Batman: Rebirth #1 (DC)

It's the dawn of the Tom King era in Batman comics.  Although, basically, it's King and artist Mikel Janin reprising their Grayson act.  (It'll be the same for Tomasi and Gleason in Superman, and thank goodness!)  If this is what Rebirth will be like, I can see that DC has indeed learned where its best talent has been. 

Scott Snyder is ostensibly along for the ride.  As with Geoff Johns in Green Lanterns: Rebirth, I think it's a purely ceremonial act, meant to assure wary fans that the old guard was there to make sure the new one knew what came before them.  Because this doesn't read like Snyder.  Snyder was all about diving into what King avoids in this issue, which is the chaos of Gotham around Batman's adventures.  King's Calendar Man, in fact, reads almost exactly like Snyder's Mr. Bloom, unleashing spores that cause chaos.  There's even Duke Thomas (assuming a new, as-yet unnamed heroic persona) along for the ride.

King's an emerging force for psychologically strong superhero storytelling.  His Batman is prone to pushing his limits in the classic sense (one of Snyder's best Batman comics involves a scenario very similar to what is presented in these pages, in Batman: Futures End as he sets about the clone agenda Snyder had previously explored in Detective Comics #27).  Otherwise, King's vision of Batman's strength of character remembers that Bruce Wayne still exists, too, and that his business acumen, and persistence, amount for something, too, the allies he made there, and what they have to say about where all of this came from.

The best lines in the issue come from Lucius Fox, who remembers this about the late Thomas Wayne:

"I once tried to talk your father into coming into the business.  Told him being a doctor drives you crazy.  Whatever you do, people just get sick again.  You make no progress.  He looked at me for a bit, got real quiet, stern almost.  It's a look I've only ever seen once again.  And it was in the face of a masked man [Batman].  Finally, in a dark voice, he said, 'You're right, Lucius, I am crazy.  But the sick need someone crazy enough to believe they can be better.  So what else could I be?'"

Now, recently, in the pages of a Marvel comic, Nick Spencer decided that Steve Rogers needed a neglectful father, that it would somehow help make his origin better.  (This is to say nothing about Hydra.)  That's the difference between Marvel and DC right there.  Steve's dad has been a nonentity all this time.  You can do whatever you want with him.  Thomas Wayne has never had that luxury.  Rarely seen, but every time he's brought it, it counts for something.  Is it a shortcut to make Batman's dad a good guy, too? 

Absolutely not.  Welcome aboard, Tom King.