DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY DID WITH THE TITLE?
So these are three self contained Bat stories from a series called Tales of Gotham which were sort of outside normal continuity and followed Batman early in his career and I think this is the first time we had Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee work together. They also collaborated on the rightly praised Long Halloween and Dark Victory stories and they do an excellent, noir Batman.
Of these three stories, the latter two are far more interesting than the first which is a decent Halloween story with Batman taking on Scarecrow. It seems like there should be more of Batman around Halloween. His whole thing is inspiring fear in villains and he is basically wearing a Halloween costume. It is a perfectly decent story well told but there’s not really much to talk about there.
The next story is more notable and I think it establishes a piece of what is now Bat-canon. Batman takes on the Mad Hatter is a villain inspired by Alice in Wonderland with a bizarre fixation on hats. I would not say he is a vintage villain by any means. The lovely insight into this story is Bruce Wayne’s relationship with his mother. Far too often in Batman interpretations, particularly Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy we have the death of his parents basically seen entirely through the relationship with his father. Bruce is angry with his Dad for failing to act. Bruce wants to do his best to live up to his father’s example. He needs to honour his father’s memory etc. Martha Wayne ends up as an afterthought more often than not. We generally know far less about her, but this story chooses to go into it a bit. Bruce is particularly angry with the Mad Hatter for corrupting what should be a good memory and we get to see Martha reading Bruce Alice in Wonderland on the evening before they went out. We find that Bruce asked his mother to wear her pearls to the cinema that evening and Joe Chill only attacked them for those pearls. We also meet the wonderful Leslie Thompson, a doctor friend of Bruce’s father who acted as a mother figure to Bruce and is generally relentlessly awesome (when I talk about No Man’s Land later we’ll have a bit more of this). Leslie is a rare beast in being an older woman with no super powers who is undeniably a total hero. She’s a bit of a distaff Alfred and she’s super and I love her.
The final story in this collection is one I had to re-read because I didn’t quite believe it had happened. The introduction of the book talks about how the second story is inspired by Lewis Carrol and then mentions how the third is inspired by Dickens.
So we have A Batman Christmas Carol. No… seriously. It’s literally a Batman Christmas Carol. Poison Ivy and Joker play the ghosts of Christmas past and future. They inspire him to found the Thomas and Martha Wayne foundation to help people.
It’s just ludicrous. I mean, it’s the kind of thing you’d really expect in the Silver Age. I think there’s a particular disconnect because Loeb and Lee are known for their noir, gritty Batman. And then they do a bizarre Christmas Carol homage which simply makes no sense. Scrooge needed to be visited by ghosts so he could be reformed because he was a villain, he was a greedy wealthy man who needed to learn the value of love. Batman is a hero, not just a hero, but a super hero. He should not need some kind of visitation through dreams to understand that he could help people with his money.
It’s just absolutely bizarre. The final story here isn’t something that’s infuriating like the misinterpretation of Wonder Woman in Infinite Crisis. It’s just genuinely baffling due to the established perception I have of Loeb and Lee as creators.
My Feelings on Things 