3 crampons out of 5

…And Mignola did the covers.

Mr. Milligan has a few different modes of writing – fantastic, surreal, silly, overly-poetic, soap-opera, etc.  His best work tends to blend a lot of that to establish a sort of melodramatic status quo that settles well over the course of a story, but once he swings too far in one direction, he careens back toward another to correct the course and thus far into his career its rare that it settles back into something (by my opinion) successful.

Between the 90s and now, Milligan has written a spattering of Batman tales.  The major names are always tough to write well because they can’t involve too much character development, and most of the tough analyzation of who Batman and Spider-Man “are” has already been done, so most of the time you just have to tell a story and hope it pleases the right fans.

One of Milligan’s Bats tales, from issues 452-454 “Dark Knight, Dark City” is mostly just a fun little story.  With continual flashbacks to a cult from a couple centuries ago trying to rouse ‘The Bat’ – a demon – “Dark Knight” gives us a three issue yarn with the Riddler setting up various challenges for Bats to work through.  Why does the Riddler seem like he’s not trying to kill or capture Batman?  And how does this relate to the cult?  Once a couple pieces are in place the story is mostly obvious, but Pete does a good job of pumping excitement into each issue.  Alfred gives him an outlet for his literary references, and the flashbacks give him an outlet for his more poetic leanings.

I give a couple lines to “The Idiot” storyline from 472 and 473 that crosses over with Detective Comics in my Milligan Detective review, and I’d be saying the same things about it here – that it feels more like a concept Pete wanted to explore (someone Freudian psychology mixed with drug trips) than a true Batman story, and is also stupidly manipulative just in the way it crosses over between Batman titles, fractured one further degree by having two pretty different artists display the same characters in pretty different ways.  If these issues were all the existed of Pete’s Batman, you wouldn’t invite him back to the title.  SORRY.

So focusing on DNDC: a lot of the story’s enjoyment hinges on your appreciation of Pete’s Batman.  He’s definitely the 80s-era Batman, a little hammy and more expressive than his modern-day jack-of-all-trades, stumbling where today’s Batman would calculate it out to the nth degree.  And Milligan opens him up a little more, leaving behind a lot of the “criminals are a cowardly lot” mentality for just telling his story.  It doesn’t add anything brand new to the World of Batman, but neither is it a waste of reading time.