The Batman titles of the Dawn of DC era were surely a study in contrasts. At the same time Batman has been shunted to an alternate Earth by his psychic doppleganger in Chip Zdarsky’s Batman, Ram V has what’s in many ways a very ground-level Batman story in his Detective Comics.

Though Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 2: Gotham Nocturne: Act 1 involves a werewolf and a sentient music tune and a “reality engine” that can control the fates of cities, at its base we have a somewhat regular, low-key Batman story — a would-be conquerer and his minions come to Gotham and only Batman stands in their way. If there’s similarities to Bane, Bird, Trogg, and Zombie or to the rise of the Court of Owls, it’s because these stories follow somewhat similar tropes.

I thought I understood that Ram V’s “Gotham Nocture” would at some point get much more esoteric, but for now, I don’t mind that this one’s more sedate, a bit slower and more methodical. Ram V is pulling in all sorts of different directions — Bruce Wayne and the conquering Orghams, but also Renee Montoya and Two-Face and the Ten-Eyed Man(!) and Lian Harper with Solomon Grundy. It is talky, perhaps to a fault, but there’s something lovely about sitting down to five volumes of this, a la the Batman Eternal-type weekly series of years past. As I say more and more these days, this one will be great in the inevitable omnibus.¹

[Review contains spoilers]

To embrace the metaphor of Ram V’s gothic opera, there’s a few refrains that repeat through Act I of “Gotham Nocturne” — encounters between sons of Gotham Bruce Wayne and Arzen Orgham; Batman throwing himself against the Orgham servants, particularly lycanthrope Gael Tenclaw. Also, in the span of five regular issues, Ram V has Batman waking from unconsciousness no less than three times, which could be seen as a writing flaw but also contributes to the sense of this “act” going over the same melodies, each time slightly changed.

There is much discussion here of old Gotham versus new. Jim Gordon is specifically worried that both he and Batman are getting too old for this; even new commissioner Renee Montoya is accused of not embracing Gotham’s progress. Of course, we know that “new” in this instance means the Orghams' evil scheme, so perhaps we can state here the “message” of Ram V’s Detective is that “new” doesn’t necessarily equate “better” (the guiding principle of mainstream superhero comics writ large).

At the same time, the included annual shows that Batman was not Gotham’s first “Bat” nor Arzen Gotham’s first Orgham, so as to suggest concepts of “old” and “new” are meaningless, and instead it’s just the same cycles repeating over and over.

“Gotham Nocture”’s biggest contribution to the mythos continues to be the outright intimation that Gordon knows Batman’s identity. This is communicated often by the almost laughable lengths to which Gordon goes to establish he doesn’t know the identity, removing Batman’s mask in the dark and sitting on the other side of a doorway while Bruce changes — but then, Gordon matter-of-factly sends Bruce a text message to let Batman know something’s up. I’m still interested in how explicit this will get, whether it ultimately lines up with Batman and Gordon in Zdarsky’s Batman Vol. 5: The Dying City or if Gordon in the two books is just coincidence.

I appreciate that Simon Spurrier’s backup stories, mostly about Two-Face Harvey Dent, pull from Two-Face’s far-reaching history — we are still hashing out events from Peter Tomasi’s New 52-era Batman and Robin Vol. 5: The Big Burn and Detective Comics Vol. 5: The Joker War, so around a decade’s worth of history. But the faux tough guy voice that Spurrier (and even Ram V) write for the internal monologue of Harvey Dent’s Two-Face side grates; it’s less intimidating than it reminds of Baby Herman: “Whadda you think, ya putz?”

The backups overall both distract and detract from the main story. For every one winner, like Spurrier and Dani’s gritty multi-perspective one-off, there’s the Two-Face stories or these that focus on psychologist Dr. Mead, who has the terrible luck (some might even say “ridiculous”) to escape Two-Face’s captivity only to be kidnapped by Mr. Freeze. Spurrier’s voice for Mead is overdone just like his voice for Two-Face (“…Th-this stupid song! I c-c-can’t stop hearing it. F-f-feeling it!”) such to make it hard to care about her plight, plus the poor judgment in introducing an important character but then dubbing it “Earworm.” Weirdly, too, Spurrier’s three-part stories don’t break at the same time as Ram V’s, such that a part of “Tale of Three Halves” is back in Detective Comics Vol. 1: Gotham Nocturne: Overture and, having read a book in between, I don’t really remember it; similarly this volume ends on the second of the three-part “Absolute.”

I want to take Ram V at his (admittedly unspoken) word as relates to “Gotham Nocturne”; that is, Overture was the overture and Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 2: Gotham Nocturne: Act 1 is indeed the first act. But if you’re in the restroom during the overture, you can still come in during Act 1 and only have missed some music, which is not the case here. Similarly, one expects an act to have its own self-contained arc, which maybe we see in Bruce growing suspicious of the Orghams over this volume, but there wasn’t much in the way of climactic action. That is, I’m not sold on “Gotham Nocturne” as an opera quite yet (the musical bits are mostly relegated to the backups), but it’s holding my interest as a Detective Comics story.

[Includes original and variant covers, scripts and pencils]