Previously, I had posted about Darwyn Cooke's late-Noughties take on Eisner's romantic noir hero, the Spirit. I have had Cooke's Batman Ego and Other Tails on my ebay watch list for ages but it became an impulse buy in Plan 9 in Aberdeen at the end of the summer.
Cooke's vision of Batman is a blend of the Dick Sprang 50s model blended with Bruce Timm's take from the Batman animated series of the early 90s. But Ego reminds me most of Starlin's trippy Metamorphosis; there are also echoes of Ditko in Cooke's work, I reckon.
I don't care for the idea of the schizoid Bruce Wayne and the way its tendrils weave through Goth culture- in essence, the mainstream nowadays. However, I do like Cooke's Art Deco Wayne Manor; his Batmobile of 1950; his Robin the Teen Wonder and his noir vignettes of the origins of the Joker and Two-Face (aptly enough in a story about Batman's disintegrating personality).
The rest of the book reprints Bat-stories either written or drawn by Cooke and displaying his 50s and 70s influences.
Here Be Monsters riffs on Alex Toth with a one-off, disfigured femme fatale named Madame X. Selena's Big Score is a gritty heist drama, where the artwork becomes more primitive and abstract as the story progresses and the plan collapses. Slam Bradley guests but I would've preferred to see more of the costumed Catwoman in this pastiche of Point Blank.
The Monument is a send-up of Frank Miller's Dark Knight. Date Night is an exciting and stylised vignette by Tim Sale, which made me want to read Superman Confidential: Kryptonite.
Finally, Deja Vu is a re-imaging of Englehart's Night of the Stalker, from the experimental 100-page era of Detective Comics. This is a classy package but the tone is a bit too "grimdark" for my taste.
At the other extreme, we find Batman '66 Meets The Green Hornet. This handsome volume expands on the tv series 1967 crossover.
Roger C. Carmel's Col. Gumm has suffered a fate similar to Marvel's Baron Zemo and joins forces with the Joker. The Green Hornet and Kato, who pose as crooks in their crime-fighting crusade, lock horns with the Caped Crusaders throughout the adventure. There's not really enough material to flesh out six issues but there's lots of charm and great affection for the tv series. There are death-traps, Bat-ropes and deadpan humour-although the bootless Batman's short, fat, hairy legs are a little too Morecambe and Wise.
The likeness of Robert Conrad's pal Van Williams and Bruce Lee are good and what little I know about the Green Hornet- the Black Beauty, the revolving scanner and the Kissing Candy secret garage, all from the Sixties annual- is present and correct.
The comic's riff on the Adam West series has been great fun over the last two years. I would love to see a Batman '66 World's Finest- preferably with Brainiac and Clayface.
Coming up: Fraction's Hawkeye and the Sixth Doctor's Last Adventure
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