Review: Haunted Knight

It surprises no one that the Payne family is in to Batman.  It might surprise some people to see how much we are in to Batman.  We go for the apparel

Full disclosure: this is not his only Batman onesie.  Or his only Batman socks.

The video games

The World's Greatest Detective doing...detective stuff...I guess

We own all the movies

Well, all the good movies

And for Kate's birthday, I got her a couple of my favorite Batman books (I'll avoid the term "Graphic Novel" because it makes me feel like an even bigger dork).

It's important to teach him Batman's origin story very young in case something happens to me and Kate

The point is, we love us some Batman.  Knowing this, and knowing that Kate has spent a lot of time stuck in bed lately because of her blood clots, Lance loaned us a couple of his favorite Batman books.  I read one of them yesterday (it was pretty short and I had some time on the bus) and I thought I'd review it here for anybody looking to get a taste of Batman comics.  I'll try to do the others as I get to them, but no promises.  Turns out the next few weeks are going to be busy.

Haunted Knight is actually a collection of three short stories, published as Halloween specials in 1993-1995.  The stories are relatively simple, which makes them nice for a new Batman reader.  In the first, for example, Scarecrow is terrorizing Gotham on Halloween, so Batman finds him and punches him really hard.  Fin.

Although the surface stories are simple, these stories have lots of flashbacks to formative events in Bruce Wayne's life.  Because the stories are Halloween-themed, the flashbacks go back to Bruce's fears, nightmares, and traumas.  His character gains a surprising amount of depth.  The second story shows us one of my favorite characters, Police Captain Jim Gordon, trying to keep his family together while doing his job protecting Gotham.  The story is actually very touching and I almost cried on the bus reading it.

What I really love about this book, in addition to the surprisingly touching story, is the art.  Tim Sale uses shadow, silhouette, and big blocks of color in very interesting way.  It's hard to describe, so I'll just include a couple pictures.

I love the use of just black, grey, white and red

I also like the way he depicts the vast emptyness that is Wayne Manor.  Such an empty, lonely place for Bruce to live.

My biggest worry before I read any comic books was that I would get lost trying to keep up with 75 years of backstory.  The nice thing about this book (and most of the ones I will review in the near future if I get around to that) is that it is pretty self contained.  You don't really need to know anything going in other than that Batman is a guy who fights villains and criminals in Gotham.  I would recommend this book to anybody who wants to try out reading a comic book without a lot of time commitment.  Easy to read, satisfying ending, beautiful art.