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DC Comics Review: Detective Comics #855

Rating: ***

The first issue of the new Detective Comics featuring Batwoman as the lead character was very good.  I was not expecting to like it, but I was very surprised at how good it turned out.  Unfortunately, the second issue did not thrill me as much the first one did.  This issue wasn’t bad, in fact it was pretty good.  I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I did the last one. 

In the last issue we saw Batwoman was looking to find out who was the new leader of the Religion of Crime (ROC).  She discovered that the new leader was a woman who looks like a Goth version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice.  The cliffhanger for the last issue had Batwoman confronting Alice and shooting her.  We weren’t sure if the gun was a real gun or not and I thought that if it was, it would be a cool twist to the Batman universe to have one of Bruce’s “followers” use a gun.  It would have been very cool if DC went this route and it would have added to the story of Dick Grayson now being Batman, but DC did not go in this direction as the gun that Batwoman used was not a real gun.  It was a gun that shoots pepper spray bullets. 

Batwoman takes Alice away from her minions and uses something to dilute the effects of the pepper spray.  Batwoman wants to know what the ROC wants with her.  In a very cool scene, artist J.H. Williams III does something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in a comic.  He presents the POV of the story from the inside of Alice’s mouth.  There we see her fiddling around with a razor blade that she has in the inside of her mouth and then bites down on it and uses it as a knife to slash Batwoman in the face.  Very cool.  My hat is off to Mr. Williams on his work on this issue.  The way he tells the story written by Greg Rucka is very different.  It kind of reminds me of the work I saw Tony Harris do on the Starman title in the 90s.

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