Don Kramer - Detective Comics 826 p10 - Robin Joker

Detective 826, as soon as the issue hit I knew this gallery wouldn’t be complete without at least one page from it. I ended up with two! (So thank you Mark Hay at Splashpage art!)



Writer Paul Dini, penciller Don Kramer and inker Wayne Fauchner firing on all cylinders with a Christmas story with a distinctly Gotham-y difference; When accepting a lift from what he thinks is a passing Good Samaritan, Robin finds himself instead a prisoner of the Joker, who ties him up with Christmas lights and gags him with a Christmas tree bauble, before taking him on a literal slayride through Gotham. The Joker hit-and-runs passersby at random, with the sole purpose of seeing Robin’s reaction.



Best of all, this is Dini's Joker, you can hear his lines in Mark Hamill's voice, and it doesn't get much better than that.



Here The Joker is shown as being utterly insane, not by killing masses of people (as too often happens) but by killing as many or as few people as he needs for maximum effect. There's also a darkly hilarious scene at a drive-through restaurant.



Plus Robin is brave, cunning and resourceful in escaping his fate and it all ends with literally crushing irony for the Joker that will have you cheering.



On this page, we discover anew the Jokers utter disregard for life as Robin realises this isn't the Joker's car. It's the car of a couple of complete random strangers out Christmas shopping who the Joker killed horribly simply because they had a car he wanted. Creepy is too mild a word



This was the story which Dini pitched to DC to get the Detective Comics gig in the first place, and even though Batman only appears for about three pages at the end, it’s a treat on every level.



If there's a tiny little disappointment, it's that the text is missing. What with lettering being digital nowadays, it's never actually applied to the art. On the other hand, that means more art to be seen!