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With a villain lurking under his nose, Batman proved that his “Greatest” skill isn’t as great as everyone believes.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the backup story “House of Gotham” Chapter Three from Detective Comics #1049, on sale now from DC Comics.
Batman is considered to be the World’s Greatest Detective. Having started life in the pages of Detective Comics #27, and that title even lending its initials to the name of DC, this is clearly a very important part of the Dark Knight’s identity. Unfortunately, he’s just proven that he isn’t a great detective after all, let alone the World’s Greatest.
This is because of the shocking developments in the Detective Comics #1049 backup story “House of Gotham” Chapter Three (by Matthew Rosenberg, Fernando Blanco, Jordie Bellaire, and Rob Leigh). Previous chapters have shown how the Dark Knight, and Gotham as a whole, have failed a young orphan whose parents were murdered by the Joker. Although Bruce Wayne checked up on this child often, he missed a startlingly obvious thing happening in this child’s life.
Bruce likely missed the fact that his favoritism when visiting the child led to the orphan being bullied by the other boys. However, his mistreatment at the hands of Scarecrow was a much worse thing to have missed. Dr. Jonathan Crane was working at this orphanage as a psychologist and using its children for his Fear Toxin experiments when they were asleep. Considering how often the Dark Knight visited, and the fact he’s been paying close attention to how this young boy was doing, the World’s Greatest Detective should have noticed the abuse going on in this institution.
This story takes place early in the Dark Knight’s career, so it’s likely he didn’t know that Scarecrow and Jonathan Crane were one and the same at this point, but that’s no excuse. He should have seen the signs either in the shady behavior of Crane or in the children. The villain was experimenting on them and considering all the changes he would be making to his toxin to get it just right, there was likely some sort of physical evidence. Even if Scarecrow made sure he didn’t do any experiments around the time of Bruce Wayne’s visits, he couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be any permanent side effects. What’s worse, the orphanage’s staff noticed that Crane was treating the kids as an experiment without knowing who he really was, so Batman should have been able to also spot it easily.
Even though he has a reputation for being the World’s Greatest Detective, Batman really can miss the glaringly obvious sometimes. The biggest blind spot is when it comes to people. Even though he’s studied all sorts of human behavior, his people skills aren’t the best. He’s had problems with a number of Robins in the past, especially Dick and Jason. Both relationships got so bad that they struck out on their own. Bruce and Dick weren’t even on speaking terms for a long time, around when he became Nightwing. As for Jason, everyone knows what happened when he went after the Joker alone.
Batman has also shown that isn’t always a great detective when it comes to his villains either. He was unable to deduce the identities of Gotham’s first vigilante the Reaper, as well as Hush, who turned out to be his childhood friend, despite some very obvious clues showing that he isn’t as sharp as he claims. Is it any surprise then that he never figured out Crane was Scarecrow here?
These weaknesses in his detective skills mean that Batman is far from the most effective hero for Gotham. If he can’t see the villains hiding in plain sight, how can he protect the city’s most vulnerable citizens? The story ended with Scarecrow leading these kids, brainwashed, to Bruce Wayne’s house to kill him. Considering he didn’t notice anything wrong before, it doesn’t seem totally out there to say the World’s Greatest Detective won’t even see this attack coming. Even when they knock on his door.
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