Batman: Haunted Knight

Written by: Jeph Loeb
Art by: Tim Sale & Greg Wright

Haunted Knight represents Loeb and Sale's--the team that brought us Batman: The Long Halloween and its sequel Dark Victory--first collected collaboration of their Dark Knight work. The book contains three story arcs revolving around crimes committed around and inspired by the Halloween holiday. Surely this premise sounds familiar for those who've read The Long Halloween. In fact, says the writer of Haunted Knight's introduction, the stories collected in this book were actually the inspiration for Loeb and Sale to go on to create the later holiday-themed Batman crime story.


A variant of the Haunted Knight cover.

The three stories collected in Haunted Knight, however, don't have the same dark tone found in The Long Halloween and Dark Victory. In fact, the stories in Haunted Knight have a formulaic quality to them. The issue will start out with an exciting fight; the bad guy will get away; he'll go home as Bruce Wayne and have bad dreams about his parents; at some point the bad guy will be captured; Wayne/Batman will have some cheap revelation about his parents/childhood and why he must be Batman. How many times must one character keep asking the same question and arrive at the same answer?

While not nearly as kinetic as it could be for an action book, the art in Haunted Knight (and Long Halloween and Dark Victory, for that matter) derives its strength from its opulence. The look of the book is no better than when Bruce Wayne is attending a gala. Opulence should never be rushed, which is why the twelve-issue arcs of Long Halloween and Dark Victory work so much better at establishing a tone than Haunted Knight. I should mention that--while Tim Sale's artwork is certainly interesting and distinctive--it's the colors of Greg Wright that really establish such class for the book(s).

While not so impressive after reading Long Halloween and Dark Victory, Haunted Knight serves as an adequate introduction to the decadent world created by Loeb, Sale and Wright. Strangely, this superhero book actually calls out for less character development and more action. There's only so many times one can watch Bruce Wayne go to sleep with the cold sweats and wake up a new Batman.

D

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