You might think Batman, Scooby-Doo, and missing gloves is the setup to a bad joke, but it’s actually the start of a fun new mystery from DC Comics. Available now, The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #1 is written by Ivan Cohen and illustrated by Dario Brizuela. Colors and lettering were done by Franco Riesco and Saida Temofonte, respectively.
The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #1 opens the planned twelve-part limited series with a deceptively simple glove theft. Batman calls Mystery Inc. when he finds that someone broke into the Gotham Museum of Culture. Whoever broke in also stole the purple gloves off Batman’s Year One costume. The story gets wacky when Batman suggests time travel to catch the suspected thief in the act.
Who would have considered time travel in a story like this? Well, Ivan Cohen had the bright idea, and his writing capitalizes on other delightful hallmarks of Scooby-Doo and Batman. Each character has the chance to deliver quippy, idiosyncratic dialogue as we’d hear it in the cartoons.
Glove Story
Even Batman is funny, albeit in an ironic way, with the majority of his jokes relating to the Dark Knight’s true identity. Such tongue-in-cheek humor relies on dramatic irony and fans’ prior knowledge of the characters, but the story is still accessible to everyone.
In keeping with Cohen’s nostalgic, referential writing, Brizuella’s art style borrows greatly from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. It’s all soft lines, curves, and broad expressions. Brizuela also uses plenty of master shots and medium shots to punch up the jokey dialogue and lend an actual sense of space to the otherwise two-dimensional style.
Additionally, Riesco’s colors are equally cartoonish, carrying familiar bright, warm, and bold tones. Riesco also emphasizes purple, green, and orange in backgrounds to evoke the costumes of each Mystery Inc member. Moreover, Riesco managed to get Batman’s purple gloves to stand out among his panoply, seemingly using a particular shade not used elsewhere in the book. That subtle choice, in combination with Brizuella’s illustration, adds cinematic flair to the mystery.
From Joke to Joke
To the same degree, Temofonte’s lettering is at turn bold and cartoony with just enough SFX to sell the jokes. Yet no dialogue bubble or effect feels out of place or forced, for that matter. It all seamlessly flows from joke to joke to wacky encounter with the same pace as the original cartoon, thanks to Temofonte.
Thanks to a creative team with as much love for Mystery Inc. and Batman as the oldest fans, The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #1 serves up tons of fun. It may be the most heartwarming comic I’ve read so far this year. So, I will definitely be tuning in for the next eleven installments of the series.
