Detective Comics #832

Detective Comics #832
Not a bad issue, and although it's a done-in-one, I can't muster much more than an EH. This may be primarily due to the fact that Batman doesn't do very much detecting - or at least little that we're shown. Most of what he does is reacting. I don't remember any tales featuring the Terrible Trio. I do remember Volper, but he's the only one.
Observations: Again, another book featuring the kinder, gentler Batman. One who feels bad when he has to kill a dog. Batman and Jim's relationship is one of colleagues. I guess Bats gets called in for any psycho related crimes - kind of like in the 70's TV show. Andy Clarke draws Jim Gordon wearing a trenchcoat that's at least four sizes too big on him. In one panel, he looks like a midget. In the scene where Fisk is attacked, the location seems to shift between pages, without Batman and Fisk having gone anywhere. The final page of the book apparently occurs before the rest of the story, but it's hard to tell. Especially since Batman believes that Shackley's psychotic break is the result of drug abuse - whereas the final scene seems to point to it being the result of emotional and psychological torture by his former cohorts led by the Great White Shark. I'm not even sure what the point of that page is. Is it to ominously foreshadow the rising of the Great White Shark as a new menace to Batman? Or is it to highlight what Jeremiah Arkham (not dead, apparently) feels is therapeutic?

Of all pages of a comic, it's the last page that colors your perceptions of the overall book most of all. In this case, the comic would have been much stronger without it. I cannot say if it would have been elevated to the level of okay, as there's still nothing distinctive about this story that enriches me in any way, but whatever. I miss Paul Dini.