In contrast to Snyder’s Batman: The Court of Owls, which included Batman’s cadre of Robins and their various continuity eccentricies, Daniel’s Detective might be considered “Batman classic,” the book you could give to any reader (or, perhaps, fans of The Dark Knight Rises) and they could understand it easily — Batman, Commissioner Gordon, Alfred, and the Joker are the main actors here. After four issues, however, the main Faces storyline gives way first to an unrelated short story, and then to a lackluster Penguin story. However, suicide squad joker halloween costume there are several hallmarks that   batman costume  will instantly identify your costume as being Harley Quinn inspired. It goes again to the question of how and when War will actually matter or if it’s just a speculative tale for its own sake. Gore is no substitute for a good storytelling, but Daniel manages to combine both — Faces of Death is gory, earning it some derision at the start of the DC New 52, but Daniel’s gore builds suspense, it is not gore for gore’s sake.

Daniel’s comparison between the Joker’s torn-off face and the Shroud of Turin also opens possibilities that overshadow the gore of the image — concepts such as that the Joker’s face itself might contain evil, or that it becomes a totem for his followers, are so engaging as to justify the gore needed to get to that point. The Dollmaker cutting off the Joker’s face not only underlines the danger of the Dollmaker character, but casts a pall over the story in general — among a couple of masked characters, the reader is never sure if the Joker might be hiding underneath. For around two hours I was over the moon thinking I’d snapped a selfie with the Star Wars star. Daniel’s first issue is New 52 by way of Batman: Year One: Batman, in his New 52 suit of armor, fights toe-to-toe with the Joker over the Gotham rooftops while the Gotham police take shots — at Batman. Really the greatest throughway between past and present in this story is King building on the history of his breakout take on Catwoman (not Ed Brubaker, but few can be) and of course spinning the origin of Kite Man.

This gets strange as regards Poison Ivy, for instance, or what Batman’s relationship is with Two-Face Harvey Dent; also, though of course some of this is due to different writers and stories being told at different times, it seems a big waste now that in Justice League vs. If we posit now at least four Robins worth of clean living for Batman in this continuity, Justice League membership, friendship with Superman, no instances of trying to kill villains since and no real consequences since for Batman’s attempt on the Riddler’s life, then (problematically for the story) Catwoman’s got it right in the end: “Who cares?” King has earned Batman’s nervousness to propose to Catwoman and Batman’s reluctance to seek out true happiness for himself, but for Batman to be this out of sorts — for his deep, dark secret that he (ludicrously) believes might turn Catwoman away from him to be that one single time when he was young he almost crossed the line but then it turned out OK — is markedly absurd. If this were our one and only Batman story, or if Batman had just taken another vigilante to task for murder, or if there were any real context or resonance for War, perhaps this would be shocking.

The book is clever taken in isolation, but reads strangely in the context of King’s Batman run so far and the DC Universe overall. And just as recently as Batman: Endgame, we saw Batman effectively kill the Joker (though himself as well); King’s revelation is almost mundane. When Harley regained consciousness, Ivy initially planned to kill her. Batman begins the story confessing a sin, and it is something meant to be so shocking, so heartbreaking, that not only does it take eight issues to tell, but in the final chapter King takes a whole page of Bruce getting a hold of himself, pauses, and then goes in for another page of the same before we finally learn: Batman tried to kill the Riddler and the Joker stopped him. It’s not a zero sum game, but King simultaneously strips some of the recent (and perhaps unnecessary) mystique off the Joker while adding some to the Riddler. That’s no more apparent than when King puts the Riddler in the Joker’s place in a scene from Tim Burton’s Batman, joker suit bizarre as the sequence is. King’s story is tonally aligned with what came before and what seems to come out of it is simply Catwoman’s answer to Batman’s marriage proposal — unless all of this is really a scheme by the Riddler — and surely that could have been accomplished in less than an eight-issue flashback.