Detective Comics (unofficially
Detective Comics Rebirth, or
TEC) is a 2016 twice-monthly comic book published by
DC Comics as part of their
Rebirth initiative, written by James Tynion IV with art by Eddy Barrows and Alvaro Martínez. It marks a return the original numbering of
Detective Comics, which was relaunched in 2011 as part of
The New 52.
note The 52 issues of Detective Comics vol. 2 have been folded into this renumbering, which resumes at #934.Upon discovering the existence of a large, violent, technologically-advanced organization operating in Gotham's shadows and targeting the city's various vigilantes, Batman enlists the help of Kate Kane (
Batwoman) to lead a "Gotham bootcamp" for some of Gotham's younger crimefighters. Batman reasons that Kate's various forms of military training are best suited to quickly prepare a group of trainees for an all-but-certain battle against their new foe, and Batwoman accepts, eager for another chance to have a leadership role that she was denied after her dismissal from the Army.
Together, Bruce and Kate recruit
Stephanie Brown (Spoiler),
Tim Drake (Red Robin),
Cassandra Cain (Orphan), and
Basil Karlo (Clayface).
The series is also notable for being part of the first
Batfamily Crossover of the Rebirth era:
Night of the Monster Men, a storyline beginning in late September 2016 that also includes the Rebirth volumes of
Batman and
Nightwing.
The series began on June 8, 2016.
Detective Comics provides examples of the following tropes:
- Adorkable: Subverted rather creepily with The General, who comes across as this at first, before chatting about killing people with Dissonant Serenity.
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The Colony manages to pull this off on the brand new Belfry.
- Ambiguous Disorder: Word of God states that Cass is "neurologically atypical," which is reasonable given her extreme upbringing. However, James Tynion has said he will not be more specific than that, to avoid potential stereotyping of any particular mental illness.
- Ambiguous Situation: The existence of the League of Shadows - Jacob Kane believes they exist and has a list of people within Gotham who were planted members of the group. Batman claims that the group is a myth that Ra's al Ghul made up to keep the League of Assassins in line, so they wouldn't try anything stupid.
- Word of God confirms the existence of the League of Shadows.
- Amicable Exes: Downplayed in the case of Kate and Renee Montoya, as shown in #936. They're not exactly friends, but Renee clearly still cares enough about Kate to meet her in a bar and lend an ear to Kate's current frustrations, even if Renee is a bit outwardly gruff. Renee even gives a small bit of guidance to Kate before she leaves.
- ...but then kind of played "straight" in #943, as Renee all but admits she called Kate to a crime scene instead of Batman since she wanted to see her.
- And played even further "straight" in #944, complete with banter and genuine concern in the middle of a firefight.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Throughout the first arc, Batman maintains that the League of Shadows is just a myth, despite the fact that he thought the exact same thing about the Court of Owls and was later proven wrong.
- Ascended Fanboy: Upon encountering Batman, the General geeks out, tries to take a selfie with Batman... then tries to shoot him.
- Attack Pattern Alpha: How the Colony's infantry functions. A complex algorithm based off of years of video footage of Batman in action analyzes a given situation and feeds each soldier a sequence of moves to perform, displayed on a HUD in their helmets.
- Awful Truth: Batman didn't tell Batwoman that he knew her father was leading the Colony to make sure she wouldn't warn him, as Batman couldn't afford that happening. Which, to Bruce's credit, is absolutely what she'd do, though not intentionally. It would be very much in Kate's character to confront her father directly, without thinking it through, which would have tipped Jacob off to how much Bruce knew.
- Bald Women: Downplayed in Kate Kane's case. She sports a buzzcut in the first arc of this series (as opposed to her more iconic bobbed hair) and thus isn't completely bald, and her hair isn't commented on in any way.
- Batman Gambit:
- Batman himself actually is a pawn in one. He gets ambushed by the Colony and gets the everloving crap beat out of him before getting captured. This causes Batwoman to assemble the rest of the team at the Belfry. She also contacts her father, a Colonel, after recognizing the Colony is a military organization, and invites him as well in order to get his advice. Unbeknownst to her, her father is the leader of the Colony, and he uses the opportunity to disable and take control of the Belfry. The intent all along was to gain access to Batman's data in preparation for a strike on another target, and Kate played right into her dad's hands by doing what he expected her to do.
- Batman and Batwoman pull a small one on the Colony during the assault on Gotham. They find the Colony's top target and position themselves on its roof, putting themselves in the line of fire. Batwoman expects that her father won't endanger her, and turns out to be right, as he shoots down a suggestion to put her as a top-priority target and instead moves on to the next location.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted when Cass gets a bloody nose while fighting a group of Colony soldiers.
