Detective Comics #34

I bet Alfred isn't wearing any underwear right now.

The first page of this issue states that it is the conclusion to the Icarus story! Yay! I love conclusions because that means I survived until the end of yet another story! Although I could be celebrating a bit too early since I haven't actually read the book yet. Hopefully I can stave off a stroke or a heart attack for at least another hour!

It doesn't normally take me a full hour to read a comic book! But it does usually take me one to two hours to read a comic book while writing these commentaries on them at the same time. It would be nice if I could just take a stack of comic books out into the back yard and just read them one after the other without feeling the need to say stupid things about them. I suppose I still can do that with all of my old back issues that I want to read but I never wind up doing that. So I guess I don't really want to do that! Problem solved!

Harvey, you liar! You have not been following the evidence! You've been trying to pin Elena's murder on Bruce Wayne!

I'm not exactly sure what Batman and Harvey are talking about. I've never really been a fan of mysteries so I think I might have tuned out all the important bits of evidence that would fit together to make this story coherent. It involves human trafficking, the drug Icarus, a gang turf war, and the murder of Elena Lastnameorsomething. Somehow the explosion they just heard, which got them to stop fighting, made them realize some truth of the case. I don't know what that truth is!

Oh! According to the Annual, this whole thing is Batman's fault for beating Julian Day up in a bar's restroom and giving him just enough brain damage to become Calendar Man. That caused a ripple effect that led to the gang war and to Elena's death! So maybe Harvey was correct to investigate Bruce Wayne! His guts weren't wrong at all!

The explosion down at the waterfront was a radioactive man that leaks Icarus which the Kings of the Sun sell on the streets. Now they have to go collect their Icarus leaking mutant freak boy.

Batman also goes after the kid. Harvey too, probably!

I bet I would understand what was going on better if I went back and reread all the past issues! But my past comic books aren't really organized in any manner because my cat has taken to sleeping on the organized back issue boxes. The rest of my comics over the last half year or so are just higgledy-piggledy in another box. I suppose I could move my cat but he's old and infirm and he only really leaves to eat and use the litter box. Besides, cats are immovable objects.

More answers are discussed between Holter and Batman as Gertrude the Squid reappears to drag Holter, King of the Kings of the Sun, off to sea. But the Icarus Kid flies away to poop Icarus another day.

Harvey winds up yelling at Yip because he wants to scare off anybody interested in him before he realizes they're not interested in him because he's fat. I think that means he has low self-esteem or something. Anyway, he finds a missing crate that was tied to something or other and finds Anarky's anarchy symbol inside it. And that's how the comic ends.

Detective Comics #34 Rating: No change. How can I rate a comic book that I barely understood?! I don't think this story went too long that I couldn't remember it. But in-between the conclusion and the rest of the story, I read the Annual which kind of explained how the whole mess got started and the Free Issue #27, so maybe I lost track of the story a bit. Also, there were a lot of threads that kind of tied in to Elena's death but weren't entirely necessary to follow to understand the whole murder mystery part of the story. But remember when I deconstructed the title way back in issue whatever issue that was? I said this story was about an "I" that "cared" about "Us"? I was totally fucking right! It was about Holter causing all this trouble because he cared about his daughter and Elena, her mother, kept her from him! Even when I'm being a stupid fucking dickhole, I can't help but determine what the comic book is actually about.