make it feel like O’Neill is not changing his storytelling due to any shifts in continuity. This story simply carries on with plot threads established in the 1970s. 

The monthly Detective issues that finish Volume Two are a pair of stand-alones. One story has Batman traveling to London in pursuit of Arabic terrorists. It is about as sensitive as you might expect about Muslim people, though to their credit, the writers do allow the villains in the story to point out the ways the United States has created chaos in their home country. The other has an Australian Aboriginal man showing up in Gotham to punish a wealthy man for stealing from his people. Both are just okay. Again, Breyfogle’s art is always fantastic, which alone makes these worth reading through.

The third Dark Knight Detective volume continues the Wagner/Grant/Breyfogle run and introduces one of the more underrated villains of this period. Batman hears reports of long-dead famous figures like Abraham Lincoln and Jesus attacking and killing people on the street. Eventually, he uncovers the culprit, Cornelius Stirk. Stirk was locked up in Arkham at 16 after trying to murder a classmate. He has a deficiency of certain neurotransmitters in his brain, which appear to have caused Stirk to develop psionic powers, mainly the ability to appear as other people in his victims’ minds. He eventually becomes convinced he has to remove and eat people’s hearts to keep these powers, which is when Batman finds him.

Stirk is one of the most horrific Batman villains of all time – a serial killer cannibal whose face is disfigured. None of this could be read as sensitive to the disabled, though. I did have some discomfort reading story after story where villains who are being given some real-world psychological diagnoses have the shit beaten out of them by a wealthy guy with a fucked up hobby. It was a weird seesaw of emotions because, from a classical Gothic perspective, Stirk is a wonderfully scary villain, but he’s also meant to be a severely mentally ill man. 

The rest of this collection was not my favorite. We get the first of very few appearances by Joe Potato, an elderly private investigator that Grant & Breyfogle would try to find a spot for occasionally. He’s an okay character, just not much developed in his singular appearance here. That’s followed by a crossover with the Invasion story event. This sees Batman traveling to Havana where Hawkman’s people, the Thangarians, have established a beachhead. Like most Batman tie-ins with events during this time, it is okay. Nothing worth re-reading.

There’s a two-parter about snuff films made by the mob, which is okay. In an interview in Back Issue Magazine (#22), Breyfogle jokingly expressed disappointment that he didn’t get to draw more of Batman’s rogues gallery during the run. I agree with that because many of these other stories just aren’t very memorable. This one certainly doesn’t stick with me as much as something like The Ventriloquist or Stirk.

The final arc in this collection was done to try and piggyback on the phenomenal success of the 1989 film. Sam Hamm, the screenwriter of Batman, was brought in to write a three-part story that would culminate in the 600th issue of Detective. The story feels like a prose novel you might find with the mass market paperbacks, something Marvel and DC would do to try and rope in some of the fantasy/pulp audience? Batman investigates a macabre science experiment that involves transferring someone’s consciousness into another body to use in attacks. Along the way, Henri Ducard is introduced, a mentor figure from Bruce Wayne’s past who has become a villain. If that name sounds familiar, it was the alias Ra’s Al Ghul used in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins.

I don’t find Blind Justice to be that fantastic of a Batman story. I am a big fan of the characters when he’s dealing with more horrific and disturbing fare. This one was more like the Ra’s Al Ghul stories, Batman up against an international threat and less of a Gotham-centric one.

These two collections were quite fascinating to read through. The Batman comics of 35 years ago differ from those published on the stands today. Now you’ll find sprawling year-long or more arcs, and back in 1988/1989, having a two or three-part story was considered relatively “epic.” I am on the team that sees Grant & Breyfogle as the best of this era. No other comics pairing ever made me feel as creeped out by Batman’s villains as these two when I was growing up.