Sakura of DOOM

In the early days of Bruce Wayne assuming the matle of Batman, Gotham City is overrun by gangsters and the mob, most notably by Carmine "The Roman" Falcone's crime syndicate. One by one, Falcone's men are being killed off on holidays, and Batman, then Captain Jim Gordon, and DA Harvey Dent must team up to find the killer. This is a solid noir mystery and a pretty nifty retake of the origins of Two-Face, as well as a look at Batman's early days, when Gotham hadn't been completely populated by supervillains in costumes.

I actually picked this up because someone (londonkds?) made a comment in their review of Batman Begins mentioning that Gordon's comment to Batman about his actually attracting costumed villains was reminiscent of The Long Halloween. It is, a bit, although I guess I felt more that the story here centers around the murder mystery instead of around Batman's psyche. I do like how we get to see Gotham pre-costumed-villains and how we get to see the well-known villains creeping out of the woodwork -- Joker, Riddler, Poison Ivy, and Scarecrow are all there, though they play secondary roles to Holiday, the holiday killer.

The ending is a bit iffy. Loeb has so many red herrings out for the mystery that the very final switcheroo completely doesn't work for me; I was getting tired of being misled and not given enough clues. Also, the obvious killer is the most interesting one, and it was irritating to have that taken away just for a surprise that I felt didn't add much to the story.

I feel sort of bad complaining, actually. As mentioned before, this is a solid graphic novel, but when I was reading it, I found that I was actually a little bored with the gritty Batman-verse and not so concerned with the state of the city in general. All the main players are men -- Harvey Dent, Batman, Falcone, Gordon -- with two stronger Falcone women and Catwoman. Catwoman is always awesome (I am a fan), but she doesn't play a very big role here at all. All the big issues and concerns are the men's, and this is most obvious with Dent and Gordon's wives, both of whom stay at home and worry an awful lot. Gotham is a very male world in this book. I'm not sure if it's fair or not to task the book for this -- it's not anti-feminist necessarily so much as.... completely unfemale. The female is of no concern at all, not even worth being anti-feminist about, I suppose that's the feeling I get. And that sense created a distance between me and the story.

Also, after reading more manga than usual the past few months and after being immersed in manga reviews and commentary, courtesy of the wonderful people on LJ, it was a little harder to shift to the brainspace of gritty Gotham City, as opposed to a more shoujo narrative. The art style was also difficult to get used to; there are few colors, the people are stylized to look less perfect, gritty and real, unlike manga stylization, and most of all, all the panels are rectangular. Obviously, the color scheme and stylization fit a noir and a gritty mystery, but it was much harder getting used to blocky panels again, to my surprise.