Advance Review: ‘Whatever Happened To The Crimson Justice?’ #1 Channels ‘The Dark Knight Returns’
by Tom Smithyman
Overview
This creative team manages to take a seminal work of comics – The Dark Knight Returns – and somehow make it feel fresh. It doesn’t hurt that it looks great and has just enough surprises to keep readers coming back to see what’s next.
Overall
9/10If one thing is for certain, creators Frank Tieri and Inaki Miranda know how to grab your attention.
In the first few pages of their new limited series, Whatever Happened To The Crimson Justice?, the pair channel Gotham City’s Batsignal and Commissioner Gordon, only to violently kill him off.
It’s not Gotham, of course. This isn’t a DC book, but the parallels are clear. Tieri, who wrote the story, clearly patterned the heroic Crimson Justice after Batman and the seminal work The Dark Knight Returns. As in the Batman story, Crimson Justice has been retired for decades and now crime has returned with a vengeance to the city streets.
The street-level vigilante is nothing more than an urban legend. Though he’s actually running a breakfast shop downtown, and Tieri adds in a Batgirl-like character who is now reduced to performing sexual favors for cocaine. Metropolis, this is not.
Empire City, though, is a bit different from the Gotham City we know. Instead of Joker running around killing people, it’s Dr. Mayhem, who makes short work of former Police Commissioner Ted Burke in the opening pages. That caused John Redding to again don his scarlet costume.
The story clearly isn’t all that new, but in Tieri’s skilled hands, it feels surprisingly fresh. Perhaps it’s because we don’t know this universe like we do with DC. The trick for Tieri moving forward will be how, with this foundation already established, he’s going to further differentiate Crimson Justice’s tale.
Miranda’s artwork will clearly be a major ingredient in that recipe. He grabs us by the throat – almost literally – from the opening pages. His character designs are equal part Batman, Moon Knight, and Daredevil and any reader can instantly identify John as the retired hero just by looking at his aging but buff body and the lines on his face.
It will be interesting to see how this creative teams handles CJ’s return to the Empire City Streets, Will they go the conventional route, using DNK as a template, or instead chart their own course? Either way should be rewarding.
Whatever Happened To The Crimson Justice? #1 will be available at comic book shops on Wednesday, April 26th, 2025, from Mad Cave.
