I’ve been waiting for Bruce Jones, since he went over to DC a few years ago, to do something entirely kick-ass. It’s taken him a while (I don’t know, for instance, how much longer his DC contract has left), but he’s finally done it. His Legends of the Dark Knight story, Darker Than Death, is a self-assured home run. It’s not the home run of an unknown, but of an assured professional. Unfortunately, Jones isn’t writing a regular Batman series, which makes Darker Than Death a little awkward. It’s so smooth, it feels like it fits into something larger--not a longer story or anything, but a greater emotional gesture. I remember reading, when Jones first went to DC, he’d had a Batman story in mind for years and I wonder if it was this one... for five issues, Batman plays detective. The story’s a mystery, which, even when Batman is playing detective, is a rarity. It makes me sad Legends of the Dark Knight is getting canned. The series obviously still offered opportunities to artists.
However, Darker Than Death does suffer a little from Ariel Olivetti’s artwork. Olivetti does this computer-painted thing and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Jones’s script has a lot of silliness in it, a lot of comedy, which Olivetti actually does really well. He also does the romance really well. He just doesn’t do all the Batman really well. Olivetti’s Batman is über-iconic as opposed to mildly realistic. It’s hardly a deal breaker, but it does occasionally divert ones attention from the story. He’s also really slick and Jones’s story is anti-slick. It’s a romantic approach to the unromantic.
The best thing about Jones’s story--amazingly in this comic book period--is Batman. Jones has written him before and I loved him then too, but this Batman is different. He’s fallible and full of self-doubt. He’s lonely. Jones does a wonderful job with it.
