In fact, the biggest detractor from issue #13, is how much it makes me want to go back to this series’ weaker installments and see them redone with this level of success. It draws on the storyarc and mythos elements that Morrison has been seeding for years now, it’s very well paced as a single comic, and it brings its moments of tension to climaxes at just the right speeds. I might even go as far as to say this is the best new Joker comic I’ve read since seeing “The Dark Knight” in theaters — at least in terms of its approach to the character and the way it framed his inner workings and scheme.

It’s remarkable how few rapid action sequences there are in this issue, but those don’t really play to Irving’s strengths. Thusly, this comic may not resonate with the punch-punch-punch, fight-fight-fight crowd. For the New X-Men and Morrison JLA lovers, however, especially those who have been on since Batman and Robin #1 or before, it should be worth the $2.99 plus tax.

“Werewolves of Montpellier,” like many of Jason’s books, draws from existing genre material — this time, it’s werewolf stories. The book exemplifies his quirky unique methodology, which I can’t think of how to describe in any terms other than “chamber comics” because of his use of a minimal number of visual elements and character faces. This reductionist approach to his story telling feeds the timelessness that results from the lack of period-anchoring fashion or uniquely stylized characters that would otherwise draw clear lines between his individual works. Instead, the small cast of animal types and distinguishing characteristics that he employs serves to create continuity in his larger body of work with ham-fistedly working in overt self-referencing. It was a strategy that worked for Ingmar Bergman, and it works for Jason as well.

This particular story ends in a graceful, yet awkwardly suspenseful and open-ended manner, but as with Jason books I’ve encountered before, this landing contributes to the matter-of-fact delivery he often employs in making you feel like you’re witnessing a story sliced out of a larger saga.

There are so many Bill Sienkiewicz and Ben Templesmith knockoff artists floating around in comics that when you see an artist with his own style who knows how to create real mass and meaningful shapes while still evoking mood and movement in some of the same ways that they do, it’s really something to be celebrated. Chamberlain’s visual style in Sweets leverages color, texture and character postures to breath life into his story about a priest’s murder and the world and events surrounding it. His attention to page-by-page pacing and architectural detail, meanwhile, keeps it all at a good rhythm with an undercurrent of flavorful setting.

Economy is definitely one of his biggest strengths, both with his scripting and ability to understate violence without letting the comic fall into lucid passivity. In fact, the modulations in tone just have me more keen on seeing what other tricks and strategies he has left to show off in issue #2 and onward. I’m on board for the first few issues at least right now, and I’m looking forward to seeing where Sweets goes.

Self-inflicted electrocution in various contexts and spontaneously erupting physical forms from amorphous organic blobs are the two major motifs at play here, and if you appreciate extremely confined perspectives that leave a great deal to the imagination while you read, this is a minicomic worth picking up. The art isn’t refined in a traditional sense, but it really comes into focus around figures like the Cthuloid/Starro-ish figure who jumps out of the sidewalk and the microwave scene toward the end. In fact, the imbalance between the detail invested in the surreal elements versus the human characters in the art really drives home the notion of the sci-fi and fantastic forces at work in the story being in control. It’s a neat nuance and made for a worthwhile $4 pull.

The current storyarc has really been humming for the last few months, and Oberon Sexton turning out to be The Joker more or less means that things are ostensibly at fever pitch right now. The duplicitous Sexton/Domino Killer reveal made the unmasking intriguing, even if it compels me to point out the drastically different shape of Sexton’s head and face shapes compared to those of The Joker. It’s a petty aesthetic quibble, but it also constitutes a small cheat on Morrison and his artists’ parts. Nevertheless, narratively and as a plot device, it works.

Furthermore, the rest of issue #12 was full of solid beats as well. Damian’s clarified fall from the House of Ra’s al Ghul was great, and the opening fight between Dick and Slade Wilson/Damian was both fun visually and a well-developed convergence of old and new plot threads. The whole book this month was vintage Morrison, and Andy Clarke, Scott Hanna and Dustin Nguyen’s artwork may have required a prism of collaborations, but it gelled serviceably.

As a series, Batman and Robin has been an unexpected multi-ring circus of hits, misses, and artists, but now that it’s over the 12-issue hill, the big pictures looks much better than you might have expected it to last fall.

