Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Detective Comics #1013 Review


Freeze Frame

Writer: Peter J. Tomasi
Pencils: Doug Mahnke
Ink: Keith Champagne, Christian Alamy
Colors: David Baron
Letters: Rob Leigh
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: October 10th, 2019


Review by Joey Casco of TheWineStalker.net

In Detective #1012, Mr. Freeze was abducting women similar to Nora to use as guinea pigs on the serum that Lex had given him. His thugs had left one of the women in her house after she fell down and busted her head. When she woke up she called the cops, which alerted Batman to a rash of abductions. Freeze killed one of the thugs and, not knowing that Batman was on the case, sent the other one back to the house to collect the lady. But Batman was there waiting, he knocks the guy out with his fist.



Batman doesn't kill but he's all for possible seriously brain-damaging concussions. That won't escalate the crazy in Gotham, right?


#1013 starts with the thug waking up in an alley and Batman doing his big mean scary thing to get info. When the guy says he was just robbing the place, Batman points to the dead body of one of his pals and claims that he shoved him off the roof. So he uses his grappling gun to bring the guy up to the top of the building and threatens to drop him... so that bird sings like Tekashi 6ix9ine.




Also, that dead body wasn't really a dead body. It was another Oscar-worthy performance from Alfred. Batman makes a wisecrack that he could see him breathing, but according to King's Batman book it doesn't look like Alfred will be breathing for much longer anyway.


So Batman comes crashing in through the wall of Mr. Freeze's hideout wearing what looks to be a smaller version of the hellbat suit with a huge ass flamethrower. He tells Freeze to give up the women he's kidnapped. Freeze tells him "they have been drinking Gotham water laced with a special DNA strand of Nora's for several months now. Piped specifically to their residences."




How is that even possible???  Did he dig into their yard and put a thing on their pipes that slowly releases the DNA? That would make sense but that's not what he's saying. How are you going to dump DNA into Gotham water and make sure it goes to their houses specifically? I'm not a plumber but that sounds ridiculous.


The next part is cool though because it's a bit of an ode to old-school Mr. Freeze. He clicks a button and all of his failed experiments come back to life as ice zombies, like in 1979's Batman #308 which I retro reviewed back in April. Batman gets swarmed and Freeze gets away with Nora in a snow tank or whatever.


After Batman disables the transponders that animate the ice zombies, he catches up to Freeze but gets zapped off of the top of the tank, onto the ice, and into the freezing water. That was a really cool scene.




I'm really trying to avoid spoiling endings so more stuff happens, but you're going to have to read the comic to find out.


Bits and Pieces


I absolutely loved the art. And just the way the issue is laid out to compliment the visuals are great (the zombie attack and the snowmobile chase are intense because of the way it's all put together). Again, I think that's been Tomasi's strength on Detective. But I still just don't care for the story. It's not incredibly awful like what's going on over in Superman, it's just... meh.



6.5/10

4 comments:

  1. Wondered the same damn thing about the water being pumped to specific houses. Jim was saying last issue about how it was a big deal that it had to be these women, but by the end of the issue it seemed like it could have really been anybody. This seems forced to (sort of) explain why it had to be these women.
    I also seems that almost everything that Freeze was doing doesn't matter because it seems he was able to do what he wanted without needing any of the women or equipment from the lab.

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    1. You guys aren't getting me excited to read this one!

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    2. It has some moments and is still above King (not a high bar). Theres a moment with alfred when they get back to the cave that had me chuckling.

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    3. It was okay...I am really worried, though, since Tomasi hasn't been nailing the endings lately

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