Comics Fondle

Batman: Red Rain is not bad at all. The beginning, the slow, mysterious lead-in to the Dracula revelation is actually handled wonderfully. Moench does a great job of both establishing the otherworldly Gotham City and getting his story going… some of it reminds a lot of Dracula, for the beginning anyway, and I’m sure that effect was intended.

There’s so little action in the first half or so, when it finally does turn in to an action-packed story, it feels like a bit of a cheat. Lots of Red Rain feels unique–Moench takes a silly idea (Batman vs. Dracula) and gets some solid scenes out of it. His Bruce Wayne is real nice, a loner in his bedroom, plagued by nightmares… really, really good stuff. It’s the story unfolding around Batman he doesn’t spend enough time on. He spends some time on it–little scenes with Commissioner Gordon, but it’s all ground situation establishment, lots of it meant to quickly answer obvious reader questions.

When the big action starts, Red Rain loses everything special about itself. Moench basically took a five page setup and drug it out over twenty or thirty wonderful pages, then got around to the rest of the standard story.

I mean, I’ll bite–there needs to be some action in it, right? There needs to be Batman vs. Dracula in a Batman vs. Dracula story, but what he was doing at the beginning was so good… it seems like a real waste.

Red Rain’s an interesting example of the old, short graphic novel–according to DC it’s ninety-three pages but I didn’t count–in terms of pacing. The middle of the second act and the third act all play like expected, but its format is familiar not because it’s currently used in comic books (I mean, one of the big two putting out a ninety-three page single, yeah, right), but because at some point the medium adopted it… in some ways, having a reasonable second and third act really date Red Rain, because it’s just a story. It takes a lot of short cuts–which is what Elseworlds really facilitated–to get in and out effectively.

Kelley Jones’s art is, overall, absolutely fantastic. It reminded me a lot of old, 1970s Wrightson Swamp Thing art for some reason. Sometimes there are some hiccups–like when the female lead looks different from panel to panel on the same page–but overall, it’s very effective artwork. Jones’s designs for Wayne Manor and Gotham in general really remind of old Universal horror pictures, which is cool and Jones does a great job with all of Bruce Wayne’s psychological traumas in the story….

My only problem with the art would be the vampires and since it’s a vampire story, there are lots of vampires… but whatever. It’s fine. I can’t believe I’m saying I miss the early 1990s, but here’s a sure sign–something solidly mediocre and readable, which is more than one can say for a stunning majority of DC books these days.

C

Technorati Tags: Batman, Comic Book, DC Comics, Doug Moench, Elseworlds, Kelley Jones, Review

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