Bad music, buses and Batman

What is it with these mobile phone mp3 players that kids have these days? Getting all those files on a phone is clever, but when it sounds like a cheap transistor what's the fucking point?

If they really wanted to appreciate their shitty rap and saccharin soul they'd get some headphones because these glorified walkie talkies they insist on carting around make a noise like wasps on a snare drum.

I've decided that the only possible reason the little oiks persist with their pissing machines is to make reasonable people on public transport lose their minds. If I'm right then their plan may be working.

Their continued presence on my bus to work has forced me to start wearing ear plugs just so I can concentrate on my reading. Even then the tick, tick, tack of their awful music seeps through. Gahhhh!

It takes a particularly good book or comic to focus my mind in the presence of these twerps, so it says a lot for Batman: Detective that I've managed to read the whole of the new trade while surrounded by the sound of braying mongoloids and their bleeping retrotrannies.


Written (with the exception of one story) by Paul Dini, Detective collects issues 821 through 826 of Detective comics. Like All Star Superman these are stand alone tales which are probably more suited to the monthly format than this collected version.

Dini understands that a comic called Detective should be about a detective and while there are plenty of great moments where Bats goes to town on the bad guys (he pushes a hood under a train within three pages of the first issue) the real strength of this Batman is as a sleuth.

Dini isn't afraid to ditch the spandex and have Bruce Wayne do the investigative work either. It says a lot for his writing that the scenes where Wayne is piecing together clues are as good as those where Batman is taking down the bad guys.

Those bad guys are done really well by the way. Any decent Batman book is going to be built around the classic rogues gallery and Dini knows it. He did a great job on them in the animated series and he isn't slow in introducing many of the old villains here either. There are some nice new takes on the Penguin and the Riddler both of whom are trying to go straight (it's clear that neither of them is going to make it) as well as a very funny Joker story which owes plenty to Grand Theft Auto.

The fill in issue by Royal McGraw is excellent, while the art is superb throughout. Not surprisingly then Detective kicks the much hyped All Star Batman in the balls. Even when that comic does eventually reappear I'm not going to pick it up, there's no point really not when Detective is doing Batman so well on a REGULAR basis.