Someone somwhere might be able to do something worthwhile with the idea of overlapping Batman's Gothic horrors with the cosmic calamities of H.P. Lovecraft. But neither artist Troy Nixey nor writers Mike Mignola and Richard Pace came anywhere near the mark.
So it's another Batman Elseworlds. This time Bruce Wayne and his parents are around for Gotham City's founding in the early 20th century, and twenty-plus years after the death of the Waynes, Bruce launches his career as Batman. He even has two wards this time, Tim Drake and Dick Grayson, though neither is being prepared for sidekick status. He has no rogues' gallery, nor does he get involved with any form of street crime, and yet, when a Lovecraftian doom comes to Gotham, many analogues of the rogues show up in new guises: Penguin, Two-Face, Man-Bat, and Mister Freeze. At least the authors didn't resort to the overused Joker and Catwoman.
Ra's Al Ghul and his daughter Talia are fundamentally responsible for unleashing some sort of demon-gods. None of them are given the same names as the Lovecraft myth-figures, and though I tend to think there's no copyright protection for the original stories, it's possible that some gaming concern has control of, say, the name "Yog-Sothoth," which might be the reason the raconteurs came up with a facsimile fiend. Of course that means that these aren't even weak templates of the Lovecraft monsters, and so there's no crossover potential with any of these new creations.
Troy Nixey's art sometimes achieves a good creepy vibe, but he draws a lot of characters off-model, and his demon-gods aren't particularly compelling. The story's hard to follow thanks to the authors' desire to play to Bat-fans by injecting rogue-analogues all over the place. Not only is the story a disservice to the concepts of Lovecraft, it's even dull as a Batman story. I only read it because it's been adapted into a DTV animated film and I may want to review that in future.
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