The Riddler: Year One Review (Paul Dano, Stevan Subic)

Edward Nashton is a brilliant but underachieving and meek accountant who discovers his accountancy firm is laundering money for the mob but feels helpless to do anything. Which is why he becomes so fixated on the new masked vigilante that appears in Gotham: The Batman. He represents justice and positive change to all the wrongs Edward sees in his everyday life. But the obsession soon sours, warping Edward into the Riddler we meet in the 2022 movie.

In his foreword, Paul Dano explains that this comic started life as an acting exercise where he wrote the backstory of The Riddler, whom he played in the most recent Batman movie, to understand how he ended up as the person we meet on screen. Except it’s not that convincing an origin or an especially good story, much like the movie ended up becoming.

It starts well. It’s initially about modern alienation - loneliness, lack of community, helplessness and frustration at the perceived breakdown of society - and I feel like if this was a comic about just that and how a regular person overcomes or makes their peace with that, this would be a much better book. But it’s not - it’s a superhero comic - so those aspects become overshadowed by a hackneyed plot about organised crime and Batman punching crooks, which has been done to death over the decades, and what seems fresh and compelling devolves into dreary, trite melodrama.

Edward’s sad childhood in the orphanage is similarly predictable, and then - very suddenly - Edward goes from introverted and bashful to full-on nutjob and transforms into the Riddler. It’s too abrupt and arbitrary - Edward has to become the Riddler by the end of the book, we’re running out of pages, quick, make him the Riddler!

I liked Stevan Subic’s art. Dano mentions Francis Bacon’s Head VI as a touchstone for this book and Subic seems to have taken that painting to heart, really channelling it into the visuals on every page. Some of the art is really inspired - one page shows the Gotham skyline that looks like Batman’s cowl in the background and Joker’s laughing mouth in the foreground; very impressive stuff. Edward is also drawn as Dano to make that movie connection even more clear.

Paul Dano’s not a bad writer - I thought he captured the melancholic flavour of Edward quite beautifully at the start of the book - but he’s a weak storyteller whose Riddler origin breaks down the further along it goes until it’s nonsense by the end. The comic has some interesting art throughout but overall The Riddler: Year One is a poor origin story for one of Batman’s most iconic villains.