Science Fiction In the City Streets
This cover's got some decent energy, but ultimately its pretty bland. That damn banner certainly isn't helping. Seriously, anyone buying freaking Detective Comics is almost certainly buying a ticket for The Dark Knight Rises. Stop being stupid with your marketing DC, NOBODY doesn't hate those banners. Well maybe some can tolerate them, but I don't think hardly anybody's getting anything out of them. XP
This story is still reminding me of Batman: The Animated Series. Not one of the best episodes, but not one of those few really bad ones. We've got a new villain with a variety of gimmicks, a mystery around truths of his identity, an informant who faked his death... the pieces are all there for an interesting story, but this one is starting to lose it's way a little bit.
The whole 'Hadron Collider Lite' thing works well enough, as does the clones and the melting and whatnot; but when characters start discussing the ramifications of the experiment and what it means for Mr. Toxic, things got a little out of hand in the sci-fi department. Matter transmitters and time travel? This was a street level lab accident in Gotham, not a.... I don't know. It just doesn't mesh well with everything else that's been going on. There's some nice extra little twists and turns, like a further twist on the fake Batmen from the previous issue, and some of the leads Bruce Wayne gets in his investigation; but it all works in a very street level mood, and even the villain himself, radioactivity or not, works well on this street level. But the ramifications of his origin, as well as some tiny bits of his motivations, seem to work in this far fetched science fiction atmosphere that isn't unbelievable in the DCU, but just doesn't fit the series, or at least the story arc.
I enjoyed the fill-in artwork of Julio Ferreira and Eduardo Pansica, I couldn't really tell who did what, or maybe they worked together? It had a lot of the nice sharp angles Tony Daniel used to do, and it transitioned well enough from the previous art of both Daniel and Benes.
As for the Two-Face co-feature... Szymon Kudranski's artwork was as dark and moody as ever, and actually decently coherent in a perfect balance. But the story.... at this point I've completely lost what's going on here. I guess the beginning kind of made sense, but the final scene.... I have absolutely no idea what happened. It was written well enough that at first I was like 'Ha! That was pretty damn badass. And cold.' But then a split second later I just thought 'Wait.... what? Oh, none of that actually makes any goddamn sense. What the hell just happened?'
In Conclusion: 3/5
It's still better than the whole Penguin debacle or the massive deterioration of the Dollmaker arc, and it keeps up a lot of the nice B:TAS energy this arc began with; but at least I think that the story is leaning too flippantly on heavy science fiction elements to create a proper mood. Everything is street level Batman in tone, so the sci-fi elements feel out of place. And the Two-Face co-feature is just.... all style and no substance. Not entirely bad, but.... eh.
