Forged and Tempered Under The Judgement And Mercy Of God, Batman: Holy Terror
This week I read Batman: Holy Terror by Alan Brennert and Norm Breyfogle, which while technically being the second Batman Elseworlds (the first being Gotham by Gaslight by by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola), was the first published under the Elseworlds brand name.
The story is set in an America far from our own, an authoritarian theocracy founded by Oliver Cromwell still operating as a commonwealth of Britain. In this world there exists no separation between the church and the state, or church and anything at all. The church is the state, ruled by an all-powerful shadow council of magistrates, and no freedoms exist outside of those the council can keep in check. Dissidents, heretics, and all religious minorities are hunted down and executed, or worse.
It is in this world's equivalent to the 1980s that we find the wealthy orphan Bruce Wayne, having just recently given up his pursuit of becoming an inquisitor (this world's police equivalent) and just days away from his ordainment as a minister of the state. He has been told for years that the man who killed his parents, Joseph Chill, had been found and tried for his crimes, so lacks the drive for vengeance other versions of Bruce traditionally have.
That is until James Gordon, the inquisitor who had investigated the Waynes' murder and served as a mentor to Bruce previously, stricken with regret for his life-long complacency with the corrupt system he participates in, reveals to Bruce that his parents were not killed in a random mugging but instead in a covert execution by the church/state. This was due to Bruce's parents operating a secret clinic to help the oppressed, including homosexuals, religious minorities, and those pregnant with children outside of wedlock. Distraught and enraged at this revelation, Bruce dawns a bat-like demon costume once used in a church passion play his father performed in and sets out to take vengeance on his parents' killers, starting himself down a path to become a figure powerful enough to destroy the entire corrupt system, a holy terror.
(I find the clergy-collar being incorporated into the
Bat-Symbol a very fun and fitting design choice)
Though perhaps overly exposition heavy at points, I rather enjoyed this story for the sheer uniqueness of the whole adventure. Most Elseworlds Batman stories, as will be displayed in later posts, tend to either take Batman and change something about him or his world in his present (for example, he is gifted with a Green Lantern ring before he can become Batman) or they reconfigure him to fit in some point in the real-life past (like the Victorian Era), but this story goes the extra mile by rewriting an entirely different history of the world from the 1600s onward and creating a Batman to fit within the then-present of that world. Though it hinders the story by requiring a lot of time to be spent world-building, once it establishes itself, it's able to feel incredibly distinct from a typical Batman story, which I think is a positive. Another positive is the art by the late Norm Breyfogle, which though not as refined as it would be later in his life, is still very good. His rendering of a Gotham skyline entirely constructed in the style of a gothic church really heightens the feeling that the church has permeated every aspect of society, and his character designs, particularly his reworking of the Batman costume, do well differentiating themselves from their mainline counterparts without losing what makes the normal versions of the characters distinct (and that cover is just gorgeous).
One noticeable flaw this story has, in my opinion, is the amount of space taken up by cameos from this world's versions of other DC characters, which often distracts from the central focus of the story and feels like an expense that wasn't worth the page-space, given the short format of these stories. The length is another flaw, as once the story feels like it's hitting its stride, it has to rush towards a conclusion. I think with more room to breathe, this story could've become something really great, but as it stands its just a pretty solid alternate universe Batman story.
Seeing as this is the first post on an actual story I've made on this blog, the ranking of this story is rather easy:
- Batman: Holy Terror
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