Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham <2000-2001>

Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham <2000-2001>

By Mike Mignola, Richard Pace, Troy Nixey, and Dennis Janke

Elseworlds (DC Comics)

157 Pages

From the solicitation:

An unholy union of a comic book icon and pure Lovecraftian horror is unleashed by writers Mike Mignola, acclaimed creator of Hellboy, Richard Pace (Robert E. Howard’s Savage Sword) and artist Troy Nixey (Harley Quinn) in this terrifying reimagining of the greatest heroes and villains in Batman mythos.

It’s Gotham City, 1928. Twenty years have passed since a madman slew the parents of young Bruce Wayne, heir to one of the city’s oldest fortunes. Twenty years since he fled the carnage of Gotham.

But now Bruce Wayne has returned - and hell has followed. A terrible thing from beyond space and time has awakened. The Lurker on the Threshold has called its faithful servants - immortal sorcerers, reptile men, beings of eldritch cold and fungal horror - to feed our world into its gaping maw.

If the Batman hopes to end the horror, how terrible must Bruce Wayne become?

The Doom that came to Gotham is a story that promises much, but falls just shy of delivering. The premise is unique and intriguing, pitting Batman against eldritch horrors and damnation in the style of Lovecraft against a noir backdrop.

The story opens on a ship in an arctic locale as Bruce Wayne and some of his crewmates, Jason Todd, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake (all robins in DC continuity), “Alfred”, and others search for the missing crew of a previous expedition led by Professor Cobblepot (the Penguin in Batman continuity).

They spot a naked man on a hilltop surrounded by penguins, and they suspect it to be Cobblepot, but he soon dashes into a cave. Inside, Wayne encounters a man named Grendon (Mr. Freeze) kneeling in front of an eldritch horror frozen in a wall of ice. Demonic penguins attack, but Wayne is able to fend them off and knock Grendon out to take him back to his ship. The rescue party finds a manuscript written by Cobblepot that provides cues as to what may have happened to the original expedition.

Wayne and his crew then decide to return to Gotham after 20 years abroad, and events soon avalanche down on Gotham as an election looms (with Harvey Dent/Two Face leading the race) that promises to restore Gotham to its former glory.

A reptilian plague strikes the city, mysterious murdersare scattered about, and hellish creatures make themselves known as a prophecy looms closer to fulfillment. Characters like Gordon (Commissioner in the comics), Talia and Ra’s Al-Ghul, as well as other Easter eggs are sprinkled throughout the story in re-imagined roles - but often they meet the same fate their continuity counterparts have met (think Jason Todd, Harvey Dent, and Barbara Gordon, among others).

The story is mostly successful but fails in that there are perhaps too many elements presented in such a short work. There are magicians, ancient curses, undead, werewolves, ghosts, eldritch creatures, immortal beings, resurrections, transformations, genies, goblins(?) and, it seems, anything else you can name from horror stories all thrown in for good measure. What begins as a tight mystery very quickly devolves into a mash-up of so many elements that it doesn’t seem to be a singular story, but rather a crossover that simply leaves the reader unsatisfied.

Additionally, it is never satisfactorily explained how some characters who never age were able to fool an entire city for centuries, nor why exactly Bruce Wayne dresses as Batman if everyone knows that the Caped Crusader and the millionaire playboy are one and the same.

The artwork is a mix of Mignola’s style mixed with Frank Miller’s, only not as dark (Mignola does the covers for all three books, but Nixey does the interior art). It is appropriate for this kind of story, and the colors are muted enough to make it dark and brooding without drowning the work in shadow.

The dialogue is primarily accurate for the setting (although not as successful as, say, Spider-Man Noir), but at times it seems silly, like when Batman and the main villain get into a truly childish argument that devolves into, “I am a GOD!” “No, you’re a pawn!” “God!” “Pawn!”. No kidding. I had such high hopes for this one, but I have to regrettably and reluctantly give it 3 stars out of 5.

You can find this title in hardcopy on Amazon.com, eBay.com, and digitally on Comixology.com. Be sure before you buy that you are purchasing the full, 157-page trade paperback and not the individual issues, unless you'd rather have 3 50-page comics.