Letters to Detective #51

Same again, a really enjoyable personal noir for Gotham's dark knight detective. A very small scale, but still brutally real, single murder case that bites to the core of who Bruce is and allows for some really solid crime-fighting story-telling.

Love it.

And love the very concise nod to what Inc. is all about:



Batman can fight international villains that strain credibility, hang out with goofy characters like Knight and Squire, but we still believe it utterly when he returns to the bare-bones, avenging a child killed in urban conflict. And yes, Black Mask continues to be genuinely scary.

Kudos.

A very tight story. I thought that the resolution to the child murder plot was a bit easy, a bit quick, but I don't think that the point of the story was for him to be caught, only that he was caught, and the repercussions that come with killing a child in Gotham, so I didn't mind. Black Mask has always been one of my favourite villains (he played a major role in my own time around the Bat-books, and I was really pleased with what I did with him, so it's good to see that continued) and his grudge against Bruce Wayne is an interesting counterpoint to his enmity toward Batman. I enjoy it when a story isn't based around an attempt to kill Batman but to actually kill Bruce Wayne, because it puts the protagonist in an interesting position. A short, snappy burst of Batman prose. Very cool, mate.