Review time! with ‘Detective Comics volume 2: Elixir’

“This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us”

I liked (with some caveats) the first volume of Tom Taylor’s soft reboot of Detective Comics, so I picked up the second volume. Funny how that works. This is from DC, naturally, and it’s $19.99 for 154 pages. Lee Garbett draws the main story, which is three issues long, with Lee Loughridge providing the colors and Wes Abbott the lettering. Then we get the Annual, which is written by Al Ewing, drawn by Stefano Raffaele, John McCrea, and Fico Ossio, colored by Loughridge, Triona Farrell, and Ulises Arreola, and lettered by Tom Napolitano, with a back-up story by Joshua Hale Fialkov, Mike Norton, Nick Filardi, and Troy Peteri. Finally, we get issue #1100, which I already reviewed and so will ignore. Got all that? Great!

This is a bit of a follow-up to Taylor’s first story, as the longevity potions from that story play a role in this, in which Batman discovers — I hope you’re sitting down — a long-time secret organization that is only now coming into the light. I know, shocking! Taylor doesn’t do what you might expect with it, which is why it didn’t piss me off too much — sure, it’s been around a long time, but the members don’t seem too good at doing nefarious things, which adds a hint of humor to the proceedings (and more than a hint at the end, which does not go the way you might expect). Taylor drew out his first story a bit too much, I thought, but this is a tightly-plotted 3-issue tale, one that manages to feature two guest stars — Harvey Bullock and Oswald Cobblepot — who get to shine a bit and have some good things to say. It’s a bit in the vein of the old O’Neil/Adams stories, in that the pace doesn’t really slow down, Batman gets out of his Gotham City comfort zone, and the secondary characters are interesting. Bullock has been fired (by, I must note whenever it comes up, GOTHAM CITY POLICE COMMISSIONER VANDAL FUCKING SAVAGE), and he’s become a private detective, and more detectives in Detective Comics is never a bad thing, so that was fun. He and Penguin get kidnapped by the “immortal” dudes, and Batman goes to — checks notes — “Pokolistan” to rescue them (well, Bullock, as he doesn’t know yet that Cobblepot has been kidnapped). I love me some fictional comic book countries! Anyway, it turns a bit farcical, which you might not enjoy, but honestly, after decades of gloom-‘n’-doom Batman, I like a serious story that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I mean, some of the stuff that happens in the story would logically sometimes happen in stories, so that was nice. Ewing then gives us a nifty Annual in which Batman once again goes far afield — to beautiful York, England — to solve a mysterious murder of a tech billionaire. It does get a bit esoteric, which clashes a bit with Batman’s down-to-earth aesthetic, but, as Grant Morrison knows, you can go to that well every once in a while with Batman, as long as we’re not getting “Robin Dies at Dawn!” all the damned time. It’s an actual mystery, and while it’s not exactly “fair play,” it’s always good to see Batman being, you know, a detective (he’s that in the main story, too, but a bit more so in this one). The middle chapter, which initially doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the main story, sees Batman fighting “Mr. Mystic” on the streets of York, and it is, honestly, one of the more fun Batman vignettes I’ve read in a while … or it would be, if Fialkov’s back-up story didn’t exist. Fialkov introduces David Rosales, the seventh-grade “president and founding member of the Gotham Public Middle School 96 Junior Batman Detective Club” (probably its only member, too), who is the Sensational Character Find of 2025, if you ask me. David believes that kids in his school are being poisoned because the Scarecrow is around, and when Batman shows up, they need to solve the case together. It’s only a 10-page story, but it’s very keen, and Batman, as is his wont in this Brave New Kind DCU, is perfectly willing to hang out with a 12/13-year-old and figure out what’s going on. This story is humorous, too (I don’t know what the Big Bosses at DC have been snorting to let their writers write Batman like this, but I’m here for it), although it is also about something serious, so that’s neat. Overall, these are three solid stories (plus issue #1100) without any horrific stuff, which is nice to see in a Batman book.

The art is good, too. Garbett is a solid superhero artist, and he seems to alter his style a bit to align it with Mikel Janín’s, possibly to keep the visual look similar as we go along. I dunno. He’s good with action, and I like his Penguin — he’s ugly and creepy, but not the misshapen monster that a lot of artists turn him into. As I like Shady Businessman Penguin rather than Terrifying Criminal Penguin, this look works for me. We get nice art in the Annual, but I always have to point out McCrea’s work with Batman, because he has such an idiosyncratic style that seems like it wouldn’t work with Batman, but it does. I know McCrea is off doing his own thing and DC wouldn’t let him near the character on a regular basis, but it would be nice if McCrea could do a longer Bat-related something.

I like this volume a bit more than the first one. Taylor has eased into Detective pretty well, and while the stories haven’t been too ground-breaking, I dig his Kindler, Gentler Bat-Dude and the fact that he didn’t just start going with old Bat-villains right away. There’s plenty of time for that! I guess I’ll get the next volume. We shall see where he goes with everyone’s favorite hero!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