I'm up to Detective Comics #775.

"Bruce Wayne, Murderer" is just about played out. Bruce was proved innocent. Checkmate faked Sasha's death and recruited her. The real murderer was (apparently) proven to be David Cain, Cassandra's father. Alfred is back.

Josie Mac ended a few issues ago. It's pretty good!

The backup for the last few issues was "The Hunt." It's not as good as the Slam Bradley or the Josie Mac storylines but it was OK. The backups have been pretty good since The Jacobian ended.

Coming up soon! "Dead Reckoning!" My favorite Two-Face story. And in the backups - "Spore!" I'm kind of looking forward to reading "Spore" again after all these years. I sort of remember not liking it back in 2003, but I sure have thought about it a lot over the years!

I just read Detective Comics #796 (which is a favorite issue). The last issue I commented on was #775, so I'm way ahead of myself and it's actually a pretty good place to stop until I have a chance to type comments on Dead Reckoning and Dogcatcher and the Tarantula and Spore and things like that.

The next issue of Detective is #797, and that's the first issue of the massive Bat-title cross-over known as War Games.

I quit buying Detective Comics around #785 or #786 (and didn't read any comics for several years, except I did pick up #796 and #800 when they came out), but in 2011, I picked up Detective Comics #879, #880 and #881, and I decided to get all the back issues I missed. The scattered issues of War Games I saw in Detective made me curious to read the whole thing, so I bought the trades. So this cross-over is the first one in a long time where I can read the whole thing just by taking it off the book shelf. (Which is something I haven't done for a while.)

Later today or maybe tomorrow, I'll hopefully have time to get caught up on Detective Comics #776 to #796.

I have had this occur several times. learned my lesson and now whenever I post anything substantially large or time consuming I will highlight/copy so it is in my current window/memory. This will allow me to paste if anything ever deletes on me!  

Holy Frustration, Hoosier! I HATE that! 
I do my longer posts in Word and then copy and paste.

OK. Let's try this again! Instead of putting all my comments in one post, I'm going to just handle one storyline at a time. First up: "Dead Reckoning!" in Detective Comments #777 to #782.

This is my favorite Two-Face story.

Something is going on among the members of the Batman Rogues Gallery community. A henchman dressed as Killer Moth was murdered. There are attempts on the lives of several other villains. There's a certain amount of nervousness among the whole bunch. Batman wants to find out what's going on before anyone else is killed.

Well, I'm going to give it away because otherwise I can't really talk about all the things I like about this arc and why it's my favorite Two-Face story.

It seems that some years ago, many of the big guns among the Batman rogues were putting together a plot to kill Batman. It was the Joker, the Penguin, Killer Moth, the Riddler, the Mad Hatter and the Scarecrow. And the participation of Two-Face was vital because they all know Batman has a soft spot for the man who used to be Harvey Dent. But Two-Face flipped his coin and the unscarred face turned up, so he bugged out and didn't want to be involved.

So they recruited somebody to play the part of Two-Face. Paul Sloan was a very dedicated stage actor who specialized in the menacing and the macabre. Sloan was the Gotham stage version of Lon Chaney or Boris Karloff. And he seemed to consider it quite an honor to mix with the elite of Gotham's bizarre underworld figures. He masqueraded as Two-Face. He really immersed himself in the role. And things went bad when Sloan decided to go one step further and commit a Two-Face crime on his own before the plan to kill Batman even got off the ground. Very bad.

They thought Sloan was dead. But now he seems to have come back from the grave … and I think these guys know better than to be surprised that he might have somehow survived.

I love it that Two-Face is all over this story even though he isn't in it that much. (Oh, yes, he eventually shows up.) It just shows how vital Harvey Dent is to the Batman mythos that he's such a major part of the story engine that a great story like this one can get going just by a flip of the coin and he doesn't even have to stick around.



I also love it that Paul Sloan is being used. He first appeared in the 1950s as an actor who was playing Two-Face and then an accident scarred his face and he thought he was Two-Face. He didn't appear more than a few times, but I love Paul Sloan stories! Why wouldn't there be two Two-Faces - each thinking he's the real Two-Face! - running around in Gotham City?! And I'm also pretty certain that the real Two-Face would like the poetic justice of two Two-Faces - if the coin came up right.

"Dead Reckoning" monkeys around with the formula. Sloan doesn't think he's Two-Face. And he doesn't look like Two-Face. He was horribly disfigured and his head looks like a wad of chewed gum. But it's a good change, and his plot for revenge - which is more twisted and convoluted than it appears at first - does a really good job of ignoring the old tropes and giving us a fresh take on Sloan. (The only drawback is that this version of Paul Sloan can't come back; even if he's still alive, you really can't add any more to the Paul Sloan story with a sequel.)

The other major thing I like about this story is the way it plays with the "all my enemies against me" plot. This is something that happens from time to time in the Batman comics, a bunch of Batman's villains get together as part of somebody's major plan and he tracks them down and (except in Knightfall), he foils the plan and almost everybody gets beaten up and captured. But the plot behind the "Dead Reckoning!" storyline never coalesced into any kind of a threat to Batman. It was such a disaster that the rogues just scattered in the wake of Sloan's spectacular failure and Batman never knew there was a major plot against him!

At this point, I was only buying Detective Comics and Cerebus, and I only bought a few more issues of Detective. (I think #786 was my last consecutive issue for a while, though I did buy #796 (because Stephanie Brown was Robin) and #800. I had been buying Detective Comics regularly since Knightfall, about #660, so that's about 125 issues, the longest amount of time I've ever read Batman on a monthly basis.)

But in 2003, I had gone back to college and was working on a double major in journalism and history (and eventually a master's in history) and I just quit making time to stop by the newsstand and pick up Detective Comics every month. 

I'm sort of glad that one of my last full storylines before quitting was a great one like "Dead Reckoning!" 

Another story I like from this period is "Made of Wood" from Detective Comics #784 to #786.

The Batman comics don't often mention that Gotham City had a different protector in the 1940s - the Green Lantern! Alan Scott was based in Gotham City in the Golden Age! And in post-Crisis DC continuity (or is it post-post-Crisis DC continuity?), Batman was the modern-day protector of the same version of Gotham City where Green Lantern had adventured in the old days.

"Made of Wood" does a great job creating a sense of time for Gotham City. One of the parks even has a statue to the city's long-ago super-hero. And one day, there's a body next to it with "Made of Wood" carved into the skin.

It's a very bad memory for Alan Scott. In the late 1940s, a serial killer littered the city with a few bodies with "Made of Wood" carved into the skin. It was a case that Green Lantern never solved. "I'm not a detective," he reluctantly admits. The killings stopped, and the culprit was never caught.

Had the killer returned? Or is it a copycat?

It's up to Green Lantern - with the help of Batman - to find out!

I have to mention "The Surrogate" in Detective Comics #791 to #793. I'm not going to go deeply into the plot. I have to say a few words about it because it's the rare Mister Freeze story that I like. He's not in it very much. He's behind the scenes, letting some low-level thugs use his thermal technology to further his own ends.

I like Mr. Freeze much better as a schemer and a manipulator. The Flash's Captain Cold should have the monopoly on using ice to rob banks. And that Mr. Freeze plot about his dying wife is getting pretty old and I never found it that interesting in the first place.