Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Lovecaftian Thing a Day No.209: The Doom that Came to Gotham


It was inevitable, I suppose, that we were going to get a Batman-Cthulhu mash-up - given that Julius Schwartz (who acted as agent fof the sale of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness to Astounding Stories) later edited the Batman line for DC during the period that Arkham Asylum became part of its mythology (although apparently it was Jack C. Harris and not Schwartz who added that particular institution to the DC universe). Mike Mignola's previous form with the Lovecraft-inflected Hellboy series, he seems a good fit as writer for The Doom that Came came to Gotham: the caped crusader's first official outing against the forces of the Cthulhu Mythos. This is, however, set in an alternative DC universe, and thus is pretty much at right angles to what I presume is the 'canonical' Batman timeline (and in doing so attunes elements of the original character's mythology with the Cthulhu Mythos). Whilst this didn't quite hit the right note of cosmicism for me, The Doom that Came to Gotham marks an interesting attempt to push Batman toward what might be seen as the kind of darker territory for which Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego are well suited.

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