- Beware the Quiet Ones: Cassandra averages about one word per issue over the course of the first arc. She's also referred to by Batman as the most dangerous fighter on the entire team, himself included (though he's specifically talking about her potential and how bad it would be if she were influenced by the wrong people).
- Big Damn Heroes: The team shows up to rescue Batman from being executed by the Colony's leader. The best part? They'd been hiding behind Clayface (who was disguised as a rock wall) during Batman's whole conversation with the commander.
- Big Entrance:
- The Colony invading the Belfry. Also counts as a Super Window Jump.
- Batwoman and Co. quite literally coming out of the walls, as mentioned above.
- Jacob ambushing our heroes just as they're about to escape the base, complete with flying platforms and giant spotlights.
- Big "NO!":
- Batwoman lets off one when Colony soldiers open fire on Cassandra and fill her full of tranquilizer darts, since she initially thought they were using live ammo.
- Spoiler reacts this way to Tim's final goodbye.
- Bi the Way: Harper Row, in #945, reveals this about herself to Jean-Paul Valley.
- Breather Episode:
- More accurately a Breather Mini-Arc, but still. "Batwoman Begins", the story in issues #948 and #949, is relatively lower-key compared to the action-heavy first arc, the crossover, the emotionally heavy second arc, and the third arc starting in #950 (which is also intense).
- #950 is also fairly tame, delivering three character-centric stories for upcoming arcs and events.
- The Bus Came Back:
- Harper Row and Luke Fox make their Rebirth debuts in issue #943, after not appearing in any comics for several real-world months.
- Lady Shiva makes her Rebirth debut in #950, after last appearing in Secret Six #14 in May 2016, nine months earlier.
- Call Back:
- Tim Drake's new costume design is mostly an armored version of his original costume from the early days of his solo series. He's also dating Stephanie Brown again, even though the New 52 erased most of their previous interactions. Cassandra's new mask is also similar to her original one.
- Steph also makes a few disparaging comments about Tim's "showboat" costume from Teen Titans.
- Clayface wrapping himself around his teammates to shield them from harm in #936 is an interesting visual one, as he performed a similar feat during the final Batwoman arc.
- Issue #937 reveals that the Colony was created in response to the "Zero Year" event from the New 52. note Or more accurately, an existing project was changed into it, as issue #938 shows that the initial plans for what would become the Colony existed years earlier. .
- Issue #939 opens with a flashback to Kate trying to comfort Bruce at his parents' funeral. She does so again when Tim is apparently blown up in issue #940.
- Issue #943 has Harper referencing New 52's Batman #12, the chapter where she was formally introduced and tapped into Gotham's electrical grid to track Batman's movements. Apparently, she and Tim were working on building that second electrical grid she thought about way back when.
- Issue #944 has Luke commenting to Kate that it feels like "...this isn't [her] first gala that's gone sideways," which is a reference to Batwoman: Elegy.
- Cannot Spit It Out: Literally in Cassandra's case. Her story in issue #950 notes that she wishes she could communicate with the other members of the team so she could tell them how she feels about them, like how she admires Luke's driven attitude, sympathizes with Clayface's condition, and wants to learn more from Kate. Unfortunately, her traumatic upbringing and mental handicap make it next to impossible to do so.
- Chekhov's Skill: After the opening Mud Room sequence in #935, Batwoman critiques her team's performance (sans Red Robin) and instructs them on how to compensate for their most prevalent weaknesses. Spoiler burns energy inefficiently and thus needs to learn how to breathe properly and pace herself. Orphan tries to fight everyone's battles, so she needs to focus on one goal at a time. Clayface possesses no technique whatsoever, and needs to learn how to actually use his abilities rather than just smothering people. Later, in #938, when the team saves Batman from the Colony, we're shown that all three of them have taken Batwoman's instructions to heart. Spoiler paces herself, relying more on clever tactics than direct combat. Orphan is given a singular goal (secure the extraction zone) and succeeds with little difficulty. Clayface gets extremely creative, transforming his arms, and even his entire body, into bludgeoning weapons and a make-shift vertical bridge.
- Civvie Spandex: Three of the five members of the Victim Syndicate (The Mute, Mr. Noxious, and Mudface) wear normal civilian clothes instead of costumes.
- Combat Pragmatist:
- The Colony has no problem simply tranquilizing Orphan rather than fighting her hand-to-hand.
- Conversely, Batwoman has no qualms with bringing Clayface to demolish the Colony's forces by the dozen, who have no earthly idea how to fight someone like him.
