Be careful what you wish for … maybe? Reading Joshua Williamson’s two Dawn of DC volumes of Batman and Robin, I wanted something with a few more teeth — if Batman and Robin, Bruce and Damian Wayne, made their peace, then whatever is this series even about? With the DC All In Batman and Robin Vol. 1: Memento, new series writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson has an answer … but I think some of you aren’t going to like it.

Whether intentionally or accidentally, there’s a sizable amount of the closeness between Bruce and Damian that developed under Williamson that Johnson just ignores. Further, Johnson presents a conception of Batman that’s bonkers really, outside the mainstream, and doesn’t line up with what we see in a variety of places.

Despite that (or even partially because of it), I’m pleased. Johnson crafts a serial killer mystery; there’s a bunch of obvious suspects around, but I’m still not sure the culprit. Between artists Javi Fernandez, Miguel Mendonca, and Carmine Di Giandomenico, this is a dark book in both illustration and tone; this isn’t a book where we’ll see high school food fights a la Williamson’s Batman and Robin run.

It’s a shame, perhaps, that the Batman and Robin characters had to take two steps back so this series could keep going forward. But I finished Memento excited for Johnson’s second volume (and at that point I had a year to wait) and I think that excitement is telling.

[Review contains spoilers]

Take, as a microcosm, Johnson’s first issue of Batman and Robin. It kicks off with a car chase and some death-defying acrobatics, well depicted by Fernandez, and where we see a lot of trust between Batman and Robin, working as a team. It’s very much in line with Williamson’s happy ending. But discordant notes begin to seep in; while Johnson shows Damian’s interest in art just as Williamson did, Batman still expresses concern that Damian is only Robin for the violence. The two begin to bicker, with Damian insulting the memory of Thomas Wayne, when lately we’d started to see Bruce and Damian grow more familial.

I am won over more by the former than the latter. While, again, the best case scenario was that Johnson could pick up from the present moment but still find ways to complicate things, I ultimately wanted strife; I think it makes Damian more interesting and not a carbon copy of the Robins before him. If the only way to do that is to roll things back a bit — the creative team even draws and portrays Damian younger than the high schooler from the last book — I don’t hate that as much as I expect some others would.

But I’ll venture, too, that Johnson takes it a little far. Bruce approaches Damian with “dinner. Usual micronutrients,” and later Damian mentions how they “never eat civilian food, except as a show for the cameras”. Surely Johnson doesn’t think Alfred’s covered trays weren’t gourmet meals, or are we to believe Bruce started feeding his son only “micronutrients” after Alfred’s death? There’s a chessboard that Bruce forbids Damian to touch because it’s set up with Bruce’s last chess game with the presumed-dead Ra’s al Ghul — as if that’s not weird on its own, or the board couldn’t be changed and reset if needed, or as if Bruce hadn’t just moved into Pennyworth Manor when the chessboard must have been packed up and unpacked anyway.

At one point, Batman and Robin are training, jumping from the rooftops while practicing foreign dialects, and Damian complains, “Why can’t we ever just talk?” As a metaphor, the scene is great, but viewing it from the lens of Williamson previous, it’s awful strange to see Damian being the one asking Bruce for more dialogue. Later, Bruce remarks, conveniently with Damian within earshot, that Damian is capable, “but based on grades, tests, all the usual metrics, he’s unremarkable at best”. That’s in Johnson’s issue #18, when in Williamson’s issue #13, a school counselor tells Damian he’s “arguably the smartest student we’ve ever had” at the Gotham high school. I recognize we’ve changed writers, but the continuity of character between the two runs is not strong.

Still, I’ll take all these nitpicks in exchange for the “Memento” storyline, essentially Batman hunting an immortal Jack the Ripper with much explosions and fire and gory crime scenes. The story very often flashes back to when Bruce sought the same killer during his training as a detective in London, and brilliantly, Di Giandomenico is brought in for these scenes, as if to present lost pages from Chip Zdarsky’s Batman: The Knight. The story is wonderfully creepy, Batman a la Sherlock Holmes; there’s the suggestion of the supernatural, which Batman immediately dismisses, and indeed I hope we’ve got a true whodunnit on our hands.

Phillip Kennedy Johnson wins and loses Batman and Robin Vol. 1: Memento in the details. It’s a fantastic suggestion, I’m surprised no one thought of it before, that people from Metropolis and Gotham have different accents; then again, a lot of action takes place in the ruins of Arkham Asylum, which I’m pretty sure was bulldozed to make way for an Orgham hotel. If you essentially graft Johnson’s Batman and Robin on to Peter Tomasi’s series circa 2011 and ignore everything that happened in between, that’s about the only way I can make Johnson’s portrayal of the Dynamic Duo make sense. That’s not good, maybe, but the book ends on a heck of a cliffhanger and I’m more excited for the next volume than I was between Joshua Williamson’s previous.

[Includes original and variant covers]