Someone in Europe is offing everyone Batman’s ever saved. Time for Bats to hop over the pond to find out whasgoinonnnnn!
Before James Tynion IV was announced as Tom King’s successor on Batman, I thought Tom Taylor would’ve made a better replacement. Having read his first standalone Batman story now though… eh… not that he wouldn’t have been worse than Tynion, but his hypothetical Batman run also probably wouldn’t have been good either going by how poor Batman: The Detective turned out.
I can’t get past how astoopid the premise is. The villain-of-the-week is killing everyone Batman ever saved and they’re getting this information from Batman’s own database. Why does Batman maintain a database of everyone he’s ever saved - besides the onerous nature of the task, what’s the benefit of having this information?! Also, large numbers of these people are being killed in one go, ie. downing a flight where all the passengers happen to be people Batman has saved. How likely is this, that the entire passenger manifesto of a plane are all people Batman has saved!?? It’s so contrived.
Henri Ducard is the detective in the title and a significant chunk of the book are flashbacks of a young Bruce Wayne in Paris learning how to detect, though we don’t see any good detective work being done in the story. It just feels pointless. The motivation for the main villain is not great, and other features of the story are equally weak - Batman has a gigantic truck on call in mainland Europe, so I guess that whole stealth aspect of his character is something he doesn’t care about outside of Gotham, and the “European Alliance of the Bat” is just naff.
Andy Kubert is one of the best Batman artists ever and I enjoyed seeing his work on this book. He gives Batman a cool coat design (similar to Damian Wayne’s Batman 666, also designed by Kubert) though the designs for the villains was kinda terrible. I get that he has to do something because it’s a superhero comic but having them all wear Batman outfits - except they’re white! - was really dumb. They hate Batman so they dress like him? Still, it’s nice to see Batman in a European setting for a change, and England, France and Belgium all looked great, and it was good to see Knight and Squire cameo too.
Batman: The Detective is a disappointing effort from Tom Taylor - a badly-conceived story whose pretty art can’t save it from being wholly forgettable.
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