Batman Gotham Knight

Following up my Dark Knight Box Office Talk I figured I’d make a second entry as I’ve finally had time to purchase the new Batman DVD entitled “Batman Gotham Knight”.

If an average Batman fan watches this, they will like it quite a bit. If a pretty big Batman fan watches this, they will love it. There are a lot of references to other characters in the Batman universe, most aren’t even used in the comics that much anymore.

Probably the most dominate one in this series is Sal Maroni. If you read Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween or Dark Victory you’re probably familiar with the name at the very least. If you haven’t read either book, do yourself a huge favor and check them out. A lot of scenes, characters, and concepts for Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies come from those two books as well as Batman Year One by Frank Miller and you’ll see a lot of Heath Ledger’s Joker (most likely) in The Killing Joke! Feel free to check out ATOMIC COMICS to purchase the graphic novels on line, or in store if you’re lucky enough to live in Arizona and have one close!

Back to the point though, Maroni is a cool treat that will also appear in this film (Just like Carmine Falcone did in the first Nolan movie and Detective Flass). You also get appears by Killer Croc, The Scarecrow, and Dead Shot. My personal favorite was seeing Crispus Allen in two episodes.

Crispus Allen, for those who are unfamilar, was a main character in a series written by award winning writter Ed Brubaker titled Gotham Central. It focused on the GCPD and how they handled things from their end while Batman and his allies did their thing. Eventually, Gotham City claimed Allen as he was murdered in an alley. That wasn’t the end of him though, he was chosen by the spirit of vengeance to be his human host and Allen became the new Spectre after Hal Jordan returned to the land of the living.

As far as animation quality goes, Bruce Timm is an Executive Producer (original Batman TAS artist), so it goes without saying that it’s bad ass. I like the first story quite a bit as it tells the story through three children who all saw Batman in a different way (A shadow, A Bat, A robot). If you’ve read Gotham by Gaslight, it almost seems like they designed this Batman off that version, which is a cool elseworlds story about Batman in the late 1800s hunting down Jack the Ripper in Gotham City.

Gotham Knights is overall a fantastic piece of animation that needs to be seen. It fills in the gap between the first movie and the second, as a year or so has passed when they get to the start of the second movie. Also be on the look out for the segment called “Working Through Pain” as it’s written by 100 Bullets writer Brian Azzarello!