- Cool Car:
- Aside from the Batmobile, Luke Fox has a flying car that looks a lot like the models from Back To The Future Part II.
- ...which turns out to be his Batwing suit in disguise.
- Cool Bike: Batman and Batwoman each get rocket-powered ones during "Night of the Monster Men", and in issue #941 specifically they used said motorcycles to restrain a kaiju.
- Cool Guns:
- The Colony's weapon of choice is some variant of FAMAS.
- One of the FoxTech weapons being showcased at the GCPD Charity Gala in issue #944 looks remarkably similar to the iconic pistol from Blade Runner.
- Colony Prime's main weapon is some type of short shotgun capable of firing both lethal and nonlethal ammo.
- Cool Plane: The Colony's massive teleporting helicarrier.
- Cool Train: Tim's 'Bat-Monorail', which functions very similarly to a rail gun with the 'pods' being the projectiles, is an almost scary example of this. In his own words, it can go "twenty times as fast as the top speed of the Batmobile", which has been clocked at anywhere between 250mph and 300mph over its many iterations. So, Tim created a subterranean transportation system that could easily exceed Mach 7...and he still needs to nail the braking system. Kinda makes you wonder if they used Clayface as an airbag when infiltrating the Colony, huh?
- Costume Copycat:
- The Colony as a whole uses iconography and suits designed specifically to mimic Batman, albeit along a more militaristic bent. Additionally, their logo is extremely similar to that of Batwoman's, rather than the generalized bat symbol. This, unfortunately, carries the heavy implication that the striking red bat symbol variant Jacob presented to Kate when she first became Batwoman was never hers to begin with, but rather a preparatory measure to get her accustomed to the design, and eventually the overall idea of the Colony when the time came.
- The Cracker: The Colony employs the General, Ulysses Hadrian Armstrong as their tech expert, and he manages to trick Red Robin into giving him digital control of the Belfry's systems in his first mention.
- Create Your Own Villain: The antagonists of the second arc, called the Victim Syndicate, are a group of Gothamites who have been severely injured or transformed due to the actions of Batman's foes, and blame him for it since each of their situations were caused by attacks directed at Batman. They have banded together to strike back at Batman and anyone they see as affiliated with him.
- Creator Cameo: In issue #943, a man who very much resembles James Tynion IV appears in the crowd of protesters. He's the one grinning with the beard and glasses.
- Curb-Stomp Battle:
- Batman takes on fifty Colony soldiers at the end of #935. Early in #936, it's revealed that he got his ass utterly kicked, complete with getting captured.
- The entirety of #938 could be considered as one in favor of the Bat-team, but this moment stands out:
Colony Soldier: Heh. They sent
you to fight
all of us?
Orphan:
Yes. - Deadly Training Area: The new Belfry houses one, known as the Mud Room. It uses excess Clayface matter to form solid opponent constructs.
- Headbutting Heroes: Downplayed and one-sided in the case of Batwoman and Batwing. Kate doesn't hate Luke, but doesn't approve of him joining the team because she doesn't think he fights crime for any reason other than the thrill, and the recklessness she sees in that pisses her off. Luke, on the other hand, is somewhat oblivious to her beef with him. This subsides after she learns that Luke was driven to become a hero after an innocent, unarmed black kid was gunned down by Gotham police officers.
- Heel–Face Turn: Clayface.
- Heroic B.S.O.D.:
- Batwoman has a bit of one while watching footage of Batman receiving a beatdown from Colony soldiers. Not only because she's fought Batman before and knows exactly how tough he is, but because Batman is her cousin, and she has a history of not taking things well when her family is in danger.
- Batman has one while reading Tim's college acceptance letter after his supposed death.
- Heroic R.R.O.D.: Batwoman invokes this as part of her training regimen. She pits her trainees against waves of Joker constructs for three hours to stress-test them, so she can analyze when and how they'll break in a full-on battle.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Tim redirects all of the Colony's drones to target him instead of the civilians they were originally sent to kill. He defeats the first wave, but is not so lucky with the second, and is seemingly killed.
- Hollywood Hacking: Many examples, but one of the most extreme cases occurs in issue #938, when Spoiler hacks into a half-dozen grenade belts to detonate them.
- Home Base: Since the team can't operate out of the Batcave for a whole host of reasons (namely, Clayface), they instead work out of a new base called the Belfry, located in the Old Wayne Tower. Designed by Tim Drake, the Belfry provides a more centralized location than the Batcave.
