So Heath Ledger's going to be the new Joker, woo hoo. Way back in February, I greeted plan to pit Batman against bin Laden with a huge yawn, suggesting that the truly significant Dark Knight stories were going to be the ones created by Grant Morrison and Paul Dini for Batman and Detective Comics, the two anchor titles in the DC Comics franchise. Well, both have made their debut in the last few weeks—and though sales figures won't be available for a while, the two books have each made significant strides in recent months, thanks to a crossover plotline that set the scene and allowed the new teams to hit the ground running. Morrison, along with artist Andy Kubert, starts Batman at full tilt (click on the image at left for maximum effect), then pivots neatly into a completely different type of story...except that you know it's still going to turn into an action movie again real soon.

The most notable quality of the Morrison/Kubert storyline, though, is the sheer fun the creative team is having playing with the Bruce Wayne aspects of the character—in fact, much of the story is about how Batman needs to take a vacation from his crusade and relearn his billionaire playboy persona, and the banter between Bruce and Alfred is cracking. It's no coincidence that, over in Detective, Dini and artist J.H. Williams III are placing a similar emphasis on Bruce Wayne, although theirs is a much more compact tale where Batman sheds his costume to use Bruce as bait for a criminal targetting Gotham's wealthy.

The distinction is an important one: In Detective, Williams' artwork, with its highly stylized layouts and color schemes, gives Bruce an almost unnatural appearance, so that his unhidden face seems more like a mask—it's Batman who pretends to be Bruce Wayne, rather than Bruce Wayne who's gotten too caught up in the role of Batman. Williams and Dini are creating a series of set-piece, ornate updates of the sort of one-shot mysteries that were once standard fare for Batman (and every other superhero) in comics' Silver Age. They're working in miniature, while Morrison and Kubert are building a blockbuster—and that's okay; the character of Batman is big enough to handle the two approaches. One of the few difficulties lies in the more subtle nuances: Maybe it's just me, but Williams seems to be drawing a Bruce Wayne several years older than Kubert's. Forbes pegs Bruce Wayne as 32; that could fit with Kubert's rendering, but the man Williams draws looks to me like he's on a collision course with 40. That quibble aside, though, both series are highly recommended...and sure to be collected into trade paperbacks at the first opportunity.