Review: Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 2: Elixir hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Tom Taylor has proven his stature as one of DC’s preeminent writers several times over, so I don’t think anyone is concerned that one middling story is a sign of real trouble, or even an ill portent for his Detective Comics run.

Add to it that Taylor’s three-issue story in Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 2: Elixir falls between a seven-part story and a six-part story, that both of those stories have renowned artist Mikel Janin while this one has a fill-in, and that more than a few DC titles are marking time now in various ways to link up with the aftermath of DC K.O., plus there’s also the Detective #1100 anniversary issue to accommodate, and the reasons Elixir is what it is become even more clear.

What’s here is not bad by any measure, it’s just unremarkable, in the way Detective Comics can sometimes be and also as befits an interstitial three-parter, an annual, and an anniversary issue. All of this is measured, too, against Taylor’s Detective debut, which was impressive enough that this one can’t help but pale.

[Review contains spoilers]

With the “Elixir” story, Taylor is unfortunately a victim of his own success. His Detective Comics Vol. 1: Mercy of the Father unfolded along well-tread lines, but it was violent and suspenseful, with mystery and pathos and even some doomed romance for Bruce Wayne, plus art by Janin. “Elixir” has plenty of charm, but it’s hard to beat that opening scene of Mercy, Batman in a cell standing over a bleeding victim, being goaded to let the man die.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

All that went back to Batman’s origins, but here there’s no personal stakes and hardly even innocent victims in harm’s way. I have liked artist Lee Garbett’s work plenty, but in comparison it doesn’t have Janin’s steel-eyed gravitas. Over three parts, Batman tracks down the bad guys and defeats them without much difficulty; if Mercy hadn’t been so good, this would be more than passable, but it was.

The charm of the story is that it teams Batman with Harvey Bullock and Penguin Oswald Cobblepot, all marooned in the Elixir cult’s compound overseas. Batman plays it cool but clearly working with a tough-as-nails cop and hardscrabble gangster unlocks something for him; see how easily Batman goes along with a ruse to make cult leader Ambrose think he’s going to be tortured. The trio are not quite the legendary pairing of vigilante Batman, commissioner Jim Gordon, and district attorney Harvey “Two-Face” Dent, but if you squint a little … “You shouldn’t have @#%&# with Gotham,” Bullock retorts at the end, as three of the city’s most storied sons walk away triumphant, and that seems perhaps the point of the whole thing.

As with Mercy (and no small amount of Taylor’s other works), the story has some social/moral resonance — here, that the Elixir cultists have become “so obsessed with not dying” that they have “forgotten to live” — and also that the whole of the Elixir cult turns out to be a pyramid scheme. But Taylor made Elixir seem exceptionally dangerous in Mercy, whereas in “Elixir” he takes the piss out of them, revealing the leader to be a guy in a glass jar cut off from society. It’s a tone change, I get it, it’s surprising, but I liked Elixir better when I knew less and they were scarier than when they’ve been brought into the light. The end of the story is verily anti-danger, anti-suspense.

Following, the Detective Comics 2025 Annual contains two stories, one by Al Ewing and one by Joshua Hale Fialkov. Ewing’s is brilliant if mildly long, Batman solving a locked room mystery, and it lives up to the “detective” moniker enough to make me wonder what Ewing on the title might be like. I know Fialkov mostly from his horror work, so this mild story Batman teaming with a precocious seventh grader, with ebullient art by Mike Norton, is an interesting change of pace.

Detective #1100 progresses along similar lines. Taylor and Janin spin a nice silent story of Batman retrieving a deaf child’s stolen dog. It’s heart-warming and it’s got Ace the Bat-Hound in it, though there’s a bizarre suggestion at the end that Batman spends an inordinate amount of time finding lost pets; also in order to misdirect us into thinking that the boy’s dog has died, Batman ends up keeping the dog in a closed box longer than really makes sense. Which is to say, a couple times Taylor chooses sentiment over logic, which is fine for a short anthology story but maybe it would be even stronger if he hadn’t?

Mariko Tamaki’s ironic story of hero Batman getting drubbed as do-nothing Bruce Wayne at a charity even reminds of the rich Gotham cast of her own Detective Comics run. But, the Bronze Age-y action sequences by Amancay Nahuelpan with Joker on a Joker-themed motorcycle added a note of camp that I didn’t think was useful. Dan Watters plus Bill Sienkiewicz is a treat, though it remains still what we have are a series of flash-in-the-pan Batman stories without real resonance.

To that end, the only story that felt meaningful to me was Greg Rucka’s “Knife and Gun Club,” which introduces characters next to appear in his “Gotham General” Bad Seeds tie-in. I’ll accept the argument that I’m missing other good trees for the trees I’m focused on, but at the same time, I mourn the days when anniversary issues were big deals (annuals, too), at least partially starting or completing big storylines, and not just forums for index stories. There’s not a particular amount of difference between Detective #1100, the annual, and even Detective Comics #1000 and Detective Comics #1027 and that suggests to me something’s been lost in the process.

So, Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 2: Elixir is Tom Taylor’s second volume in his Detective run, follow-up to his dynamic Mercy of the Father, and it is not as good, on its own and in the ways that it’s an anthology collection for reasons somewhat specious. I’m eager for something meatier next time.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.25