Gotham City is a pretty messed up place. It’s a city of shadowy insanity that’s been in the background of pop fiction for nearly a century. As prominent as it is in the bat-end of the DC Universe, the city itself is not often given a great deal of attention on the comics page. Writer/actor Paul Dano takes a look around the edges of the madmen and masked men of the city to cast a light into the psyche of the city in The Riddler: Year One #1. The actor who played the villain in the latest dull and lifeless Batman movie emerges to deliver a captivating story to the comics with the aid of artist Stevan Subic. 

Edward is a forensic accountant. He lives a life of quiet desperation like so many others in Gotham City. One guy focuses on numbers in a city of over 12 million people. He’s living alone. He loves puzzles. He sees numbers acting suspiciously in and around the office, so naturally he gets a little bit curious. When a chance encounter allows him to see Batman in action...maybe he gets a few ideas. Maybe he’s in over his head. There’s criminal activity going on. There’s a mystery. It’s a puzzle. Edward loves puzzles. This one could get him killed.

Dano has gone well above and beyond what most actors do when researching a role. He dives right into the Riddler and comes up with an origin for the character he played in this year’s film. Interestingly enough, Batman’s one appearance in the opening issue isn’t very flattering. He’s a cold figure of justice who is in the frame just long enough to inspire Edward to action. Given that origin, Dano is clearly giving the Riddler precisely the kind of skewed perspective that is likely to make for one of the more intriguing takes on the birth of a villain.

Subic delivers a largely nondescript Edward to the page. Batman’s got pointy ears. This guy’s got glasses and bangs. His world lives in a brightly lit office, a cramped little apartment, and all of those shadowy places in Gotham City that separate them. Subic allows drama to flash across the faces of villains and anti-heroes. There’s no hero in the series thus far. It’s all darkness. Thanks to some stylish work by Subic, it’s a very appealing kind of shadowy darkness. 

Dano and Subic’s Gotham is a fun place to visit. The captivatingly bleak life of Edward suggests an enjoyable and potentially engaging dive into the contrast between heroism and villainy. Precisely what it is that makes one person a hero and another person a villain has been explored in great depth on the comics page over the decades. It never ceases to be fascinating, though. Arguably, it’s one of the more consistently compelling themes in superhero comics. Dano is clearly taking a fresh approach to it which could turn out to be a brilliant comic book prequel to an exceptionally bad Hollywood movie.

Grade: A