“Why, sir —” long-suffering butler Alfred inquires of Bruce Wayne in Frank Miller’s classic The Dark Knight Returns, “—whatever happened to your moustache?”

Providence’s Ryan Alves is out to do a lot more than flip that query on its head with his recent AWE Comics newspaper broadsheet Moustache, though — and while it may not always be clear what his ambitions and aims are, his atmospheric blend of rich black inks, cinematic panel compositions, well-placed washes (or a digital approximation thereof, at any rate?), intricate linework, and good old-fashioned improvisational drawing at the very least marks this as the best-looking “Bat book” to come down the pike in ages, certainly better than anything DC seems even capable of producing with the “real” thing. Which brings us to the big question, namely —

So what is this early-days story featuring the most thinly-veiled analogue for the Caped Crusader ever…