{"id":21253,"date":"2021-02-18T11:47:05","date_gmt":"2021-02-18T17:47:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/popculturenetwork.com\/wordpress\/?p=21253"},"modified":"2021-02-18T11:47:05","modified_gmt":"2021-02-18T17:47:05","slug":"future-state-dark-detective-1-2021-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/popculturenetwork.com\/wordpress\/2021\/02\/18\/future-state-dark-detective-1-2021-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Future State: Dark Detective #1 (2021) Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DC Comic\u2019s new publishing initiative of adding back-up stories and raising the cover price comes to Detective Comics for the Future State debacle in the form of Future State: Dark Detective. This time, the mediocre writing talents of Mariko Tamaki get the proper Bruce Wayne\/Batman story while the superior writing talents of Mathew Rosenberg get the mediocre character of Grifter to work with. Both stories run the full twenty-two pages of a modern comic book for the cover price of $5.99, but one delivers an action-packed narrative while the other drifts along, drowning in a meandering monologue.<\/p>\n

Dark Detective follows the story of Bruce Wayne after the events that led the public to believe that the Batman had been killed. Shot in a fight with The Magistrate, Batman makes his way to a back-alley doctor who stitches him up just enough to keep him from dying. Bruce emerges to find that Gotham City has now been told that the Batman died at the hands of The Magistrate and Bruce Wayne died sometime later. Of course, Bruce happens to find that crime is still a problem in Gotham, even with facial recognition drones and a militarized private police force, so he pieces together the remains of his Batsuit and what appears to be scraps of armor from The Magistrate\u2019s Peacekeepers and sets out to retrain and retake Gotham City.<\/p>\n

At the very basic level, Tamaki gets Bruce Wayne and his commitment to Gotham City correct. Tom King never quite seemed to understand Bruce\u2019s undying fealty to a city that openly seemed to despise him, so the writer gets points for structuring that part of the story correctly (though to be fair, that could\u2019ve easily been the story outline given by editorial). The problem is that she borrows heavily from the Tom King book of \u201cmake the character drone on endlessly in a pointless monologue that accomplishes nothing other than to make a 50-year-old man sound like an emo-teen.\u201d There\u2019s a moment where Bruce is confronted by a Blade Runner inspired version of Gotham City, with its high towers covered in bright lights and holographic imagery, and he has to run away with his head hung low in a full sprint towards a dark alley to escape the noise and the lights and the commotion, as if the New York City\/Chicago inspired Gotham City of old was never lit up or noisy. This scene plays out on a full splash page of art to give it some sort of falsely enhanced gravitas, but in reality, just wastes a page on what should\u2019ve been a panel on the bottom of the preceding page, at best.<\/p>\n

The art is from Dan Mora with colors by Jordie Bellaire, and it is beautiful to look at. Mora is able to make each character stand out and provides a wide range of expressions, making the story work at times when it shouldn\u2019t. It elevates the story beyond the script in many places, which is good because there\u2019s not a whole lot of meat on the bones of this story. However, there are a few puzzling issues plaguing the story and I wish there was a better explanation given as to what was happening. For instance, there\u2019s a flashback sequence of Bruce getting shot by Peacekeeper-01, the head of The Magistrate\u2019s police force, which is what lead to the stories of his death. He\u2019s in his Batsuit pants, t-shirt, and leather jacket. When we see the next flashback of him getting operated on, he\u2019s in jeans with kneepads and wearing his cowl to protect his identity. Did he change clothes to get a lifesaving operation from a back-alley doctor? If so, why change out of half a Batsuit to half a Batsuit? Is this an artist error or did the script specifically call for this? Someone get Cinema Sins on the line because I need to know how many points this kind of mistake is worth.<\/p>\n

The back-up story has a completely different problem. Grifter is not a Bat-family character and has no business being in this comic (but I guess Jim Lee has a mortgage too, so we\u2019re getting Wildstorm characters shoe-horned into the DC Universe these days). I really don\u2019t care for Grifter \u2013 it\u2019s not that I hate the character, but much like Marvel\u2019s Winter Soldier, I just don\u2019t have much of a reason to care about the guy. The only thing that makes Winter Soldier enjoyable is his buddy-cop team-ups with The Falcon, and Matthew Rosenberg must\u2019ve been reading my diary again because this Grifter story is a buddy-cop styled team-up with (former) Batwing, Luke Fox.<\/p>\n

Grifter is in an illegal high stakes card game when approached by two plainclothes police officers who out his real identity to everyone in the underground casino when he refuses to leave to talk to them. In the ensuing battle, the fight spills onto the street where The Magistrate is waiting to arrest Cole and take him away for being a masked vigilante. This is where he meets Luke Fox who is also locked-up in the paddy-wagon, even though he hasn\u2019t been Batwing for a long time. Luke offers Cole a lot of money to help get him out of Gotham City, and the hijinks begin. The story is just a downright fun action spectacle in the vein of an explosion laden popcorn flick. This is mini-series I\u2019d add to my regular list of pulls at the local comic shop, even though it has Grifter in it.<\/p>\n

Carmine Di Giandomenico and Antonio Fabela provide that artwork, and it\u2019s some of the best looking in any comic book on the shelves from any company publishing comics today. Di Giandomenico puts so much detail into every panel that you often find yourself looking at all the people and objects packed into each page. He\u2019s an artist from the same school as Ethan Van Sciver, so every poker chip, every windowpane, and every car headlight is drawn in and detailed. Fabela not only adds the proper colors to make things pop and come alive in the action, but the texture and depth is added when it needs to be. I\u2019ve marveled over Di Giandomenico\u2019s work before, and this story is another great work from him.<\/p>\n

So once again, the mix of stories from DC in these expanded issues are a mixed bag of quality. The art is top notch in both stories, and I can see how many people might not care about how shallow the feature story is because the art is so good, but I just can\u2019t let something that bad go without commenting on it because it is costing you money to read it. The $5.99 price tag is essentially getting you two comics for the price of two comics (drawing the line at $2.99), but I\u2019d honestly rather pay the modern standard of $3.99 for the stand alone tale by Matthew Rosenberg, because he knows how to put a good story together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DC Comic\u2019s new publishing initiative of adding back-up stories and raising the cover price comes to Detective Comics for the Future State debacle…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21255,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[54,885,1574],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/popculturenetwork.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/1973104_xl-1-e1613670408525.jpg?fit=899%2C615","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":21290,"url":"http:\/\/popculturenetwork.com\/wordpress\/2021\/03\/03\/future-state-dark-detective-3-2021-review\/","url_meta":{"origin":21253,"position":0},"title":"Future State: Dark Detective #3 (2021) Review","author":"DiRT","date":"March 3, 2021","format":"image","excerpt":"Well, that was... nothing. 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