comic book review | the m0vie blog

A Tale of the Batman: Gotham By Gaslight (& Master of the Future)

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Darren

After spending the tail end of last year looking at the tangled inter-continuity crossovers at Marvel, I thought I’d spend January looking at some of the looser “out of continuity” tales at the major companies.

Gotham By Gaslight is an out-of-continuity tale which imagines Batman as the protector of a Victorian-era Gotham City, pitting the detective against none other than Jack the Ripper. It’s an entertaining little story which has a bit of fun with its premise, while managing to concisely boil the Dark Knight’s characteristics down to their core components. It’s an efficient tale which works quite well on its own merits, but has subsequently been overtaken by the hype surrounding it.

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: a tale of the batman, a tale of the batman: gotham by gaslight, batman, Brian Augustyn, bruce wayne, Christopher Nolan, comic book, comic book review, dark knight returns, elseworld, elseworlds, Gotham by Gaslight, gotham city, mike mignola, review | Leave a comment »

Ed Brubaker’s Run on Uncanny X-Men – The Rise and Fall of the Shi’ar Empire (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Darren

I’m currently wading my way through Marvel’s somewhat complicated continuity, with a major focus on The Avengers, what with the film due out in 2012 and all that. Anyway, this isn’t really a “big” crossover in its own right, but it factors into a big event I’ll be looking at later on today. Consider this an appendix.

Ed Brubaker’s run on Uncanny X-Men isn’t as widely praised as his work on Daredevil or Captain America – in fact, while Marvel couldn’t wait to churn out omnibus releases of his work on those two titles, his Uncanny X-Men run, like Matt Fraction’s run which followed, has been haphazardly collected. Part of me suspects that this might be down to factors outside Brubaker’s control – Joss Whedon was monopolising the most popular X-Men for Astonishing X-Men when Brubaker kicked off his run – but part of it comes down to the simple fact that Brubaker simply isn’t a great writer of team books. That said, writing a year-long space epic featuring none of the more iconic characters as his introductory arc probably didn’t help much.