Batman Annual #13 – “Faces” – James Owsley/Michael Bair/Gray Morrow
This one starts with Batman and Commissioner Gordon investigating the remains of a bombed-out house. The house belonged to an undercover cop (Anthony Wells), whose body is so mangled it’ll have to be identified by dental records. Wells was trying to boost his career by infiltrating a bunch of thugs led by a guy named Freddie Richards, a known associate of Two-Face. Gordon figures someone blew Wells’s cover and Richards blew him up on Two-Face’s orders. Barbara Gordon stops by (this prologue takes place a
couple years ago when Barbara was still walking and Jason Todd was still alive) and Batman heads off to find Freddie Richards. He and Jason run Freddie down, but Two-Face surprises them and Jason ends up hanging off the edge of a roof. Two-Face flips his coin and doesn’t shoot Jason, but kicks him off the roof anyway. Luckily, it’s only a two-story drop and Batgirl and Batman show up to help take down Two-Face’s men. Batman saves Richards when Two-Face tries to eliminate him, and takes Two-Face out with a mace-filled snowball. Richards is sent to death row for killing Wells and Two-Face is sent to Arkham Asylum. The main story picks up two years later, when 
Freddie Richards is only 72 hours from being executed for killing Wells. Batman sees an interview from Santa Prisca (a lawless country in the Caribbean) with one of Two-Face’s men who claims he actually blew up Wells’s place, not Richards. Batman decides to head to Santa Prisca to sort it out, since he’s the one who got Richards sent to death row. Gordon refuses to let Batman take Two-Face out of Arkham, so Batman goes in disguised as a doctor and breaks Two-Face out. Two-Face’s coin dictates that he cooperate, so he goes along quietly. Batman takes him on a flight smuggling medicine to Santa Prisca (which is secretly funded by Bruce Wayne) and they parachute onto the island. Two-Face leads him to the guy who claimed responsibility for
killing Wells, but Batman is one step ahead of them. He saw Wells on the news interview tape and figured out Wells must’ve been secretly working for Two-Face and faked his death when things got hot. Two-Face calls his guards, but when he drops his coin, he realizes Batman doctored it to always land with the good side up. Batman is shot (don’t worry, he’s wearing body armour) and falls through the window. He wakes up handcuffed in the back of a truck that Two-Face plans to roll down a hill and over a cliff … and just for a little extra fun, two pissed-off pit bulls will be tossed into the truck as well. Batman frees himself, takes the dogs down, and bails out just as the truck 
goes off the cliff. He figures out Wells will be working as a cop in Santa Prisca and goes to police headquarters just in time to stop Two-Face from killing Wells. Batman takes them both down and heads to the airstrip where his flight is waiting, with the cops right behind him. But Two-Face gets loose and knocks Batman down, giving Wells the chance to run. Batman doesn’t have time to grab both of them, so he lets Two-Face go and takes Wells back to Gotham to get Richards off death row. Commissioner Gordon is pissed of that Batman let Two-Face go and says any deaths he causes now will be on Batman’s head.
There’s a back-up story called Waiting in the Wings (by Kevin Dooley and Malcolm Jones III) set back when Bruce first became Batman. It’s about
Alfred wanting to quit being a butler (his father and grandfather also served the Waynes) and be an actor, his first love. But helping cover for Batman lets him use his acting talents and he decides to stay. There are also some Who’s Who entries (which was something all the 1989 annuals did), but these are updated entries, not the same ones from the regular Who’s Who comic. There are entries covering Batman, Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, Barbara Gordon, and Vicki Vale.
