Comic Book Review – Batman: The Dark Knight Detective Volumes Five and Six

Batman: The Dark Knight Detective Volume Five (2021)
Reprints Detective Comics #612-614, 616-621 and Annual #3
Written by Alan Grant and Archie Goodwin
Art by Norm Breyfogle and Dan Jurgens

Batman: The Dark Knight Detective Volume Six (2022)
Reprints Detective Comics #622-633
Written by John Ostrander, Marv Wolfman, Bill Finger, Mike Friedrich, Alan Grant, and Peter Milligan
Art by Flint Henry, Mike McKone, Jim Aparo, Bob Kane, Bob Brown, Norm Breyfogle, and Tom Mandrake

We see a change of hands as we finish this round of post-Crisis Batman reviews. These issues will mark the conclusion of Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle’s run in Detective, as they were handed the reins of the Batman title. I would say these are not the duo’s best work. We get several one-shot stories before a dramatic conclusion that pushes Tim Drake into his next steps of becoming Robin. 

Cat-Man is brought back as part of Grant & Breyfogle’s work to build a new, robust Rogues Gallery. It’s an okay story that also includes Catwoman. That’s followed by some fairly forgettable but beautifully illustrated stories with inconsequential stakes. The biggest story of note in this batch of episodes is “A Clash of Symbols.” In that story, Batman encounters a fortune teller, and he asks if she can find the Joker for him wherever he is in the world. As they stare into her crystal ball, Batman reflects back three years to a reasonably standard Joker heist where the villain is captured after a chase. The fortune teller ends up framing the Batman/Joker rivalry with the image of the Ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail. 

I enjoyed this story and see it as one of the pieces that likely laid the groundwork for some of the stories written by Grant Morrison and Scott Snyder about the Joker during their respective Batman runs. The Joker as a totemic figure has become a more popular take in the comics these days. It makes sense because of how mystified the character is with multiple potential origins. Something like Geoff Johns’ The Three Jokers could have been an interesting addition to this mythos, but as we see how that turned out…meh. 

Grant & Breyfogle close out their Detective run with a four-part story that presents Tim Drake with tragedy. Since his introduction in A Lonely Place of Dying, it had been clear that, at some point, Tim would become the next Robin. Tim was relegated to working the computer back in the Batcave and providing Batman with intel in the field for most of this interim period. “Rite of Passage” served as another piece of his origin, with his parents traveling to Haiti and being taken hostage by the Obeah Man, a voodoo priest.

Sadly, this is a story rife with racist caricatures of Haitian people. They are not overt in the form of Blackface or other very obvious tropes. The thought behind the story feels very lazy, just an “oh, let’s do a voodoo story” as if this part of Haitian culture is a prop to be used in white narratives. It continues the exoticizing of voodoo rather than attempting to teach the audience about the actual real-world religious practice. Instead, it is relegated to the source of the villain of the week’s power, which he uses to victimize the white people. The Obeah Man wasn’t some original racist caricature but a continuation of the Baron Samedi figure in popular Western media. The James Bond film Live and Let Die employed the same gross trope. 

What is interesting to note is the association of multiple Robin’s tragedies at the hands of Black characters. We have Tim Drake losing his mom and his father becoming disabled from their encounter with The Obeah Man. Previously, Jason Todd’s origin as Robin, before they were retconned post-Crisis, had his acrobat parents being killed by Killer Croc. While Croc’s ethnic background has fluctuated based on where he’s being portrayed, if we go back to those original stories, we can see that he is very clearly presented as a mutated Black person. It’s just very odd that both of these Robins saw their origin point as a result of a Black character committing violence against their families. This is just another one of those ways in which racism sneaks its way into every aspect of the culture.

This collection closes out with Detective Comics Annual #3, which sends Batman to Tokyo, Japan, in a story penned by Archie Goodwin and illustrated by Dan Jurgens. Goodwin returned to DC around this time and would become one of the chief editors of the Batman line during the 1990s. It’s a fine story, but again, I’m not a huge fan of the globe-trotting Batman tales.