- Hotline: Of course Batman has one of these. It's a direct phone to the President called the Black Line.
- Lean and Mean: The First Victim is very tall and thin, with slightly elongated limbs.
- Loud of War: In issue #946, Spoiler hacks the team's radios to broadcast a debilitatingly loud sound as a way to neutralize them.
- Meaningful Name:
- The initial antagonists of the series are an organization called the Colony, who emulate Batman on a military scale. In biology, "colony" is the collective term for a group of bats. Also counts as a Punny Name.
- Additionally, the chapter titles for the inaugural arc are all lifted from war movies, which is apropo considering the the Colony is a military organization. Some are big hints to the events of the chapter, while others have no connection whatsoever other than both stories featuring a war.
- Mythology Gag:
- The Needs of the Many: The Colony believes that they discovered the existence and exact location of ten sleeper cells in Gotham belonging to the League of Shadows. The intelligence they have points to the actual number of sleeper agents to twenty individuals, the identities of which they were unable to narrow down without the help of information stored on the Batcomputer. Since they're convinced that a massive terrorist attack is imminent, which would claim the lives of hundreds of thousands, the Colony decides to invoke acceptable losses and eliminate everyone currently occupying their target areas, which would result in over six hundred casualties.
- Never Found the Body: Played with. In issue #940, Tim is caught in a barrage of drone missiles, and no remains are found at the scene. The team assumes he was completely vaporized. He was actually teleported away by Mr. Oz just before the missiles hit.
- This also parallels the end of Final Crisis, where Batman's body was "vaporized" (sent back in time by Darkseid's Omega Sanction; the body Superman found was one of the fake clones) And who was the one person who never believed Bruce was dead? Who never stopped trying to find him? The one who was right all along? Tim Drake.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
- After Batman is captured, Batwoman calls the whole team to the Belfry, which leads to her falling for a Batman Gambit, since she also called in her father to get his advice for fighting the Colony, unaware that he was their leader. This leads to the Belfry falling into Colony hands.
- During the team's rescue of Batman, they cause so much damage to technology and personnel that the Colony is forced to advance their timetable for eliminating their League of Shadows targets. Unfortunately, this also means that they have no time to fully narrow down their suspect list, and thus are willing to kill 30 times as many people to ensure their mission is completed.
- In #941, Gotham Girl rips the arms off a monster, which spills its blood on her and Nightwing and causes them to mutate.
- Nominal Hero: Played with. A major part of Kate's conflict with Luke hinges on the fact that she considers him one of these. She only sees his surface playboy persona and thinks he's in the superheroing business just for kicks, not realizing that he has his own tragic reasons for doing what he does.
- No Sell: Madame Crow tries to use her anti-fear toxin on Batwoman, to absolutely no effect. Kate did have a blocker for the toxin given to her by Luke, but she claims she didn't need it. Given Crow's description of how it works (removing the fear of what will happen if the Batfamily stops fighting crime), Kate was correct about that, since that kind of fear isn't what drives her.
- Number Two: Tim Drake's place on the team, while Batman and Batwoman are co-leaders. He acts as an advisor and a sort of liaison between Batwoman and the other trainees, and even shows some Lancer elements with his willingness to butt heads with Batwoman a bit over her decisions.
- Odd-Shaped Panel: Probably as an homage to quintessential Batwoman artist J.H. Williams III, both Barrows and Martínez use many such panel layouts in their issues.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Quite a few just in the first arc.
- Cass defeats two groups of at least five Colony soldiers by herself on separate occasions. Only the aftermaths of these encounters are shown.
- The team infiltrates the Colony's base, but exactly how isn't depicted.
- Tim's Last Stand against the first wave of Colony drones isn't shown, only the aftermath.
- In #939, Batwoman is getting ready to board the Colony's airship, and is last seen on a rooftop with the airship at least a couple miles away. At the beginning of #940 she has infiltrated the airship's bridge and taken out at least three Colony soldiers, all without raising alarm. She's not even noticed on the bridge until she speaks up.
- Out of Focus: For the first two arcs, Cass is basically there to punch people every now and then, and plays a relatively minor role compared to the rest of the cast. The fact that she's quiet doesn't help much, either.
- Poisonous Person: The aptly-named Mr. Noxious of the Victim Syndicate can emit a cloud of toxic gas, which is implied to be a cocktail of various different poisons, all incredibly lethal.
- Poorly Disguised Pilot: Issues #948 and #949 comprise a mini-arc called "Batwoman Begins," which sets the stage for her Rebirth solo series.
- Powered Armor: Luke Fox's Batwing armor, complete with "Iron Man" style prehensile suit-up sequence.
