Detective Comics #3

At the bottom of page one, Batman says this:



and the audience cheers! No, actually I die a little bit inside.

Oh! Remember how last issue ended? With the patchwork Jim Gordon being thrown at Batman's feet? And all the readers are supposed to go, "OMG! WTF? JIM! NO WAY!" And then for a full month they speculate what is going to happen to Jim Gordon on the DC Forums?

BATMANLOVER69: "Do you think they'd kill Jim this quickly?! It is a new universe! Anything can happen!"
GORDONSUCKS: "Man I hope so! F****** loser! What a chump! Way to go DC!"
XxActuallYxX: "It might be a new universe but DC isn't making many changes. Why did they even do this stupid reboot? I'm going over to Marvel."

Well, the first panel of this issue (meaning the panel immediately following that panel where Jim gets tossed at Batman's feet) is this:



Why even bother with the stupid cliffhanger ending if this is the way you resolve it?

Tony Daniel: "Fuck. I need to end this issue on a shocker!"
Lazy Editor: "Just kill Gordon."
Tony Daniel: "Are you stupid? I can't kill Gordon off! Snyder is using him over at Batman!"
Lazy Editor: "I don't mean really! Just make him seem dead. You can make it a trick of the light or something on the first page of the next issue."
Tony Daniel: "Are you fucking serious? This is why DC's continuity is fucked!"
Lazy Editor: "So what else are you going to do?"
Tony Daniel: "Fuck it. I'll go with Jim dead."

Batman puts up a fight even though half of his body is paralyzed by some drug injected into him by The Masked Sexy Nurse. Dollmaker, Bentley, Orifice, The Clapping Monkey, Sexy Nurse, and Jack-in-the-Box fail (guess which names I made up and which are real!) to stop him. Batman takes a captive as he escapes:


Captive's name is not actually Sunshine.

And then back to Jim Gordon, enclosed in a cage with a kidney seemingly removed. And outside the cage is the little girl who Batman saved who was taken from the hospital by the guy who got a bunch of knives in his chest earlier. Here's their conversation. It's kind of important. Probably.

Dollmaker, I mean, Little Girl: "Mr. Gordon, you'll die soon. Let me help you."
Gordon: "Olivia? Good lord, girl, how have you survived?"
Little Girl: "I'm a prisoner, too. But the Dollmaker wants me to be part of his family. He wants to adopt me."
Gordon: "Then he hasn't...hurt you?" [Those ellipsis mean Gordon is talking about molestation!]
Dollmaker: "No. I--I was scared at first. But now I'm getting better. And I'm learning that Dollmaker's just a victim, too. And that he has people he answers to. People even he's afraid of."
Gordon: "Do you think you can get out of here and get help?"
Little Girl Who Really Isn't The Dollmaker, wink wink: "Only BATMAN can save you here. If they see the police, they'll kill you. I heard them say it."



So the little girl overplays her hand here and says all the things the evil jerk in charge would say to lure Batman back. And who would be a better Dollmaker than a little girl? If she isn't the Dollmaker and the guy who claims to be the Dollmaker is the Dollmaker, then she's the Controller of All Dolls. But I think she's the Dollmaker because the other Dolls (Sexy Nurse and Orifice and Dollmaster) were acting like a family. And that's how a little girl would play with dolls. As if they were a family.

If I'm wrong about this, I'll mail Tony S. Daniel a nice crisp one dollar bill!

Meanwhile, Batman is off playing with the doll he stole.



Batman can't beat any information out of Jack-in-the-Box (I'm hungry!) because Jack-in-the-Box doesn't have a tongue. So he goes back to the Batcave to do some research.

This is what Batman finds out:


I'm not giving up on my dollar just yet!

The Dollmaker may indeed be this kid. But the little girl still mentioned he takes orders from someone. And my bet is it's the little girl. Perhaps his daughter who inherited the super crazy gene?

While Batman is researching, the Bat Signal is activated. Batman arrives to find Olivia has activated it with a note from Gordon. After Batman leaves, Olivia shows her true colors to the jerk cop left to protect her.


It's okay he dies. He was apparently going to kidnap her. Probably for the mayor. Or Joker.

So I get to keep my dollar! Whew! That was a close one. Gordon also realized she wasn't telling the whole truth. I think. Because here's his note with a backwards 'R' that is probably some sort of code between him and The Batman.



Batman confirms the note on the next page. He says he and Gordon have never used a code though so Batman is left to guess at it's meaning. He thinks it means to 'watch his back' (which, by the way, he fails to do in spectacular 'Batman should now be dead' fashion).



Batman also believes (before that happened) that the backwards R can mean 'there is something wrong with the obvious.' Meaning Olivia. But Batman doesn't put that together. Instead he's choked into unconsciousness and killed.

Oh, wait. He's not killed! The Dollmaker is an idiot and instead puts Batman in a ridiculous cage fight that would have been just the type of thing they did weekly on the campy television show.