Just how do they do it? Really? Only a week after the internet wowed itself into a spasm over Rucka/Williams’ Detective Comics, and completely overshadowing this week’s Big Event from Marvel, here come Morrison and Quitely (and hey! Is this the first time since New X-Men that we’ve had two issues from the pair come out in successive months? Cause for celebration!) to give everyone a timely reminder that we shouldn’t be getting any fancy ideas, because yes, they still entirely rule mainstream superhero comics.

Batman & Robin is just ludicrously confident, unfathomably entertaining comics. It may not have the depth and subtlety of the rest of the writer’s Batman run, but it’s immediately a far more enjoyable read – because it knows that a comic can be intelligent underneath, but still plug directly into the “pure childlike glee” synapses of the brain and thus appear about a million times as effortless as something more overwrought. And even while it’s telling a straight-batting, gloriously fun Batman adventure, it still shows no small amount of experimentation in the way the story’s being told. It almost seems like the series’ gimmick is for there to be a new little storytelling trick each issue – so in #1 we had the inspired use of sound effects as part of the artwork (repeated here in an absolutely wonderful panel of Robin slamming into a wall, the cracks in the plaster spelling out “SMASH”), but the new one introduced here involves pacing in the action sequences.

Quitely’s always been a strange one for this – something that characterises his work is the way that he seems to capture individual frozen moments, rather than directly expressing movement (it’s why – for example – in this issue, when showing Batman setting off a fire extinguisher in a goon’s face, he draws individual droplets rather than a continuous “whoosh” of foam), and yet due to his ability to choose exactly which moments to portray, there’s always still a vivid sense of motion. Similarly, his recent work has seen increasing use of full-page-width panels (barely any panels in this issue sit side-by-side), but due to his placement of items within the frames, everything still feels “active” as your eyes naturally scan left-to-right. Still, though, it’s a technique that – on its own – doesn’t necessarily seem conducive to fast, energetic action scenes (something that B&R is already making a forte) and so this is worked around by judiciously splitting dialogue across word balloons – and even panels – when successive frames are showing a quicker-paced series of moments. It works tremendously well for the issue’s main fight scene, and even better, is contrasted smartly by the slower, dialogue-packed panels as Dick and Alfred ruminate in later pages.

Those pages, incidentally, represent the best thing about an issue that may not have quite the same immediate, “wow” impact of its predecessor, but which is still, of course, an unadulterated joy throughout. Having never really had the chance to fully play with Alfred during his main-title run, Morrison is clearly recognising here the need for a voice of authority and experience to counteract the (wildly different in manifestation, but still shared) youthful exuberance of Dick and Damian. The butler (sod that… the father figure)’s “pep talk” here is lovely, most notably when describing Batman as a “role” and holding up the cowl Hamlet-style, and marks for perhaps the first time a genuine attempt to set out why Dick’s version of the identity is different from Bruce’s – this is not, after all, a speech that he would have given to his former charge.

Even the return to textbook brattishness of Damian can’t harm the sheer unadulterated pleasure of reading this book. The fact that the series is by Morrison and Quitely meant that a certain level of simple, objective quality was always going to be a given. But that it’s already shown the capacity to continually surprise, and perhaps even to exceed expectations, could be the greatest delight of all.