Review: Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 4: Riddle Me This hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

I was a little annoyed going in to Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 4: Riddle Me This, given that it was another short trade (a scant three issues, even including the “Gotham Girl, Interrupted” backup stories) following the similarly short Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 3: Arkham Rising, which read like too much filler. Between those two books, of course, was the 12-part Batman: Shadows of the Bat event, which thankfully DC released all in one volume, but it’s made for some slim trades in the interim.

But by and large writer Mariko Tamaki has delivered with her Detective Comics run, and her final volume is no exception. Even at three issues, Riddle Me This turns out to be dense and compelling, buffered by a spotlight on one of my favorite of the new characters Tamaki introduced in Detective. It all falls apart spectacularly in the end, whether due to an unexpected end of the run or just regular storytelling woes, but it’s a good book nonetheless and definitely doesn’t feel as short as it is.

[Review contains spoilers for Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 4: Riddle Me This and Batman: Shadows of the Bat: The Tower]

Grizzled reporter Deb Donovan has featured in Tamaki’s Detective, outlasting a few others that Tamaki introduced in Gotham’s social-political circle, and even expanding from the title to lead in to Matthew Rosenberg’s Task Force Z. As of Shadows of the Bat: The Tower, we’ve even seen the grumpy-but-crusading Donovan slipping information to Batwoman Kate Kane, and in a heatbeat I’d read a Batwoman series by Tamaki with Donovan as Gordon to Kate Kane’s Batman.

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In three issues, Riddle Me This might’ve been a run-of-the-mill Riddler story, but it gets a big boost by spotlighting Donovan’s personal life — namely, her troubled relationship with her daughter Caroline, who turns out to be a Gotham City judge, and also apparently in the thrall of the Riddler. Batman is nearly beside the point here in the face of Bruce Wayne’s burgeoning relationship with Caroline and the triangle it creates given Deborah’s disdain for both Bruce and Batman.

Add to it the quite unexpected presence of Talia al Ghul, so soon after Batman: Shadow War and Checkmate, as well as a few surprising moments of violence, and Riddle kept my attention the whole time. The themes of justice being fickle and unfairly applied are not particularly new nor delivered with new insight here, but neither would I dismiss four pages of Bruce Wayne talking philosophy over a dinner date. What Tamaki lacks for in page count in Riddle, she makes up for with lots of good dialogue.

But by the end of the book it appears as though the scheme here stems from Dr. Chase Meridian, of Batman Forever and the recent Shadows of the Bat: The Tower fame, giving information on her patients' unpunished crimes to the Riddler. The whys and wherefores are never spelled out, nor the fact that this conflicts entirely with Tamaki’s own portrayal of Meridian as on the side of the angels in Shadows of the Bat. The conclusion feels as if filtered through a game of “Telephone,” what one might expect if it were already some other writer picking up a little confusedly from the end of Tamaki’s run (I don’t know if the fact of Tamaki having a co-writer for this story, Nadia Shammas, has anything to do with it). That Sina Grace’s Gotham Girl story also suggests different nefarious deeds on Meridian’s part, but ultimately settles on another culprit, only confuses the issue more.

There’s a lovely moment at the end of the “Riddle” story in which Batman thanks Batgirl Cassandra Cain for coming to help him free the Riddler’s hostages, which reminded me how much I miss their particular — and often less angst-y — partnership from the “New Gotham” days. But even with Ivan Reis on art, it’s somewhat hard to discern what’s happening in this climactic scene — not only what is or isn’t Chase Meridian’s role in all of this and what happens to her, but who’s talking when Batman answers Caroline’s phone (since Caroline is literally tied up at the moment) and who then continues to taunt Batman through a loudspeaker. In the conclusion, it seems Talia pointed Riddler toward Deborah Donovan and then Riddler found about about legal malfeasance by Caroline on his own, but why Talia should signal Deborah as a way for the Riddler to get to Batman — versus Vicki Vale, Chase Meridian, Mayor Nakano and family, or any other of a variety of Gotham residents — is equally unclear.

I appreciate when characters aren’t simply shunted off to limbo, and so it’s pleasing to see Sina Grace resurrect Tom King’s Gotham Girl Claire Clover. Grace posits Claire as younger than I recall, still in high school (that may be right, I’m not sure, it’s been seven years since Batman: Rebirth) and the story is noticeably out of step with current Bat-events — Claire living in Wayne Manor when isn’t Oracle just downstairs in the Batcave, and also the idea that Claire was just in, and now out of, Arkham Tower, when we otherwise know everyone there was being controlled by the Psycho Pirate, not to mention the business with Chase Meridian. Still, I enjoyed Grace’s conception of Claire as a superhero more than happy to knock your head in, but who also talks enough sense to convince a team of black-ops mercenaries of a case mistaken identity and have them help her hack a computer.

2.25

Rating

Over five volumes, concluding with Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 4: Riddle Me This, Mariko Tamaki has taken the premise of a Bruce Wayne demoted from billions to millions and turned it into a rousing glimpse of Gotham’s upper-crust social scene. Tamaki combined this generally realistic base — the moneyed interacting with Gotham politics and the Gotham press — with a near over-the-top helping of parasitic space aliens, before touching back down for a wild 12-part Bat-family epic that, at it’s base, was simply about a scheme to bilk Gotham City out of government funds. I adored this run — which also gave us Dan Mora ahead of Batman/Superman: World’s Finest — and I’d be happy to see more from Tamaki at DC (looks like a little Supergirl, to start).

[Includes original and variant covers]