From there, we move to a transition period in Detective Comics. Grant and Breyfogle swapped places with Wolfman and Aparo on titles. Over in the Batman titles, Tim Drake assumed the mantle of Robin in an arc penned by Grant and Breyfogle. Meanwhile, in Detective Comics, that was not being acknowledged quite yet. This entire collection, Volume Six, has no appearances of Robin and focuses on solo Batman stories.

Before Wolfman briefly takes over the book, John Ostrander provides a three-part filler story that I have always found to be one of the underrated stories from this period. A comic book based on Batman is being published in Gotham City, and the Dark Knight is curious to see how he is interpreted. There’s also a serial killer who claims to be Batman. He calls into the late-night radio show hosted by Jack Hemp, who tries to get information out of the man. There’s also the mysterious writer/illustrator behind the Batman comic, Tod Nathan Taylor, who our hero wants to meet. 

Mike McKone deftly handles the art for the regular Batman story, while Flint Henry delivers the portions of the comic book we get to read. McKone is more realistic, while Henry is fantastical, reflecting the supernatural origins of Batman in Taylor’s comic book version. We get to see reimaginings of Robin, The Joker, Catwoman, and more as Taylor delivers his own explanation for the masked figure that looms large over Gotham. It’s not a perfect story, and I think the ending lacks the punch needed, but it’s such a clever concept, and the back-and-forth structure is a lot of fun.

Wolfman’s run begins and runs for only five issues. I don’t think Wolfman is a lousy writer but he is very much a journeyman in the industry – a guy who can reliably pump out scripts, but they don’t really wow you. I think he gets a more considerable reputation because so much of his prominent work (Teen Titans, Crisis) was illustrated by George Perez. The truth begins to set in when you see Wolfman outside that context. His Adventures of Superman run was cut short to let John Byrne take over the title, and I was happy to see that. When it comes to his and Aparo’s Batman work, it always pales in comparison to Grant/Breyfogle. 

His last stories here are okay. He plays around with some new villain ideas, but Wolfman is not great in that department. Characters like Deathstroke or Brother Blood are rare exceptions, and I think Perez had more of an influence there than he is given credit for. The Electrocutioner is just not someone I am eager to revisit. He introduces Abattoir, a villain who will return during the Azrael-Batman period. I didn’t find the character all that interesting; it was a less creative version of Cornelius Stirk, in my opinion.

During this block of issues, we get Detective Comics #600, the 600th appearance of Batman in its pages. That’s commemorated with four different versions of the first Batman story—“The Case of the Chemical Syndicate.” We get the original version, one from 1969, and one each from the Wolfman/Aparo team and the Grant/Breyfogle collaboration. 

With issue 629, we begin Peter Milligan’s run, keeping Jim Aparo on the art. A little less than a year prior, Milligan had written “Dark Knight, Dark City”, a story that pitted Batman against the Riddler while revealing some of the esoteric occult history of Gotham. The editors must have really liked it as he was made the regular writer on Detective for a year, switching out with Louise Simonson for a brief run. I didn’t find any of these stories all that memorable. I owned some of these comics as a kid, so I remembered a few things, but I never felt the pang of nostalgia reading over them now.

The best part about this period are those Michael Golden covers. What false advertising, presenting readers with that rich, evocative imagery only to find a very different artist’s work within. I don’t think Jim Aparo’s work is terrible, I just find his Batman to be a bit sunnier than I typically like the character to be. Where Breyfogle leans into the Gothic, impressionistic view of Batman, Aparo also feels more at home drawing Batman stories when he’s on international adventures or teaming up with the likes of the Outsiders. I just don’t see him as one of the contributors to the darker works.

This is where we leave post-Crisis Batman for now. We’ll be back someday to see Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle’s transition to the main title and those Louise Simonson stories. That period will also see Chuck Dixon take over writing on Detective, a comics creator about whom I have some rather strong opinions.