Batman: Holy Terror

Here's the second installment of my "DC Elseworlds" series of posts: it's a short review for a short book.

It was a good idea to get Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle to do something for the Elseworlds imprint, or really to kick it off, since this was the first comic to be published bearing the Elseworlds logo. They were pretty popular as a Bat-team back in the day. They took full advantage of the Elseworlds framework and clearly took a wild idea and ran with it. In Holy Terror the modern world is a very different place because Oliver Cromwell didn't die (excuse my shoddy observance of the history of England) when he did in reality but lived on to see old age. The resulting change in history is that theocracy spread throughout the world, even to Gotham City. 

Bruce Wayne is on track to becoming an ordained minister, but then he finds out the truth behind the deaths of his parents: they were not simply gunned down as he was led to believe. Rather, they were executed by the state for giving medical attention and support to social deviants who sought "counter-reproductive" lifestyles. Bruce wants revenge on the society that would allow for such discrimination.

So it isn't explicitly said, but this is a story of ideologies: religious conservatism vs. all that is deemed "immoral" by the same theocratic Bible-beating leaders. Batman is a force of chaos against the order imposed by the church-run state. He finds that fighting an ideology is not nearly as simple as fighting a person or even a group of people. He resolves to fight even though he knows it will be far from easy.

I definitely understood why this graphic novel is generally held in high esteem. There's a lot to think about with this story, and the Grant/ Breyfogle team is really at the top of their game here. For added fun, there are plenty of DC characters who make appearances throughout the 48 pages. Society's "freaks" are not looked upon favorably in a world that favors conformity.  There's a strange sort of Justice League that forms in Holy Terror.

Any complaints? Well, this story could have really filled so much more than just a thin 48 pages. There are some later Elseworlds projects that are pretty lengthy, and this one, the first one, really tries to cram too much into too little. So I guess we can all be glad that Holy Terror was both good and successful because it allowed other projects of more ambitious lengths to be created. I'm sure that by the time you get to the end you'll be saying "Hey, I want to read more about this Batman who roams around Gotham wearing a priest collar!" 

Justice League: The Nail

I’d like to do a series of posts on DC’s Elseworlds imprint, which sadly has been a thing of the past for some time now. It was a great excuse to just make some fun comics. Top-tier writers and artists set loose with the DC characters and given free rein to put them into whatever kind of new settings they wanted? Sign me up.

The Elseworlds title discussed here came out in 1998, right when I started ravenously collecting X-Men titles. Justice League comics were outside of my radar at that point. The connection here is that after wrapping up this Justice League work, Alan Davis (the double-duty writer and artist on The Nail) took over the writing of the X-Men comics and drew X-Men on a monthly basis. Back then I honestly didn’t like Davis’ style, much preferring the work of Adam Kubert on Uncanny, but wow, with time did my opinion of Davis change. I really love his work now, and I made it a priority to seek out some more of it...the first thing I found was Justice League: The Nail.

In this story, the Justice League exists and looks much the same as it did in, I would say, the post-Crisis DC Comics of the late 80’s. But the Elseworlds spin is that this is a world without Superman. The story is titled after a nail that pops a tire on Jonathan Kent’s truck as that little space pod crashes in a field near Smallville. We’re led to believe that this is the trip that would take the Kents to find a baby Kal-El, but because of the change of one small part of the plot, this never happens.

The Justice League is feared. There’s an anti-metahuman agenda that is largely spread by Lex Luthor, the mayor of Metropolis (he’s still the super-smart rich guy in this version too). The media always seems to be there to capture the perfect shot of a bad guy getting beaten to a pulp. Batman is caught in the act of killing the Joker, which sure does sound like some harsh justice. What the cameras and microphones don’t catch is that the Joker just killed Batgirl and Robin after wreaking havoc throughout Arkham Asylum with some mysterious Kryptonian technology.

It just wouldn’t be nice to give away too much of the story here. Alan Davis definitely packs in a lot of plot in these 150 or so pages, which were originally published as three prestige format comics and later collected into trade paperback. Pretty much any DC character you can think of is at least seen in this book in a panel or two. That’s some Crisis-like ambition on Mr. Davis’ part! I definitely enjoyed The Nail, but I felt that the whole thing was wrapped up far too quickly. This could have used a “Chapter Four of Three” for sure. The reveals and the twists come pretty quickly in the last 25 pages. Minor spoilers: we knew from page one that Kal-El did land on earth, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that he eventually shows up. It just would have been nice to see him do a little bit more, but as the final pages mention, this isn’t the end of a story but the beginning of a new one. You can bet that I’ll be on the lookout for Justice League: Another Nail, the 2004 sequel Davis worked on, soon.

In what might become a regular new feature of these reviews, I have some little snippet observations:

I really loved the way that Davis drew the Flash. He was still muscular but kind of skinny. It makes sense that Barry Allen wouldn’t be quite as ripped as most of the other superheroes.

In the “slight disappointment” department, the New Gods characters are all shown and a war starts up, presumably related to all the goings-on back on earth. But after starting, the rest of this conflict isn’t shown. I figured there would be a New Gods/ earth smashup of sorts (I expected Darkseid to be behind some of it) but it all proved to be an afterthought. I guess I would have liked to help Alan Davis out with the plot for this thing, just a little. By cutting out those essentially space-wasting New Gods scenes he could have dedicated a few more pages to padding out the ending better.

Another thing that I think is a bit of an Alan Davis trademark is that sometimes when a character is wearing a mask with the “white eyes” he draws the pupils so you can get a better sense of the character’s emotion. I know that other artists do this too, but for some reason I always get slightly distracted when Davis does it.

Let’s have a round of applause for Mark Farmer, the inker on this fine publication. He’s Davis’ right hand man, and this is a very good thing.

This was a wonderful plot-based superhero story. Look elsewhere if you want to really dive into characterization. A lot of what draws you into the superheroes in this story is what they do. Martian Manhunter is seen doing his “watching TV” routine. Davis painstakingly shows how the Atom gets into a villain’s laboratory. The Nail is an action story told on a grand scale.

If you happen to come across this book in trade paperback format and are slightly interested in, you might as well just snag it. The Nail is an older DC trade and isn’t in print currently. In summary, you really can’t go wrong with the artwork of Alan Davis, and his storytelling, while overly grandiose, is still engaging.