Comics! Detective Comics #15

Detective Comics #15

Written by John Layman
Art by Jason Fabok
Back up art by Andy Clarke

Solicitation and Preview

Review
This is not the Death of the Family tie in you are looking for.

Seriously. just go elsewhere. Joker is mentioned a couple of times, and his influence is felt, but you only get a couple panels showing him and honestly the special wrap around cover showed more face than what you get inside the comic. Kinda crappy, but that's what you get with this"tie-in."

What this issue shows is that there are a lot of moving parts to Gotham that is happening in the criminal underworld and you wonder just how much of a grip or even understanding of the situation that Batman has on it. Even as a reader you have to wonder what all happened to make this issue come together. There are references to check out the latest Batman and Birds of Prey comic to see what has been going on in those comics to help tell more of the story in this one. While I do consider that some weak sauce to cross promote books, having that happen in a comic that is supposed to be part of a crossover is even worse.

Ogilvy, who has slowly been moving up the ranks in previous issues of Detective, gets put into the head position of Penguin's empire thanks to Joker needing Penguin. Now referring to himself as Emperor Penguin, Ogilvy quickly tries to form an alliance with Ivy that may lead to nowhere thanks to the epilogue of the Ivy/Clayface story. And on that note, I must send some smart thinking kudos to Layman with the idea of having Ivy grow a poison inside of Clayface. We get all the details about how it went down in the back up, and I must admit that is a pretty ingenious move.

I had to laugh out loud at Batman's special suit that he wore when facing Clayface for the second time in the book. The costume just reminded me of one of those action figures from years past with the strange coloring that makes almost no sense. I wonder if that is something that Layman will bring back in future issues. I wouldn't mind the occasional flash to the past with those costumes.

The art in the back up and the main story continue to gel very well with one another. I saw nothing but a solid, well done job on both stories. I do find it kinda surprising that the back up story isn't really noted in any way on the cover of the book. That seems to be a DC wide thing to do with other books I've been picking up. Something definitely needs to be done to give credit where it is due, because some of the back-ups just work so well.

Grades
Words: 9/10
Pictures: 9/10
Buy Next Issue: I wonder which story I'm looking forward to more, how much Death of the Family will tie in, or a more prominent focus on the main story.