Written By: Brian Buccellato
Art By: Scott Hepburn, Cliff Richards, and Fabrizio Fiorentino
Publisher: DC
Fitting right in with this week’s Future’s End one-shots, Detective Comic gives us a neat little Batman story set in a dark, grim Gotham that doesn’t actually seem too different from normal Gotham. Within the first few pages were given a simple introduction for the issue. Basically, Calendar Man is threatening to blow the power in Gotham, the inmates have taken over Arkham Asylum, and Batman’s only hope to fixing everything is getting The Riddler to help him out.
The premise of Batman teaming up with the Riddler is really going to be the main draw here for everyone. Rarely do we see the two working together in such a straightforward way and it kinda helps hammer in the idea of the future being so bleak that Batman’s only hope lies within the Riddler.
The problem with all this is that a ton of the Batman/Riddler interactions are poorly written, especially the Riddler’s riddles. They’re oddly placed, almost like they were an afterthought, and are more cringe-inducing that funny. Brian Buccellato does get some points for keeping the characters true to themselves though, and its really great to see Batman and the Riddler recognize and prey off of each other’s weaknesses. We really get the sense that these are two characters who have been around each other for years and I just wish that there was better writing overall to go with it. It’s not that Buccellato doesn’t know the characters, its more that there’s sloppy dialogue that merely passes.
Calendar Man and his role as ruler of Arkham Asylum is a delight though. One of the things I really enjoy about the Batman universe is that many of his foes aren’t necessarily villains so much as they’re people dealing with loss in absurd ways and that Batman himself often recognizes this. Batman lost his parents and put on a batsuit to fight crime, Mr. Freeze is constantly just trying to save his wife, and so on. Calendar Man’s evil ploy in here is nothing more than a desire to get revenge against the person responsible for destroying his family and ultimately leading to his villainous ways. There’s some pretty good discussion between Batman and The Riddler regarding this and the ending is absolutely perfect and further highlights how much Batman truly seems to understands Gotham’s criminals.
The art leaves a lot to be desired unfortunately. There’s a lot of really great panels, especially a great two-page spread of Batman on his Green Goblin glider, but overall the art could be a lot better. I want to mark a lot of this down to the choice to have 3 different artists. Sometimes it can be a great stylistic choice but in the span of a one-shot its almost distracting. Scott Hepburn takes the first half and his panels are drawn with a lot more lines and scruff whereas Cliff Richards makes the Arkham scenes a lot softer and clean. It’s a weird divide and an underwater scene exists to meld them into each other but the differences are glaring when you flip between say, the first page and the last page.
And of course, the cover. All of the Future’s End one-shots have the extra fancy lenticular cover and Detective Comics has one that features Batman standing on a rooftop alone, with the Riddler popping into view next to him when we hit that sweet spot while moving the cover. Altogether it was one of the better covers this week for DC’s Future’s End stuff.
Overall I’d really only suggest this to the biggest fans of Batman. It’s not necessarily a horrible comic but the strength in writing just isn’t there and there really isn’t a whole lot to look at that seems like it can only exist because of Future’s End (I mean let’s face it, Arkham Asylum is constantly going through problems). The Riddler and Batman team up is a neat feature but it could have been done phenomenally better.
