A Christmas Story To Remember
Inspired by Charles Dickens' legenday classic A Christmas Carol, Batman: Noel (created by, with artwork by, Lee Bermejo). In this great huge graphic novel, Batman must bury the past and look to the future as he must realize what great friends he has in the present. Or else his future (after he's dead) will look a lot like death and destruction.
This is possibly my favorite graphic novel that has no strings attached to any DC continuity. I am a huge fan of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and it has a great story as well moral after following in the footsteps of Ebenezer Scrooge. While Bermejo was inspired to writer and do the artwork for Batman Noel, the story is almost exactly like A Christmas Carol. Scrooge (whom in this story is Batman) is well rooted as a hero in Gotham City and is trying to stop the latest in a series of Joker plots. While picking off one of Joker's small-fish errand boys, Batman is seen to not be letting up on the small criminals. As Batman says that "I'll scare them to make sure they don't turn into the big fish" (paraphrased of course), he is basically being more harder on all criminals than the Batman that we all know and have come to enjoy over the years. As Ebenezer Scrooge was a hard old man almost at the end of his rope, he was visited by a vision of the dead which said, "you'll be visited by three other spirits [visions] before the stroke of midnight" (or something like that). Batman was also visited by a vision, or spirit, of the dead which was Jason Todd (who said the same thing I just said recently).
As Batman partially ignores it and thinks it to be his mind playing tricks on him, he doesn't completely erase it from his mind. Visited by three other spirits eventually past (Catwoman), present (Superman) and future (Joker), Batman finds himself seeing that most people (even some of his allies) see him to be a real jerk. Can Batman change people? No way! Can he change himself? That is the million dollar question. Each time Batman is visited by one of the spirits, we can see that Lee Bermejo has put a lot of time and effort into his story. Not just throwing some material into the book just to make some money, while that is the end goal, Lee took some great time into creating Batman: Noel. While making the book as believable as possible, Lee made Batman: Noel a great comic book (timeless) classic. His artwork and writing are strong and passionate as you don't see much of his art in today's comic book continuity, but every page keeps you on the edge of your seat. And if you pay attention enough, you'll learn the moral lesson.
Most parts of the story reminded me a little bit of The New Adventures of Batman, episode, Old Wounds. While it was completely coincidental that the story and the cartoon episode have any connection, it is still nice to see a little look at a TV series. For example, the John Doe character (who is a guy down on his luck and works as an errand boy for the Joker), reminds me a lot of the guy (Connor who also worked for the Joker as his errand boy) had a family. The only difference from the TV series and the book is that the book has the guy and his son (as his only family member) and the TV series had a son and a wife. But it really is cool to think about it.
This is a great book to read to the family during Christmas, or great for the average (or unaverage) comic book nerd. Overall 5 out of 5.
