Review: Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 6: The Road to Ruin hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Peter Tomasi’s been shepherding the Bat-family for about 10 years now. Arguably he is as much, if not even more so, a steward of the modern Robin Damian Wayne as the character’s creator Grant Morrison is. Tomasi has seen Damian through a long (even death-defying) run on Batman and Robin, followed by a Superman run that was as much about the Kents as it was Superboy Jon Kent’s burgeoning friendship with Damian (not to mention Super Sons), and into Detective Comics, where Tomasi has narrated Bruce Wayne and Damian’s relationship hitting an increasingly rough patch.

So, with no new Bat-work on the horizon, Tomasi’s Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 6: The Road to Ruin is a notable book, the last in Tomasi’s decade-long Bat-adjacent work and his good-bye to Damian before another writer, Joshua Williamson, takes over Damian’s story in earnest. (Damian’s previous series by Tomasi’s frequent collaborator Patrick Gleason still felt very much within Tomasi’s jurisdiction.)

One does miss Gleason here, or Tomasi’s other frequent artist Doug Mahnke. The artists in Ruin — Brad Walker, Bilquis Evely, Nicola Scott, and Kenneth Rocafort — don’t lack for talent, but certain elements fall flat, as if they might be better handled by someone more familiar with Tomasi’s beats. Tomasi gets to say his farewells, really the important thing, but it’s amidst coincidences, storylines that don’t quite mesh, and poorly explained elements. This feels like a Detective volume caught between continuing on and closing up, and it’s the worse for it.

[Review contains spoilers]

I was reminded of Tomasi’s Superman Vol. 4: Black Dawn in the climactic story of Road to Ruin. Tomasi uses Hush, a weighty Batman villain for his time that gives the story some heft, just as he used Manchester Black in Superman — but like that story, Tomasi relies mainly on the reader’s prior knowledge of Hush for any sort of dramatic effect. Hush is simply, suddenly present, apparently able at a moment’s notice to take advantage of another villain’s chaos to single-handedly incapacitate and kidnap almost every member of the Bat-family, many of whom we’d consider among the best fighters in the DC world.

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Tomasi makes a lot of Hush Tommy Elliot’s hatred of Bruce Wayne, but he doesn’t have anything particularly new to say, nor does Hush’s vendetta have much to do with the conflict between Bruce and Damian that underscores the story. (Artist Walker also layers Bruce and Tommy’s childhood memories over their current fisticuffs in a way I found confusing and hard to read.) Without much work, Hush could as easily be Mad Hatter or Professor Pyg here, as much as it matters; clearly the villain isn’t the point, but then there’s a mismatch in Tomasi offering too much detail for Hush to be ignored entirely.

Add to that as well a sequence in which Damian discovers that Tommy paid his long-lost aunt to try to kill Bruce and Alfred when Bruce was a child — something that is total coincidence to Hush attacking the Bat-family now. This is meant to be a demonstration of Damian solving the unsolved cases in Batman’s Black Casebook, but much like Hush taking down Nightwing, Batgirl, Batwoman, etc., the mind boggles that Damian could solve through one illicit perusal of Gotham PD’s files a case that apparently Batman couldn’t solve since his childhood. Clearly Tomasi knows what to do with Hush, he knows what to do with Bruce and Damian, but on the page it emerges unpolished.

The same is true of the book’s second story (following a one-off first issue). While I like the book’s thread of growing anti-vigilante sentiment, Tomasi expresses it through a villain called the Mirror, who not only shares a name and some visual attributes with a villain in Gail Simone’s Batgirl run, but also some looks and motivations with the First Victim of James Tynion’s Detective run. There’s that reductive element, and also that Tomasi’s writing of the Bat-family in the story seems off — Nightwing greeting Batman with “Hey, Bats,” and Cassandra Cain using even such mild slang as “for sure.” I adore Evely’s art, but here’s where I wonder if things were staged differently by another artist — Nightwing were swinging in or etc. — what seems unusual here might not otherwise be so strange.

Again, I do very much like the book’s thread of anti-vigilante sentiment. How much is Tomasi and how much is incoming writer Mariko Tamaki, I’m not sure (since Tamaki seems to be running with this storyline in a way that’s unusual for one writer following another). But while Batman with a Batman-hating mayor is a little old hat, the difference is that Christopher Nakano comes to his mistrust honestly, due to trauma and not because he’s trying to cover his own corruption. This gives Nakano’s story an honest political bent that’s enjoyable, and also the clash of pro- and anti-vigilante groups seems an obvious metaphor for the real-world political landscape. I am eager to see where Tamaki goes with this.

We find the real heart of Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 6: The Road to Ruin in the recalcitrant Damian attacking his father, but at the same time when they reach a stalemate, giving in with one final “tt.” And further, when the lives of the Bat-family are on the line, Damian’s dislike of his father is far lesser than his care for his friends, all of which Tomasi sees well. There’s a hokey “Let’s do this!” but also a nice page of flashbacks to Bruce and Damian’s greatest hits and a cameo by the Batman and Robin logo.

2.25

Rating

In 10 years of DC steadily shaving off Damian’s rough edges — even Peter Tomasi’s been guilty of this a time or two — I’m pleased to see Tomasi write Damian off into the sunset as someone still struggling to find his own way and his own set of morals, not just a copy of every Robin before him. Now, Damian next appears in a Robin series, so let’s not kid ourselves that DC’s really going to do anything markedly different with this character, but it’s good enough for Tomasi’s ending. That, and a car-full of Bruce and Damian’s Bat-menagerie, one more time.

[Includes original and variant covers, cover sketches]