In order to help Nora, Batman and Mister Freeze must team-up to stop her rampage across Gotham City. Spoilers for Detective Comics #1016 follow.
Detective Comics has been doing something interesting its past couple of issues. It’s been working its way to establishing a new mythos that’s taken from the old. There are plenty of ways that this could backfire, but so far, it’s been working out well. Bringing Nora out of cryo-sleep and into the fold is an interesting move and it makes for a fun twist on a Mister Freeze story. Now that said story has ended, it has managed to use old circumstances to create a new way forward.
What’s been done with Nora and Victor Fries by the end of this issue, basically reversing their situations, is going to be either loved or hated. Personally, the reversal in circumstances works as it’s not a one to one reversal. Nora is not looking to save Victor, as she was the one to force him into cryo-sleep, thus making Nora more of a wild card. That wild card aspect is emphasized even more by the fact that she was given a serum derived by his B-Zero experiment. So, the fact that she’s unstable as she was treated with essentially a Bizarro serum makes sense and leads to more potential stories. Side note: it’s great to see callbacks to Forever Evil, which has been essentially forgotten otherwise.
Really, Batman takes a backseat in this issue though. So much of it is focused on Victor and Nora that Batman is essentially just there to have a flamethrower and be betrayed. This is pretty great though because this isn’t a story to build on Batman. He makes for great visuals in this issue, and some arguably good puns, but is smartly not focused on much at all. This lets the character work with Victor and Nora breathe much more than it would have otherwise.
The art is where this issue falls the flattest. None of the art is bad, but it lacks consistency. There are two pencillers and four inkers, which really shows at points. Both Doug Mahnke and Tyler Kirkham have great styles, but they aren’t really suited to work together. Kirkham adapts his style to be more like Mahnke’s, but they both are still drastically different. With the inking though, it really lacks consistency with Mahnke’s pencils. Because of the differences in inking, certain pages done by Mahnke look completely different than the others. That’s really the problem with the art in this issue, it isn’t consistent throughout. Individually it looks good, but there are often jarring changes.
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