LogFAQs > #909395380

You're missing that the team itself is a touchstone in a grander world of conspiracy, intrigue and mystery. On his best day, Batman is one man, especially one grounded in skepticism and disbelief. He's the opposite of a team player, one who has consistently proven himself wrong over the years by his refusal to adjust his worldview to account for even his closest friend's existence. And that alone makes Jessica Jones valuable to the team because Batman doesn't investigate Gypsy beating her live-in superhero girlfriend Mystek. And that makes Detective Chimp valuable because a three-headed fish being birthed on a leyline is something Batman would never consider important. And that makes Rorschach valuable because when you disagree with President Pete Ross' taxation plan, you dig and you dig and you dig until you prove you're right or you're incarcerated. Batman is the best at what he does, but the underlying message you're missing is that that makes him the worst at what others do. He doesn't shake the devil's hand to find a missing child like Constantine. And therefore he'll never find that child because studying butlers and bookshelves only gets you so far.

The reason the Robin example matters is that Robin becomes Nightwing and then Batman himself. Bruce Wayne is the zenith of human fortitude, but he's not infallible. You're not filling a bench with second-stringers. If you read the current Detective Comics book, you'd see that Batman lines his cave with allies so that he can create a network of super-sleuths. Because one Batman is far from enough.

This team isn't in a room together all the time. In fact, the beauty of this team is that in each story they would come together once or twice as a full unit. From there, they would function like the Justice Society usually did - in pieces, as the only partners who understand a particular clique or mindset. An elite society focused on the matters of the mind. And the exploration of each of these minds - uniquely suited to this title since each one is vastly different from the next - plays a major psychological role in understanding how thought works.

It's a beautiful idea, and you're spending too much time breaking it down into the NCIS procedural schlock on television. The best comics laugh at that. Sandman, Starman, Planetary, DMZ, Scalped, The Massive, Low... none of them are hand-tied to perfunctory storytelling structure. They encourage a break from this concept of "one case". No. It's ALL of the cases. You don't put this book together to solve one problem. You put this book together and ask them to solve 10 problems simultaneously before drawing the camera back and showing that 10 problems is actually 1 problem if you have enough perspectives to draw it together.
---

"It is too easy being monsters. Let us try to be human." ~Victor Frankenstein, Penny Dreadful