Any mystery writer worth his salt will tell you that the reader must be thrown off the trail; Loeb, as a "mystery" "writer" who created a trail about as difficult to find as the Vegas Strip, had to go above and beyond the call of duty to throw us off of it. He therefore took the bold, clever, brilliant, not-at-all-cheating step of killing the brand new stupid-obvious character no one gives a tuppeny fuck about, but then--get this!--through a series of Batman-universe wonky sci-fi/fantasy plot devices, it turns out he wasn't dead at all! He was just hiding! Ha ha! Fooled you, stupid readers! I'm a genius, I tell you!

Fortunately for us, Loeb didn't blaze into this uncharted, not-an-enormous-gyp-at-all form of storytelling unprepared. Oh, heavens no. From what I'm told, this master storyteller actually honed this bold, daring, kill-the-villain-but-keep-your-fingers-crossed-when-you-do-it approach in not one, but two previous Batman projects. These projects, The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, are part of his long-time collaboration with (legitimately talented) artist Tim Sale, a collaboration which nine times out of ten yields paint-dryingly dull, consequence-free rehashes of early-years continuity in the lives of various superheroes created several decades ago.

Alas for me, I have not read either of these Batman books, and therefore cannot describe to you how Loeb refined this stunning, shocking, ground-breaking, not-an-humongous-motherfucking-lazyass-fraud-in-the-slightest method of funnybook magic from one to the other. But I'm quite sure that it's an inspiring journey to take.

And by "an inspiring journey" I mean "I wonder if there's a class-action lawsuit pending because centering your story around a completely unearned surprise twist that you have to cheat like a bat-corking home run king to arrive at should be grounds for legal action on behalf of all the people who paid money to have their shoes pissed on and then get informed by the pisser that no, in fact, it's Hurricane Isabel."

I don't want to give you the impression that Loeb is alone in concocting a plot the shocking surprise of which was possible only because the writer put no effort into setting it up in an even remotely plausible way. I direct you to Origin, the Paul Jenkins-scripted Wolverine story that spent two full issues following around a surly little funny-haired kid named Logan, who any reasonable reader would expect to be the earlier self of the surly little funny-haired mutant named Logan, whose code name happens to be Wolverine. But on the last two pages of issue number two, a second kid, one who neither looks nor acts nor is named nor (up until that moment) did a single goddamn thing to make us think that he might be Wolverine, has claws pop out of his hands.