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Tom King's Turn To Bring Back Slam Bradley In Gotham City Year One

Published Thu, 21 Jul 2022 14:49:11 -0500

Last updated Fri, 22 Jul 2022 20:15:57 -0500

It's Tom King. It's not a Batman book. Okay, it is a bit, but not really. And it's drawn by Phil Hester, It's Gotham City: Year One, and it stars Slam Bradley. Former DC Comics publisher Dan DiDio used to be mystified that DC Comics kept trying to bring back the original star of Detetcive Comics, detective Slam Bradley. Still, Dan is gone now, messing around with Frank Miller, so consider it a slam dunk.

There once was a shining city on the water, a home for families, hope, and prosperity. It was Gotham and it was glorious. The story of its fall from grace, the legend that would birth the Bat, has remained untold for 80 years. That's about to change.

Eisner Award-winning writer Tom King and legendary storyteller Phil Hester team up for the first time to craft the definitive origin of Gotham City: how it became the cesspool of violence and corruption it is today, and how it harbored and then unleashed the sin that led to the rise of the Dark Knight.

"Night falls quickly in Gotham City," said Hester. "The shadows cut across guilty and innocent alike. I feel lucky to be the artist to show you just how this city got so dark in the first place."

King and Hester, along with Eric Gapstur, Jordie Bellaire and Clayton Cowles, launch Gotham City: Year One on October 4. Taking place two generations before Batman, private investigator Slam Bradley gets tangled in the headline-grabbing "kidnapping of the century" as the infant Wayne heir Helen disappears in the night…and so begins a brutal, hard-boiled, epic tale of a man living on the edge and a city about to burn.

"Having written a ton of Batman comics," said King, "I can say it's incredibly rare to write book like this, where you can add something large and essential to the mythos of the Dark Knight, as Scott did with Court of Owls or Grant did with the introduction of Damian or Frank did with, well, everything he touched. In Gotham City Year One, Phil and I will take you to a noir drenched past, where the secrets that made Gotham become Gotham, the sins that made Batman become Batman are finally and violently revealed."

"Tom has crafted a story that will echo across Batman lore past and present," continued Hester, "and I hope the storytelling techniques Eric, Jordie, Clayton and I are bringing to bear will augment his razor-keen approach. I'm honored to play a small part in bringing Siegel and Shuster's landmark creation to a new audience, and in giving one of DC's oldest legends the white-hot spotlight he deserves."

Slam Bradley first appeared in Detective Comics #1 and looked like this. Fighting people like this.

Because, yes, Slam Bradley is notable for several blatantly racist stories back in the day, so much so that DC Comics had to cancel Detective Comics Before Batman.

The character reappeared after decades in Detective Comics #500, joining other veteran DC detectives, such as Jason Bard, Pow-Wow Smith, Roy Raymond, the Human Target, and Mysto, Magician Detective, in solving the murder of a fellow retiring detective.

The character returned in Detective Comics #572 (the 50th-anniversary issue), teaming up with detectives Batman, Robin, Elongated Man, and Sherlock Holmes.

He appeared in the Superman titles in the 1990s, working for the Metropolis Police Department. However, this incarnation of the character was short-lived. When an older Slam Bradley later appeared in Detective Comics, it was explained that the Metropolis character was Slam Bradley Jr. The character was planned to appear in Tim Truman's 1998 Guns of the Dragon miniseries, which was set in the 1920s and teamed older versions of Bat Lash and Enemy Ace for an adventure on Dinosaur Island. However, another editor had plans for the character, so the character was rewritten as Slam Bradley's heretofore unknown brother Biff Bradley, who sacrificed his life to stop the villainous Vandal Savage.

In 2001, Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke revived the character in Detective Comics as a former police officer in his late 50s who has always worked in Gotham City. Bradley then appeared regularly in the Catwoman series, with his son, Sam Bradley Jr, in the police, and Sam Jr. and Catwoman in a relationship, with Selina giving birth to Helena Kyle, later given up for adoption. All that was wiped away with the New 52. The character was revived at DC in New Super Man a couple of years ago in a false reality sequence in pretty much the same fashion as he originally appeared, though in a way intended to be rather critical of the character.