Detective Annual #2 – “Blood Secrets” – Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn/Val Semeiks/Michael Bair
This one starts to a flashback from forty years ago, showing a bunch of hooded and robed scumbags (obviously a KKK reference) attacking a black farm, beating and killing the people and burning the place to the ground. We see a young kid hiding in the bushes, watching the destruction. In the present, Batman goes to a town called Huntsville and meets with someone we can’t see. (I’m not sure if this meant to be the real Huntsville in Alabama, but the sign says the population is 1,865 while the real-life Huntsville has a population of more than a hundred times that.) Anyway,
Batman tells his mysterious friend that he used to train under a famed detective named Harvey Harris and we get a flashback to about 15 years ago. Bruce used a pseudonym and tracked Harvey down, since Harvey wasn’t too keen on training a 17 year-old kid. But Bruce’s tenacity paid off and Harvey let him tag along as he investigated a series of murders in Huntsville (Harvey’s home town). So far, three men (a banker, a judge, and a store owner) had been killed—bled and hung up like animals in a slaughterhouse. Harvey couldn’t see any pattern, but as he and Bruce left the scene of the latest killing, someone tried to run them off the road. Harvey attended a town meeting, where 
Bruce met the doctor helping with the investigation (Malcolm Falk), who was in a wheelchair. The townspeople were freaked out (especially a weirdo named Carr who apparently heard voices) and wanted state troopers called in, but the mayor assured them Harvey could handle it. A fourth murder put him under pressure but he’d got the license plate of the truck that ran them off the road (impressing the hell out of Bruce) and tracked the owner to a roadhouse outside town. Harvey wanted to be subtle, but Bruce still had a lot of anger in him in those days so he ended up starting a brawl that almost got them killed. Bruce went with Dr. Falk to check out the fourth murder scene (a church) and ran into Carr, who was ranting about a bunch of crap. Falk
told Bruce Carr’s father was the town drunk who killed himself and that drove Carr over the edge, making him resent the whole town. But Falk said Carr is all talk, otherwise he’d have put away years ago. A sixth victim turned up and Harvey found a clue in the dead man’s wallet, a gold cross with the initials P.O.C. etched into it. They found an identical cross in the house of another victim, but Bruce’s car got trashed while they’re inside. He realized it wasn’t the killer, so it must’ve been the assholes from the roadhouse. They went to the library to ask about the cross and convinced the librarian (whose husband was one of the victims) to tell them about the cross. She told them it was a 
family crest belonging to the Hunt family, who founded the town, and suggested they ask Judge Nelson about it, since he and Richard Hunt were pals 25 years ago. But when they went to Nelson’s house, they got an unfriendly reception; Nelson had a few of the bruisers from the roadhouse with him and Bruce and Harvey had to kick their asses. Harvey realized Nelson wasn’t the killer, he was just using the thugs as bodyguards because he was afraid he’d be the killer’s next victim. Nelson admitted that he and the other victims belonged to a group called the Paladins of the Cross (a thinly-disguised KKK), which was founded by Hunt to terrorize and assault black people 25 years before. He described the night we saw in the opening scene, when they
got drunk and burned down a shantytown, killing everyone in it, with Hunt personally killing a woman who used to work as his maid. Nelson claimed most of the group were ashamed and quit right then and there, and Hunt died not long after. Hunt’s wife apparently hated the group and left him not long before that terrible night, but Bruce deduced that she later moved back to town under a new name … Cloris Pratt (a name Bruce overheard at Dr. Falk’s office). They headed to Cloris’s place, arriving just as she was being stabbed by a guy dressed as a Paladin of the Cross. Bruce freaked out and jumped the guy, who turned out to be Carr. Harvey and the cops shot Carr, 
but not before he got Harvey with a shotgun blast. Before he died, Harvey told Bruce he knew who he was and that he had to let go of his anger about his parents’ death, and his anger towards them for leaving him alone. Bruce looked at things more logically and figured out someone had manipulated Carr into the killings. After some digging, he figured out that Hunt had ordered the raid on the shantytown to kill his former maid, who was blackmailing him because he fathered a son with her. That’s why Hunt’s wife left him and he was afraid of the scandal, so he used the raid as cover for killing his ex-maid, but he didn’t kill the child … he only managed to cripple him.
Yeah, the kid is Dr. Falk and he manipulated Carr into killing everyone who had taken part in the raid that killed his mother. (Falk has been coloured inconsistently throughout this issue, sometimes appearing white, sometimes African-American. I’m not sure if that’s a mistake, or if it was meant to show his mixed parentage.) Bruce confronted Falk at Harvey’s grave and told him he knew everything, but Falk pointed out that Bruce had no proof. Bruce agreed, but kept visiting the grave year after year, which brings us to the present, with Batman and an elderly Falk talking beside Harvey’s grave. Batman tells Falk 
he’s let go of his anger, but that won’t stop him from coming back to Harvey’s grave every year to remind Falk that there’s a difference between law and justice. The issue wraps up with some more Who’s Who pages: Joker, Catwoman, Penguin, Riddler, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, the Clayfaces, Ra’s Al Ghul, and Two-Face.
Noticeable Things:
- Bruce uses the pseudonym Frank Dixon while helping Harvey, which I assume is a reference to Franklin W. Dixon, the pseudonymous name of several authors of the Hardy Boys books.