Detective Comics #13 Review

I am going to be honest from the start here. I have read maybe two detective comics issues at the most in the New 52, and did not like them whatsoever. I found the story a bit overcomplicated, however I think I chose a bad time to attempt to jump on board with it. The book now has a new creative team consisting of Layman and Fabok starting with this issue so I decided to give it another go, hoping I would like it.

Luckily for me I really enjoyed this issue, and I'm hoping for more of the same from these guys. The story focuses around the Penguin who has hired a group of assassins called the "Ghost Dragons" to assassinate Bruce Wayne. This is in order to stop him from attending the opening of the new Martha Wayne children's wing at Neville community centre, so Penguin can have it named after his own family instead. During the night of the ceremony, Batman is away on the other side of the city tackling crimes that have been started by The Penguin's cronies. These have been set up to keep him out of the way of the planned assassination. Batman soon figures this out so leaves Nightwing to deal with the criminals so he can attend the ceremony. We then see the Penguin convincing the head of the community centre to name the ward after the Cobblepots, which he agrees to do out of fear. The Penguin then attempts to call off the hit on Bruce as he was late arriving for the opening anyway due to his Batman duties. However, the Ghost Dragons do not accept failure and seem to like to finish off their jobs...

I think this is a really solid first issue from the new creative team and sets up what looks to be an interesting story arc. Yes, the Ghost Dragons will end up to be no match for Batman, but I am keen to see the inevitable confrontation with The Penguin. Only complaint about this issue is that I'm not too sure about The Penguins' motivations yet ( doing this so people will respect him out of love and not fear) seems pretty odd.. However I see this arc as probably just being used as a jumping on point for people like me who failed to jump on at other points. The back up story, which was also written by Layman, was very interesting and fun. This focused solely on a couple of The Penguins henchmen doing their bit in setting up the operation. It did a great job of showing the individual character traits of both men in such a small space of time, which is obviously pretty hard to do.

Faboks' art was brilliant throughout the book, from the cover to the last page, and I am looking forward to seeing him draw more on this book. There is one panel in particular which shows The Penguin threatening the head of the centre to change the name of the ward, which emphasises the fear on the guys face to perfection.  This has started off as a promising new start for detective comics, from an exciting creative partnership. I encourage anyone to pick it up, even if you have not read any detective up to this point in time.

Rating:  8/10