Two Sides To Every Story: Reviewing ‘Detective Comics’ #1070

Solomon Grundy was born on a Monday, died on Saturday, was buried on Sunday, and is fighting off Azmers today. That’s right, everyone’s favorite lumbering reanimated sometimes villain sometimes anti-hero has burst his way into the Orghams’ plans for Gotham.

Gotham City is of course home to Batman and his wide swath of allies and villains but plenty of other characters call the place home as well. One of those characters is Solomon Grundy, who began his comic history in 1944 and spent many years as a foe of the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott. As someone inherently part of Gotham, since his origins were being murdered and dumped into Slaughter Swamp in most incarnations, it’s perfect to fit the character in here underground as the being who stumbles across the Orgham’s people and their camps of those they displaced and kidnapped in Gotham. Also being the dead person walking around provides quite a nice shield against the Azmer demons that the Orghams are using to corrupt/take over people.

Ram V has such a natural ability to weave together various characters and scenarios in a seamless way. From the opening with Solomon Grundy and Cheshire Cat/Shoes/Lian to the bits with Batman pontificating about Gotham and his space as Batman to an origin story told by Talia al Ghul about how her father and the Orghams were connected. It’s all there and has plenty of room to grow and breathe without feeling confined or lesser compared to any other plotline/moment/character in the story.

Long-running comic stories such as this one tend to go one of two ways. Either they are a delight and grow from month to month in a way that the readers are craving more of the story, or they can feel like a bit of a slog for the reader as they wait hungrily for months for even a crumb of revelation or character development. Writing this type of story in a medium that (at least in some spaces) still runs on a monthly release model is tough. Trying to balance when to reveal information or not based upon what one thinks will keep the audience invested is rough, as there is no easy answer or formula for these things. Luckily for us all, Detective Comics 100% easily slots into the first type of long-form comic book storytelling.

Character elements are something that Ram V excels at handling, making sure that even someone like Batman/Bruce, who we ‘know’ from decades of stories, is given depth and moments for us to truly feel the character. One of the things I really have enjoyed in this run that gets so overlooked is making Batman feel older and someone very aware of the toll the long battle is taking and unsure if he’ll ever see it through. We can feel the weight upon Bruce’s shoulders as he is at his parents’ grave and the captions showcase how he’s feeling about everything and his introspection about how broken he is and how broken the city/system can be that he is trying to fix.

With this issue, Stefano Raffaele goes solo with the artistic duties after sharing those with Dexter Soy and Miguel Mendonca in the previous issue while Adriano Lucas and Ariana Maher continue on the coloring and lettering duties respectively.

One of the things that the various artists that have jumped into this story have shared is a rough quality to the overall art, whether that is their natural/normal artistic style, or they are able to add to/alter their normal style for this story, giving it all a bit of a cohesiveness no matter who is handling the art in any given issue. Raffaele brings a great sense of depth to the world as the sewers feel very confined, especially with the massive bulk of Solomon Grundy within them (and the horror aspects of his face are perfect), while other spaces feel as wide or confined as they need to be in the moment.

Another favorite thing that Raffaele has done that I’m becoming very fond of in art is having one massive panel on a page while there are numerous other overlapping sequential panels placed upon it, usually in the lower half. There are various pages with this exact style very early on. It’s such a cool thing because it allows the overall moment to take priority and lord over all other things, while the other attached moments are right there for the eyes to easily drift down to as we move further into the story. Sometimes they are different sizes too, adding some more energy and uniqueness to the visual as not every moment is exactly the same as or weighted the same as another.

Having covered Lucas over on Nightwing for quite some time now it’s really nice to see this different side of coloring compared to the bright and shiny world that belongs to Dick Grayson’s book. Here there are vivid splashes of color but they are often muted and/or surrounded by the ever-present darkness that persists within Gotham City and is a companion to Batman at all times. Much like the artwork itself, there is a sharpness to the colors as they weave through the story and move toward different ends of the spectrum as necessary. Accurate lighting effects added to each space also give the colors their own unique space as a dark flashback, daytime in a graveyard, in the sewers, and numerous other settings all have their own energy and color palate of sorts that shifts depending on the tone of light/non-light that would be present there.

All the captions and various bits of dialogue that help move this story and the characters forward are doing a ton of work in these issues, and Maher is always there to make sure they hit even more than they already would. Much like how I noted that Ram V knows how to hit all the character beats and how to weave a story of this length, hitting all the right notes and bits of energy to make lettering work is what Maher does and does so well. Hands down one of my favorite letterers and surely at the top of the best ones in the business, no doubt of that at all. All the big and little things that she does to make the various bits of lettering feel unique or personal to a character/moment really sing and add so much to any issue that she works upon.

Backup stories have fluctuated in and out of common usage when it comes to many major comic book series, and how they are used changes too. Honestly how they are used here by Simon Spurrier and his various artistic collaborators is the best way to do them. Each multi-part story is a chunk of the overall story that Ram V is telling but shifting the focus to characters or moments that help deepen the main story. Some of them are ones that would take the main story too far off course or would make the already long story even longer, so doing them as a backup keeps them close to the story and makes the idea of backups feel worth it to the series as a whole.

Spurrier handles all the characters, from allies to rogues to characters new and old, brilliantly within these spaces. Seeing what Freeze is trying to do and what it is doing to Doctor Mead, as well as getting more depth to how they both continue to feature in this story. Especially since it deals more with the personification of the tune being heard in Gotham as well as brings Gordon’s young charge/associate Sorrow into the mix.

Casper Wijngaard has such a beautiful, whimsical, colorful, and vivid sort of artistic style. It captures all the depth, emotion, and detail that one would need to see from these sorts of moments but adds a very creative unique almost surreal sort of appeal that is befitting this type of story. All the bright whites, blues, pinks, and other colors really pop and stand out from the scattered colors that are more toned-down or realistic that make sure the space feels real but also feels unreal as things of this nature should. This pairs well with the lettering work that Steve Wands is doing that easily shifts to capture that same energy.

From how cold and clinical the speech of Freeze is compared to the very clinical or logical but also very real and emotional energy that Doctor Mead’s captions have, or the soft-spoken words of Sorrow or the eerie words of the musical entity.  All of them shift and change in ways that make sure that we can feel their presence but also hear their tones and volumes at all times.

Detective Comics #1070 is now available from DC Comics.