DC Comics Reviews 8/16/22 – Nightwing #95, The Flash #785

Batman: One Bad Day – The Riddler #1

DC kicks off its latest Batman theme event — One Bad Day — spotlighting various villains doing…bad things with The Riddler by Tom King and Mitch Gerads.

King just finished Batman: Killing Time, a mini-series that prominently featured The Riddler and Catwoman, so it seems odd for this to be the lead off.

In King’s semi-predictable fashion, the story opens with a guy talking to his wife about their daughter. Gerads illustrates this in a compelling POV take, which ends as you might expect from a King story.

In the interrogation with Commissioner Gordon, King starts grabbing elements from earlier DC continuity while suggesting Riddler gave Joker the intel on how to attack Gordon and Barbara in the incident that paralyzed her.

And to make things interesting, in a flashback scene King has Riddler’s father spank him with a book for getting a 92 on a test. Between the random father getting killed three pages in and some disturbing parental abuse it’s hard to tell who is supposed to be entertained by this story, but it’s not me.

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King can’t decide if he wants to make Riddler a psychotic murderer with a joke fetish, an imbecile easily double crossed by Catwoman or this elaborate cheat sheet character that knows everything and has Batman too terrified to act in fear of his reprisal.

For a writer with such a lengthy run on Batman, it feels like King has lost all goodwill to the character and just wants to make him look foolish in every new story.

The issue’s saving grace is Gerads’ artwork. Gerads tells sequential stories better than anyone in comics and he mines every bit of tension and drama in every panel. It’s what makes his art even in service to a mediocre story so compelling.

One Bad Day: The Riddler is another failing, flailing attempt by King to find that spark he once had on Batman before the aborted wedding twist. If you’re a fan of Gerads’ art this is almost worth checking out for his stellar work. Otherwise, this start to the One Bad Day focus gets off to a mean-spirited, miserable start.

Rating: 6 out of 10