“…for this story to make sense… for it to mean anything… you have to believe in something. You have to believe people can change.”
How many adaptations and pastiches of A Christmas Carol have there been over the years? From faithful film adaptations to contemporary updates like Scrooged; from live action to CGI. And, somewhere in between, A Muppets Christmas Carol!
Well there’s also a Batman take on the Charles Dickens classic, Lee Bermejo’s Batman: Noël, which was released in 2011.
It’s Christmas in Gotham and poor Bob is a delivery man who is attacked and interrogated by Batman. Batman, who the narrator refers to as Scrooge, demands to know where Bob’s boss is; that boss being the Joker. Batman tracks Bob back to his home, where he lives with his son Tim, and Bats decides he needs to arrest Bob and make sure Tim doesn’t follow in his fathers footsteps. Alfred reminds Bruce that a similar plan lead to the death of Jason Todd who, as Robin, was killed at the hands of the Joker.
That night Bruce sees a vision of Jason doing his best Jacob Marley impression and throughout the night has run-ins with Catwoman, Superman and the Joker who act as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future respectively. It all comes to a head with a stand off between Bats, Joker and Bob.
While this is yet another variant on the classic Dickens tale, there are enough alterations to the original story here to make it interesting and fresh, most notably Bob Cratchitt is not the friendly and lovable man we know from the original story and is instead a coward and a lowly henchman.
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The setting of Gotham is a perfect location for a story such as this. The city is beautifully drawn in it’s most cold and moody state which evokes images of Victorian London. In fact all the art in this book is drawn wonderfully, although I know the more realistic character approach is not for all I think it works with this stand alone story.
In short this is a great little book and is a must read at this time of year. If you need something to get you in the Christmas spirit this weekend you could do a lot worse than picking up Batman: Noël.