Detective Comics #27 Special Issue

Detective Comics #27 marks a special occasion in comic book history: it featured the first appearance of Batman way back in 1939. The issue will be 96 pages long and has several guest contributions.  Some of these contributors are Frank Miller, Neal Adams, Paul Dini, Brad Meltzer, Gregg Hurwitz, Peter Tomasi, Dustin Nguyen and Francesco Francavilla. Jim Lee, Greg Capullo, Chris Burnham, Kelley Jones, Patrick Gleason and Mike Allred will be doing the variant covers for the special. I'm very excited to hear Paul Dini, the creator of Harley Quinn, will be a part of the line-up.  

  The one collaborator I'm not thrilled to see is Frank Miller. He has been influential to the comic book world since he created Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, but he's also responsible for All-Star Batman, which featured the horrible (and laughably bad) panel of Vicki Vale's butt that I mentioned in Women in Comics. The variant cover he did for Detective Comics #27 was originally revoked but now it is going to be released due to popular demand. This cover will probably earn a spot on my worst covers list next year... because we can't go too many years without a controversial Catwoman cover making the list. This issue of Detective Comics also begins "Gothtopia." This will be the last story Detective Comics creative team of Layman and Fabok will be doing before the series gets a new creative team. The new team will consist of Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato.     Detective Comics #27 will be released on January 8th 2014.