What, you thought I was done with my pile? My ability to not do things is only beaten by ability to put other things off until they’ve collected dust or canon irrelevance. But, unlike my procrastination, good stories persist regardless. And there are some stories that are solid, but get swept up into a large-scale event and end up either half-remembered or in a collection of event one-shots that goes out of print within the year. Luckily, my pile has unearthed some of those event one-shots in the form of Batman Secret Files for the characters Miracle Molly and The Gardener from James Tynion IV, Dani, Christian Ward, Lee Loughridge, and Tom Napolitano.

While both of these stories connect to some larger part of the Fear State story line from a few years ago, they act more like origin stories for both characters. For Miracle Molly, we have Mary Kowalski, a woman deeply unhappy with her life who undergoes an experimental program to essentially erase her past memories after having her engineering work stolen from under her. As a member of the Unsanity Collective, she has freed herself from the past that burdened her to become the self that she was always hoping to be. For The Gardener, we have a bit more connection to the broader DC canon as Bella Garten was a former student of Jason Woodrue (the Floronic Man), and peer to both Alec Holland (Swamp Thing) and Pamela Isley. Garten was the romantic partner before Isley became Poison Ivy and still tries now to help her go back to their college ideals when all they wanted was for the plants to speak for and defend themselves.

These end up being the reference materials for all stories involving those characters going forward. There’s a degree of definiteness due to these pieces coming from one of the characters’ creators, Tynion IV, that seamlessly links them into the DC Universe at large. Miracle Molly is a known entity for a new gang in Gotham while The Gardener has her own history with many of the other plant-based characters in the world. Neither are world-altering in their presence and they fill a niche needed for many smaller-scale stories as they both have their own goals outside of any hero. They can stand on their own without having to be dragged into another event.

More than anything, I just like new characters. I like seeing what a creative team can do when given a bit more freedom on a longer running series to introduce something different from what we’ve seen in canon before. And having an artist like Jorge Jiménez designing characters for other artists like Dani and Ward just brings the collaborative storytelling of long-running comic series all the more enjoyable. And that’s what many of these series do need to focus on—creating something new that fans can hold onto and these one-shots do just that. 

Get excited. Get new. 

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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.