Newly-billion-less Bruce Wayne has had to move into the rough and tumble upper-middle class district of Gotham and take a, gasp, apartment in lieu of his stately manor, where he must attend house parties without his butler making excuses on his behalf - oh, the hardship! Coincidentally, shortly after Bruce moves in, his neighbours start getting murdered. Could it have something to do with new eyepatch-wearing Mayor Nakano or his administration? Meanwhile, Huntress searches for the killer of her weird friend.
Peter Tomasi’s reign of terror on Detective Comics is thankfully over but I wasn’t thrilled to see his replacement was Mariko Tamaki. I’ve not read a huge amount of her comics but I’ve yet to come across any that were even half good - and unfortunately that trend continues with her first Detective Comics book, Batz n the Hood.
The setup is ok. I’m fine with the new paradigm of Bruce slumming it for a while (or at least his version of slumming it), and some of the new characters seem alright, even if Roland Worth’s character design is absurdly cartoonish - he looks like he took all the steroids and had a Hulk for dessert. And that panel where he’s pointing an insanely gigantic handgun at Vile’s head made me LOL.
But that’s the problem with Tamaki’s plot: it’s childishly cartoonish in its solution. The murders, fine, but the killer? Er, no. Without going into spoilers, that was just too silly. I hate when writers resort to supernatural elements - it feels lazy and contrived, as it does here.
Still, the Huntress subplot of her looking for Mary Knox’s killer was surprisingly compelling until it got folded into Batman’s increasingly daffy plot. Hue Vile is a terrible character through and through - name, powers, backstory; it’s all bad.
There are a number of shorts included that are scattered between chapters of the main story to little effect and none were any good. The worst one is the John Ridley/Dustin Nguyen short that’s reprinted from another book, while the Hue Vile short, written by some lunatic calling themselves “T. Rex” (unless the band itself wrote it), was boring and crappy. Karl Mostert’s art on the pointless reporter and Penguin shorts was decent though.
And the art on the main story was excellent too. The exemplary Dan Mora made the jump from Boom to DC, having done great work on Grant Morrison’s Batman-esque Klaus, and he’s a great fit on Batman proper, as I knew he would be. Clayton Henry’s work on the Huntress chapters was strong as well and Viktor Bogdanovic somehow managed to make his art uncannily seem like Greg Capullo’s at times, which wasn’t unwelcome.
It doesn’t add up to a particularly impressive opening book for Tamaki’s run though. The story starts ok but quickly becomes messy and dull before ending in a blur of stupid. Nobody’s going to remember this storyline - I just read it and I’ve already forgotten most of it. As bad as almost all of Tomasi’s Detective Comics run was, his first volume was pretty decent. I recommend checking out Detective Comics, Volume 1: Mythology over Tamaki’s dreary Volume 1: The Neighborhood.
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