Detective Comics Annual #1 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

Halfway through this issue, I found myself wondering whether I was correct in my assumption that Tony Daniel didn't write it, since it flowed so smoothly.  I actually checked the cover and was surprised that Daniel did write it.  Later, I was less surprised.

Daniel takes up the disappearance of Roman Sionis and the Black Mask from Arkham Asylum during "Night of the Owls" and sticks to a storyline that plays to his (limited) strengths.  We watch Batman and Commissioner Gordon separately try to track down Sionis, with Gordon interrogating his former associates like Clayface and Batman chasing down one of the former members of the False Face Society, a group of Sionis' former lackeys.  (Actually, in retrospect, I'm not sure if Bruce purposefully tracked down the guy or just happened upon him.)

But, the wheels come off the bus when Daniel tries to get complicated about halfway through the story and introduces the Mad Hatter, who's angling to knock off Sionis so that he can be the undisputed master of hypnotism in Gotham.  It's a weird motivation, since you have to wonder how often it's a problem that Gotham has two criminal hypnotists.  Is Mad Hatter really all that threatened by the Black Mask?  As usual with Daniel, the ending is perhaps the oddest part, opening the door to the idea that the Black Mask actually took control of Batman at some point.

All in all, it's actually not a bad Daniel story, but it's still unfortunately a pretty forgettable issue.  It's the end of Daniel's run and, I have to say, I was right to drop this comic after issue #4 like I originally did.  Like in his former run on "Batman," Daniel just fails to be able to keep all the balls in the air that the writer of a Batman comic needs to be able to do.  His inability to construct a tight story from beginning to end doomed almost every (if not every) arc of his that I've read.  I'm very relieved that we're moving onto a new writer.  Hopefully, we're going to start seeing more of the stories that Scott Snyder told in this series back in its most recent heyday.