Phil Hester

Tom King gets all noir with Bruce Wayne's grandparents and one of DC's earliest private detective characters, Slam Bradley.

Bradley is a nifty choice to lead the series since he is already a forerunner of Batman, having debuted in Detective Comics #1 in 1937, a couple of years before Bruce first dons the cowl in #27. But this character is named Samuel Taylor Bradley, not Samuel Emerson Bradley, so I'm a little unclear if it is supposed to be the same Slam Bradley from Detective #1, the father of that Slam, or a multiverse doppelganger on whatever Earth is currently the prime stage for the DCU.

Regardless of who he is, Bradley finds himself dropped into the midst of a kidnapping plot that kicks off with echoes of the Lindbergh baby snatch. While Gotham City of the early 1960s presents itself as an exemplar city with a low crime rate, Bradley's investigation quickly reveals the have-nots and the racial tensions that are suppressed and the police brutality that makes it so.

It's a fairly typical bit of crime fiction with femme fatales and numerous betrayals and twists. The biggest twist plays against the very perception of Bradley as a character from his inception, but before it is over the tale also tarnishes the sterling Wayne family reputation and has some implications for how blue their blood really is.

I might have enjoyed this more if I hadn't just read King's noirish treatment of the Human Target recently, but my biggest problem is the stupidity of pairing a trigger warning with grawlix. The title page has fine print that reads in part, "This comic contains language of a racially offensive nature and may not be suitable for all age groups." The book then proceeds to unrealistically not use the actual N-word, but a dated word down a notch or two on the offensiveness scale. But while using that word openly and often, the writer and editor then proceed to use grawlix -- you know, stuff life @#$& -- instead of Geroge Carlin's seven words -- you know, stuff like shit and fuck. If you're going to use grawlix anyway, why not use it for the racially offensive language also? Or why not include "mature language" in the title page disclaimer also and be done with the ridiculous symbols? Does this has something to do with Florida's censorship law? (And having ranted, do I now find myself in a similar situation by using "N-word" and "fuck" in the same paragraph?)

Also, one of my least favorite Batman continuity implants was having Bruce Wayne's father, Thomas, wearing a Batman costume the Halloween before his death. This series doubles down on that corniness by having the kidnapper use a bat symbol on the ransom letters and being referred to as the Bat-Man. Ugh!… (meer)