A comic book issue that provoked a lot of recent controversy has been Detective Comics #848.
Please be warned, there are spoilers in these links.
The Cavalier found the issue quite enjoyable:
While this certainly isn’t the best issue of Detective Comics that I’ve read in the past couple months, the book is still quite enjoyable. Paul Dini manages to add layers to a character that I had previously disliked. At the beginning, I spent a lot of time wondering why Hush attacked Kyle as opposed to Jet, considering he’s dating Jezebel right now and Hush knows Bruce Wayne’s Dual Personality. It’s obvious that Bruce still has feeling for Selena, and this issue certainly plays into the motif of the “damsel in distress.” Batman quickly writes this off as Hush predicting his next move, and selecting a meaningful target that hasn’t had worn Red and Green spandex.
Blogger Daniel is less than happy about the issue:
Eww! Ewwww! Wait, I’m not sure that’s quite sufficient. Ewwwwwwww! There really aren’t enough “w”’s available to describe the disgusting ending to Detective Comics #848. When I read the first issue of the story, “Heart of Hush”, I kind of expected that it was, well, a metaphor. I didn’t actually expect him to go around cutting out people’s hearts. And, okay, cutting out people’s hearts is pretty gross, but cutting out people’s hearts and leaving them alive strapped to rusty machines and tubes is just demented. It’s even more demented than the standard “Batman’s rogue gallery is demented” demented. Instead, it’s more the “What is wrong with Paul Dini and why does he think we want to read this demented story?” demented. Dini manages in this story to cross the line from telling a story about crazy people to adding shock value to his book by brutally mutilating major characters. I realise people get mutilated in comics all the time, but it is usually, at worst, an arm or something. There are also a lot of gory deaths (Johns writes a lot of these), but this is a gory non-death, and it’s revolting.
While Scott of Polite Dissent reviews Detective Comics from a Medical Perspective:
Selina’s heart is missing, so she’s hooked up to either some sort of artificial heart or heart-lung bypass machine. Given the art, it’s hard to tell which. Selina has tubes bringing blood to and from the heart, and we can see blood in the various pumps, so that suggests a heart-lung machine. But on the other hand, why all the wires — especially that huge 220V cable — leading into the chest cavity unless there’s something in there requiring electrical power (and even so, that’s a hell of a lot of wires). I suspect the artist thinks that a heart-lung machine actually involves an artificial heart placed in the chest and doesn’t realize that all the pumping is performed externally.
So what do you think?
September 14th, 2008 at 3:51 am
I’m annoyed by the story, but only because holy crap which editor’s idea was it to waste Dini and Nguyen on a Hush story? I mean, I realize that because Nguyen is drawing it it will be beautiful and because Dini is writing it it will be structurally sound, but I cannot get over how amazingly, confoundingly little I care about Hush.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Maybe Dini wanted to actually have Hush be a ‘big’ Bat-baddie and and have better motivation?
September 14th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Oh BTW:
This issue came out in August.
September 14th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I agree with DIFTL. New villains have to do something big to be able to hang with the classics. Libra killed the Martian, Bane broke Bats back, Hush takes out Catwoman’s heart.
September 14th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
“The Martian”? What, are we all anti-Ma’aleca’andran racists now? And Libra isn’t even new.
I thought the issue was pretty frustrating and have been growing increasingly frustrated with Detective Comics being coopted into a Selina/Zatanna buddy comic. His new origin for Hush is also really obvious and on-the-nose, which, I guess, places it on the same tier as the original Hush story, so there’s that. And the ending was pretty stupid.
I hope Dini leaves Detective after this arc and takes up the rumored “Bad Girls of Gotham” book that, in my estimation, seems to be largely what Detective is becoming.
September 14th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
I am more intrigued by what Selina saw in Hush’s face (Bruce’s copy grafted into his own?) than the M.P.D Pyscho-ish ending. Don’t know what M.P.D Psycho? Go read it, it has more disturbing image of a woman kept alive artifically inside a fridge!
September 15th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
DIFTL: Thank you for the correction, I admit, I should have worded the intro more appropriately.
September 15th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Villain does something villainous. This is more par for the course in superhero comics (replacing a vital organ with a big funny machine to make a point?) than most of the grim ‘n gritty trash we’ve been fed over the past couple decades. I don’t see why people are appalled by this. It’s not like she was raped and burned. This seems like something a bat-villain would do: an overly complex way to make a point about how scary they are. Isn’t that… EVERY good bat-villain?