4 out of 5

And Milligan is the last guy I’d stick on Batman – Peter is a chatty sort who seems to specialize in more poetic storylines that blend humor and slightly over-wrought prose – more fitting to X-Men than a stoic like Batman, but whaddya know, his X-Men issues were weird and his Batman is actually a really great balance of the 80s Bats, who conversed with cops and had gadgets in his belt, and the 90s / modern Bats, who is all brooding and quiet and doesn’t really think outside of artists drawing him in the shadows with omniscient narrative boxes.  Peter’s mysteries and crimes in his books also tend to center more around characters than story, and Batman needs a murder or crime to solve – we already know it’s Ra’s Al Ghul or the Joker or whoever.  Probably.

Yet his spotted take on Bats (he also did a few Batman issues that tie into his Detective run and later a Batman: Confidential short) seems to nail the character without alienating the reader.  Years on, when Peter would write “The Bronx Kill” for Vertigo’s Crime line, I saw a new shade of his writing that I hadn’t picked up on before – the smile wiped away, shedding the emotive edge of his prose to just nail an emotional arc and tie it into a central crime, which, yeah, y’know what, is how the best noirs work.  The poet – not the hard-boiled writer – suddenly seemed to have the best tie to this style, and it goes back to Skreemer, even, for Peter, so it’s always been there.  He just needs the right vehicle.

So we have a few scattered stories from the Bats universe, some really working as an extension of the character and his rogue’s gallery, and some just interesting stories that happen to feature Batman.  “The Hungry Grass!” and “The Bomb” are the interesting tales into which Bats has been shoe-horned, feeling like classic Silver Age stuff in that it’s totes “there’s a threat to society, someone call… Batman!” and then Batman gets a call on a wrist-radio or something and does some tumbles before throwing a batarang at the villain and contemplating the in/humanity of it all.  They’re fun tales, truly of their time.  “Executioner,” “Golem,” “Identity,” and “Library” are all tied more into Gotham and Batman (look to Milligan’s wiki page for full names of these storylines and their matching issues), and though we’ve seen forms of the golem story sooo many times in comics and “Identity” uses a shameless deus ex machina, Milligan, again, finds a unique voice for Batman that lets us in but lets him be cold at the same time.  He makes some interesting decisions in the majority of these tales that remind us that he has to be a bastard to do what he does, but he’s aware he’s a bastard.  (The Milligan guilt complex!  It fits!)  “The Idiot Root,” the crossover with his Batman issues, obviously works in concert with those and so, again obviously, falls flat in concert with those.  It’s an interesting concept, but evidence of when Pete stops writing a series and starts writing an idea – the idea of evil in the Id… that run also shows an annoying flaw in Jim Aparo’s pencils – that every single goddamn person, regardless of age or build, has abs and muscles.  It’s a common problem in comics, but a different artist draws the “Batman” issues of the story (Norm Breyfogle), and the sudden six-pack the character’s sport once you get to Detective is pretty hilarious.

A lot of great writers have moved through the pages of Detective with varying levels of success.  Milligan is a surprising win, and I know his followers would appreciate a collection of some of these truly notable issues.