The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #7

The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #7

The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #7 is exactly what I want from a superhero comic — adventure, humor, and a refusal to take itself too seriously. (I understand that that is not a popular approach these days, but I know what I like.)

It’s rare for me to laugh out loud at one, but there’s a joke on the first page that had me doing so — Daphne’s butler Jenkins has come to reminisce about his time in butler school with Alfred, and there’s a story about an oyster fork that nicely characterizes the two.

Most of the humor, though, I found came from how stodgy Ace the Bat-Hound is about maintaining his secret identity. That’s an old-fashioned idea, and his determination to make it work just makes that more obvious. And it’s hilarious, particularly when he talks about his uniform being “sprayed with decoy bat-cologne as Scooby wouldn’t recognize my scent.” Making a dog the stubbornly old-school one makes it all more entertaining.

The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #7

Sholly Fisch clearly knows his characters, and his comic history, giving them all the right voices. Dario Brizuela does a terrific job blending the two cartoon art styles, the classic Scooby-Doo and the more adventurous Batman and his friends and foes.

Scooby-Doo and Ace have been dognapped, so Alfred pulls out his deerstalker hat (yay!) and his “How to Be a Detective” book, and he and Daphne and Jenkins head out to solve the crime. Spoilers follow!

Meanwhile, Batman, Robin, Fred, Shaggy, and Velma encounter Catwoman. Which leads to my very favorite panel:

The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #7 panel

It’s the pursed-lip whistle of innocence that does it.



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