Comic Book Reviews #2

BATMAN: DETECTIVE COMICS #821: " THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE "
WRITTEN BY PAUL DINI, ART BY J.H. WILLIAMS 111
COLORS BY JOHN KALISZ
COVER BY SIMONE BIANCHI

Batman is a detective, but its rare to find a writer who can tell a good mystery with him. Do Paul Dini and his team succeed in telling a good mystery yarn? Read on to find out what I thought....
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Issue Recap: The story starts with a man, pretending to be a high class gentleman, trying to attack a woman and Batman saving the day. After that, Batman and Jim Gordon talk about how other people have been attacked and kidnapped by people pretending to be rich people. Batman decides to investigate as Bruce Wayne. He goes to serveral parties and finally finds a woman who says she's a reporter. Batman knows she's not and follows her back to the main villians lair, where the villian tells us all about his master plan, Batman fights him, follows him back to a club, defeats him, and then explains to us who the guy was.

My Thoughts: The story is a done in one comic, with a beginning, middle, and end. Its not a good mystery though because there are no real clues in this comic. Bruce Wayne just stumbles onto this woman who's invovled in the crime, follows her back to her bosses lair, and then finds out the rest from there. The story does start out like its going to be a mystery where Batman actually investigates and slowly finds out what's going on, but things don't work out that way. Its mysterious, but not a real mystery.

The artwork in the issue is really good, but the coloring in the issue is truly awful. The black coloring makes it hard to tell whats going on in the Batman scenes and other colors like red, yellow, even purple just draw more attention to the color in the scene then what's go on. I suppose the colorist was trying to make the artwork more exciting or interesting, but he just made it hard to look at. I remember during Greg Rucka's run on this title the colorist would use a single color for the entire issue, like red, yellow, etc and that really worked in the comics favor and made it more interesting. I wish the colorist had stuck to just one color in this comic.

In the end, this is not a comic I would show to a non-comic book fans or even comic book fans. The artwork is well done, but the coloring, especially the black coloring, really messes up the art. The story is not one of Paul Dini's best. He did a great job with Batman: the Animated Series and I expected more here. The issue starts off interesting, but quickly just turns into another Batman slug fest comic. If you want to see a really good run of this title, check out Greg Rucka's Detective Comics run.

Grade: D