Occupy Gotham: Detective Comics #5 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Spoiler alert! No, not Stephanie Brown, I just ruin the story for you.

The first four issue arc of Detective Comics was one of the most pleasant surprises of DC Comics’ New 52: tightly written with an interesting new villain, excellent art, and with the best cliffhanger of all September’s comics where The Joker’s face is apparently torn off and nailed to a wall. And what was most remarkable about the run to me was that it was written by Tony Daniel, who is first and foremost an artist. Now we’re on issue five. And it turns out that as a writer? Maybe Tony Daniel is a hell of an artist.

This  issue really felt like Daniel said, “Okay, I put my all into those first four issues… now what the fuck am I gonna do?” He opens up with a riff on Occupy Wall Street – which means he probably only came up with this arc within the past couple of months – and since this protest is pro-Joker, it just falls flat to me. Don’t get me wrong, as a Watchmen fan, I am totally willing to accept the concept of a good anti-vigilante demonstration in comics, but pro-Joker? In Gotham City? That’s about as believable as a pro al-Queda rally in lower Manhattan, or a pro-Beiber riot in Max’s Kansas City. It just doesn’t ring true.

Combine that with Batman actually winding up attacking some of the demonstrators (He was mobbed while chasing an escaping assassin – it’s not like Batman waded in to test out new Bat-Mace or anything, but still), and making comments like, “While they chant for my death, I’ll be doing what I vowed to do after my parents were murdered: fixing this hellhole,” it feels like the entire scene is there for Daniel to make some kind of comment on the Occupy kids. It’s the only way the scene makes any sense at all, because there is no way in hell that citizens of Gotham would attend a rally on behalf of The Joker unless it started with a barbeque and ended with the streetlights dimming when someone threw the switch on the electirc chair… and Batman would not attack civilians. Period.

Which is fine, I guess; after all, when Batman writers comment on the Occupy thing, only good things happen. But either way, this is a Catch-22: either Daniel made some kind of conscious decision to punt on the characterizations of Batman and the people of Gotham City to try and score some political point… or he simply failed to understand the nature of the characters he’s writing and write a scene that is a total misfire. Considering how deliberate the first four issues of Detective Comics were, I’m guessing we’re looking at column A here, but it ultimately makes no difference: those five pages dragged me right out of the story.

And that’s a dangerous thing for five pages to do considering the main story in this comic is only twelve pages long. And in another of the remaining seven pages, we have Batman chasing a deadly assassin who makes no sound, doesn’t show any facial expressions, and leaves no fingerprints… but who does leave a chip from the Iceberg Casino. Which has to mean that The Penguin is trying to draw Batman into a trap. Because if it doesn’t mean that, it means that Daniel wrote a fifth-grade plot advancer that could only be dumber if the “master assassin” had left behind his driver’s license with GPS coordinates to his house. Time will tell, but it feels like lazy writing.

Daniel’s art, thankfully, remains consistent with his work on the first four issues. It’s still a strange mix of 90s-style, Lee / McFarlane Batman, with a strong Frank Miller influence to it – in this issue more than the last few. There are a couple of Batman face drawings that remind me very strongly of Miller, and there’s a character named Mr. Mosaic who looks like he could have been transplanted whole-cloth from The Dark Knight Returns. All of which might sound like a mishmash, but the final effect is a series of iconic Batman images, without getting in the way of the storytelling. The only problem with the art is, at twelve pages, there’s just not enough of it.

The book also includes an eight-page backup story, written by Daniel with art by Szymon Kudranski, about Catwoman robbing a poker game with Batman nowhere in sight. Kudranski’s art is slightly stylized photorealism – I wouldn’t be surprised if he lightboxed reference photos… meaning that for eight pages, the words “Batman”, “Detective” and “Comics” didn’t really apply to this issue of Batman: Detective Comics. The backup story was okay, but it felt like a way to shoehorn Hugo Strange into the New 52 (Just in time for The Dark Knight Rises!), and honestly? It felt like a way to pad the book so Daniel didn’t have to draw the entire thing. Which may or may not be the case, but I’m willing to bet that we’ll be seeing more of this backup feature, if only to justify sucking another buck out of our wallets.

This book was disappointing. The characters acted inconsistently, many of the plot points felt shoehorned in to make a point and / or lazy ways to move the story along, padded out with an “extra” story no one asked for. It’s a little early in this arc to make a final judgment, but if you contrast it with Daniel’s first storyline, which popped right from the beginning, this issue isn’t a good sign. And I’m just not feeling the whole “ripped from the headlines” vibe I’m getting from the pseudo-Occupy demonstrations in this issue (One of the demonstrators is carrying a sign reading “We are the 6%”); it feels like an episode of Law & Order SVU where Mariska Hargatay calls a rape victim a slut while Chris Meloni fists some sense into them.

They say everyone has one good story in them. Let’s hope that the first four issues of Detective Comics wasn’t it for Tony Daniel.