Batman Detective Comics Vol. 1: Faces of Death (New 52) - Tony S. Daniel

⭐ 6.5/10

(Originally written by Joseph)

This was a reboot of the Detective Comic series (Batman's original comic) a couple years back, and led by a guy who does both the art and the writing?! That's pretty rare, and I was pretty impressed this guy has the ability to do both. If a comic writer can do both it's usually pretty beneficial because they can usually capture the vision a lot better than if it's disjointed.

I usually really love the detective comics because they focus on the more grounded, noir aspects of Batman and less of the saving the world stuff. This has mostly everything I usually like. It was dark, gritty, hardboiled and generally pretty badass. Yet, I never fell in love with it. The writing was pretty inconsistent, and I found it oddly difficult to follow the art here, though it certainly looked good. It fell back on some tropes I didn't love (Batman always being a step behind the baddies and having to fight his way out, for one), and lost focus a few times. It starts to weave a few threads that I presume are meant to come together in later volumes, but this one just felt a little all over the place. Not sure I'll continue on in this series.