- Recycled Title: The "Batwoman Begins" arc shares its title (minus an exclamation point) with issue #11 of 52, which was Kate Kane's debut as Batwoman.
- Reed Richards Is Useless:
- Clayface lampshades this in #939, asking Tim why he's still a superhero if he's capable of designing such complex technology like the Belfry.
- The arsenal Luke designs for GCPD. Kate points out that while the weapons are useful, they're way too expensive for the police to actually afford them in large enough numbers.
- Remember the New Guy:
- Downplayed with Batwoman. She's been around for a while, but this series is really the first time most of her prior interactions with Bruce have been depicted or referred to. The two had little interaction outside of their costumed personas in their past appearances together, but Detective establishes that they played together as children and that Kate was even there to comfort Bruce at his parents' funeral.
- Each member of the Victim Syndicate (aside from possibly the First Victim) was a bystander who was injured by one of Batman's rogues in their very early days of being criminals, and Batman even says he remembers them when told of their real identities.
- Dr. Victoria October, introduced in #948, mentions she has a prior history with Batman.
- Retcon:
- The series presents Clayface in a very sympathetic light, portraying him as a Tragic Villain who only lashed out because he was treated like a freak after his accident. Clayface's previous New 52 appearances depicted him as a vicious and cruel man, and his Forever Evil spotlight issue established that he was a violent Jerk Ass even before the accident. On the other hand, he was depicted as significantly nicer in the later issues of Batwoman as a result of amnesia, so that may help smooth things out even if it doesn't totally explain things.
- "Batwoman Begins" retcons Kate's age when her mother was killed from 12 to 8, and specifically mentions that she's been Batwoman for just over two years in the present time, which is significantly shorter than the rest of her adventures seem to indicate. However, due to the general wibbly-wobbliness of time in the Rebirth era and the fact that both writers of Batwoman's Rebirth series have stated they aren't changing anything from Batwoman: Elegy, for the moment it seems that Kate is missing four years, and that this is intentional.
- It even makes a strange kind of sense for it to specifically be four years aside from the whole "she's only been around for ten years of publications" thing. 52 ended in 2007, and her original solo series, along with the New 52, began in 2011. Four year gap of things that, thanks to causality, sorta can't have happened anymore.
- Retirony: Tim seemingly dies after telling Stephanie that he was going to quit being a hero in order to attend college.
- Secret Keeper: Issue #943 confirms that Renee Montoya still knows Batwoman's identity.
- Series Continuity Error: An art error in issue #938 shows Gabi Kane's headstone with a cross, when she was canonically Jewish. Word of God is that this was simply an error due to the biweekly nature of the book and that the cross will be changed to a Star of David in the trade paperback. The digital editions of the issue were fixed the day after release.
- Sherlock Scan: Downplayed. Kate figured out Bruce was Batman when, seemingly out of the blue, he asked her to lunch, when days earlier he had confronted her as Batman and she had shot him in the leg. During their lunch meeting, Kate noticed Bruce had a slight limp in the same leg and put two-and-two together.
- Shout-Out:
- The Colony's Elaborate Underground Base is similar in layout to the HQ from XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
- The cover to issue #945 is an homage to the cover of Suicide Squad Vol. 1 #10.
- A flashback panel in #945 is posed the same as the cover of Detective Comics #27, Batman's very first appearance.
- The Colony soldiers, Dom and Cooper, are very reminiscent of Sky Pilot and Shore Leave, respectively, from The Venture Bros..
- Show Within a Show: An example of Type 2 appears in issue #936. Apparently, Batgirl comics exist in the main DCU and Stephanie is a fan, as one can be seen on her nightstand.
- Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: Stephanie decides that she needs to make her own world by forcing the Bat-family to retire, thinking that by giving these people help instead of prancing around in costumes, things'll be all better. Batwing and Clayface call out Stephanie's reasoning by pointing out that making them live "normal" lives is not going to help them with their problems.
- Skunk Stripe: Dr. Victoria October has one.
- Some Kind of Force Field: The First Victim can project shields large enough to cover the entire Victim Syndicate when they're standing in a group.
- Smug Snake: Colony Prime. He's convinced of his superiority to Batman due to spending years studying him, and barely even considers Batwoman worth his time.
- Spanner in the Works: It turns out that Tim Drake was this to Mr. Oz as he was reconnecting with people he shouldn't, thus instead of letting him die, he ends up capturing him.
- Spiritual Successor: To both Batman Eternal (as well as its sequel series) and to the 90's era Batman comics as a whole.
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