Brightest Day #0 left me with a very pleasant aftertaste going into both the series and the post-Blackest Night DCU. If you hold it up against issue #1, however, and list the five most important actions or events between them, I’d challenge you to give more than one of those bullets to this chapter. And that’s my biggest complaint. It wasn’t that this was necessarily a bad comic. It just felt like a second issue.

In fact, the final reveal at the end, which I won’t spoil, is great, but the hilariousness of the character choice and focal point as issue #1’s big surprise, just served to punctuate this read as an advancement of issue #0 with nowhere near the payload of page-by-page cliffhangers shock moments.

That said, the Deadman tale was what hooked me in issue #0, and Boston’s storyline remained intriguing here, even if it was given a minimal number of panels. In as much as Geoff Johns, Peter Tomasi, Ivan Reis, Pat Gleason, Ardian Syaf and everyone else succeeded on that front, I’d be interested to know why there wasn’t a #2 on the cover.

Let me go on the record, too, as saying this book could have been numbered as #-3 and I still would have loved the zombie shark action just as much. On no pages have these artists’ talent been better used than during the Aquaman scene, and I hope to see much, much more in Brightest Day #2.

In the aftermath of Blackest Night, all sorts of characters are back from the dead, and this is a one-issue prologue to what’s going on with them going into the Brightest Day storyline. Boston Brand is one of my favorite characters in DC’s history, and I never really liked Martian Manhunter’s new look prior to his death, so seeing Deadman and J’onn J’onzz’s old brow ridge and costume re-re-tooling gave me a positive impression to go in on. The page economy allotted per storyline, the fact that I actually cared about the Hawk characters and the great little Maxwell Lord sequence brought it home.

Meanwhile, there was an extremely heartwarming moment when Guy Gardner presented J’onn with a tanker of Oreo cookies to make me smile and a totally bizarre moment in the Firestorm section with a kid at a party dumping a keg of beer all over a nearly topless girl at a party that had me scratching my head a bit. First off all, that is a reprehensible waste of beer. Second, he’s quite strong to be lifting that up and pouring it with any accuracy so effortlessly. And third, I’m a little surprised that got into a DCU comic — though stranger things have happened.

Moving on, Pasarin is an astonishing talent. His figures tend to out looking a little long in the torso — a bit like Michael Turner at times — but the overall strength and variety of his work page-to-page earned my four bucks. Johns’ story hit a memorable note with each of the revived heroes and villains, and I dug the seeds that were sewn.

If I’ve got one hope for Brightest Day coming out of issue #0, though, it’s that the Hawk-mythos doesn’t overshadow or impede the Boston Brand development. And if someone wants to make a current timeline of exactly what the Hawks’ history is at this point, I would not hold a grudge.

• My Chicago-based pal Brian Crowley launched his new webcomic Hamster Rage this week, and I approve.

• The A.V. Club ran a great rundown of characters from Warren Zevon songs. I talk to people all the time who wish they knew more about Zevon or where to start listening to his oeuvre beyond “Werewolves of London.” This is a great “Zevon for Dummies”-style start.

• Philip Tan draws about the best Beta Ray Bill I’ve seen this month.

• Diesel Sweeties summed up in a provocatively succinct manner what Twitter and the Internet are probably doing to writing as an institution.

Despite the finely tuned writing and elegant arrangement, story never seemed to put anything at risk for me, and the meaty subplots of Moore’s work were absent, which meant the real danger was mostly cerebral, implied and floated lightly upon the playful turns. The end result was satisfying reading experience, but I don’t feel like it added anything to the character beyond a confrontation with death that was interrupted by the “Goodnight Moon” homage at the end, which was also clever and entertaining, but a soft landing for a story that had already relieved its tension.

What I’ll remember Gaiman and Kubert for in this story is their salute to the Golden Age and Silver Age Batman tales of the past. Their tour was heartfelt and worth the cover price on this issue, but I don’t believe my Batman reading experience over the last year would have been impacted on way or another if I’d read this comic when I first bought it. It’s a love poem by an all-star pair of creators, but it’s just not a Batman contribution for the ages.