The five best parts of Scott Peterson, Kelley Jones and Michelle Madsen's Batman: Kings of Fear #1

1.) The first panel. That image above is the very first panel of Scott Peterson and Kelley Jones' first issue of Batman: Kings of Fear. It's also a splash page. So you open the cover and you are immediately confronted with that.

What is it? Well, you won't know for sure until you turn the page, but that's The Joker's eye. He is peering into a hole in an empty crate in a warehouse--in other words, just peering into the dark--and calling out Batman, who he knows is lurking in the dark somewhere nearby, waiting to make his grand entrance.

That is one scary eye. Not just in the detail of the human eye itself, which is, of course, a weird and awful thing to look at too closely or in too much detail, but in the black furrows in The Joker's white skin around the eye. He is making a very intense, very emotional anger smile, as is apparent from the wrinkles in the area around his eyes.

2.) Batman's fight with The Joker's henchmen. Wow. That's all one page. The fifth page to be exact. So, as you'll already know if you've read the issue, the first page is a splash page featuring The Joker's huge staring eye looking directly at the reader through the jagged hole in the wooden crate. That's the page pictured above this one. The second and third pages are a double-page splash, showing the wide-mouthed Joker staring into the hole from the outside of the crate and worming his index finger into it, his henchmen gathered and posing all around him and he calls out to Batman. The fourth page has him summoning Batman through a sudden act of violence. And then you get this page. So after several pages devoted to scene-setting, the action starts, and we get a page crowded with all of these little panels, detailing Batman's battle against a roomful of opponents, each of which he dispatches with a single, discrete act of violence delivered in super-rapid succession. If the first four pages are timed to show a moment or so apiece, this page shows explosive action split-second by split-second.

3.) Batman's gas mask-holder-up mechanism. A little context might be required here. So after Batman knocks out a warehouse full of tough guys, he similarly dispatches The Joker in the space of just two panels. We then cut to the Batmobile, where The Joker is restrained in the backseat, talking Batman's gigantic pointy ear off until the Dark Knight has ultimately had enough, and so he decides to fill the interior of the Batmobile with some kind of knockout gas, after first putting on a gas mask. But rather than reaching down to his utility belt or his glove compartment to grab a gas mask, Batman has outfitted his car with a special button that, when pressed, extends a gas mask on a little arm (see the third panel above) that then holds the gas mask in front of his nose and mouth.

It's one of those almost Rube Goldberg-esque, overly-complicated things that Jones is always so good at emphasizing and detailing, but are inherent in the character. Seriously, just stop and think for a moment about how unnecessarily melodramatic and complex basically every single thing Batman does is. No artist makes that as readily apparent as effectively and as efficiently as Jones does.

4.) Batman's giant ear. The most immediate signifier of Kelley Jones' Batman versus Everybody Else's Batman is the ears. Jones gives Batman very long, sometimes ridiculously long ears, so that they more closely resemble demon horns or even rabbit ears than those of Batman's animal namesake. This is a fact not lost on Jones. Which makes this bit so cool. Just how long are Batman's ears? So long that they don't even fit in that panel, but break its borders and extend into the panel above it...and ultimately break that panel's borders too and comes out the top of it.

5.) Batman punches everyone. The one-page, 24-panel fight scene on page five is actually just the first of the 22-page issue's action scenes. At the climax of the issue, just as Batman has returned the captured Joker to Arkham Asylum and is arguing with one of its doctors about whether it's cool that he tracks down, beats up and then drops off any criminally insane escapees on a regular basis or not, there's a mass breakout of name villains. This leads to a five-page fight scene in which Batman simultaneously battles Killer Crock, Mister Freeze, Bane, The Riddler, The Joker, Poison Ivy, Two-Face and The Penguin. About halfway through, we get the above absolutely perfect panel, in which Batman rolls through them all like a big, black wave, seemingly striking them all with his fist in a single, wide, arcing punch.

It's...it's a really beautiful image, and the sound effects are unfortunate, as they only serve to block out some of the art, and distract from the fluid motion of the Batman figure, suggesting stops and starts to his attack in that panel, as opposed to him flying through his villains like a big, black comet, fist-first.

Anyway, they should take the sound effects out of that image, blow it up, frame it, take down the Mona Lisa and throw it in the garbage, and hang this in its place, as it is the best thing ever.