Batman #12: Come One, Come All

Batman #12 is a never-ending storm of first appearances, both small and large, as the infamous nightlife of Gotham City changes in several small ways across the issue’s 23 pages.

First, the introduction of Verity Pennyworth, who made her debut in last month’s Batman #11 on the very last page. Being the great-niece of Alfred and the Wayne family’s new majordomo, a kind of all-service butler if you will, Verity has big shoes to fill, and in this issue, she does just that.

Readers quickly get a natural sense of Verity’s personality, how she’s similar to Alfred, and how she’s different. Verity occupies a similar space to Alfred in some of the early Batman reboots, that being a kind of Swiss Army knife for the Wayne household, patching up his wounds and preparing his dinner. However, unlike Alfred, Verity has a gentle and somewhat quiet characterization that makes her feel like a solid new addition to the Bat Family.

As for the numerous other first appearances we get to see in this issue, Gotham gets a slew of new villains such as the assassin Lord Fantôme, the spy aptly named Spyder Black, and the luchador Sr. Sueño, just to name a few. None of these characters truly jump out as iconic new villains, but they amp up the Torus storyline that began back in issue #4 and are an interesting reprieve from Vandal Savage’s police corruption storyline.

There’s very little to say about Jorge Jiménez’s art that I haven’t said already in previous reviews of the current Batman title. However, this issue contains a number of pages worth talking about. For starters, the panel gutters feel heavier in this issue, which condenses the pacing, giving each panel a sharper focus. A lot of effort is put into the facial expressions of the characters, showing how they react to one another in a scene. And lastly, the new characters, including Verity herself, are all drawn with a strong attention to detail that makes each character pop out from the page, even the ones who dress in everyday clothes or are slightly similar in design to characters we’ve seen before.