Also read in 2006: reading interlude
Castle of the Bat – Jack C Harris and Bo Hampton
Another graphic novel picked up from our excellent local library; an entertainment that you could probably knock off in under half an hour. Its premise is an interesting crossover between the Batman mythos and the Frankenstein legend and, on the whole, it is pulled off well. It descends into outright hamminess in a couple of places – I could quote the lines: “A lab? In mad Ludwig’s old castle?” and also “Run! Run” Everything’s about to collapse…” But perhaps I am being a bit harsh.
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It’s got a gentler, more impressionistic style of art than your run-of-the-mill graphic novel, which does a good job in presenting a different time and place – but which one reviewer found “not visceral enough to contain the story” (see below). The palette is dark and moody, slipping into sepia tones in places, but can come alive with fresh blues or fiery oranges when the story demands. I found myself viewing the story almost as an optional extra: it was obvious where it was going to have to take material from the world of Batman and where the world of Frankenstein would have the plot. Perhaps this is why some people found it a bit obvious and unsatisfying – I just thought it was a product of what the creators were attempting.
And now for the technicalities. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia explaining where all this fits into canon and so on:
Elseworlds is the publication imprint for a group of comic books produced by DC Comics that take place outside the company’s canon. According to its tagline: “In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places – some that have existed, and others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist. The result is stories that make characters who are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow.” Unlike its Marvel Comics counterpart What If…?, which bases its stories on a single point of divergence from the regular continuity, most Elseworlds stories instead take place in entirely self-contained continuities whose only connection to the canon DC continuity are the presence of familiar DC characters. Read on here… ~ List of Elseworlds publications.