OFF THE PANEL #12 - Gotham By Gaslight: A Tale Of The Batman

 
In the series' twelfth installment, the Skirt (Merce Mueller) chooses the second foray into Gotham City and enlists the aid of an all-around Bat-slave in the form of the Sloth (Alex Koch), while the Sphinx (Wiegeabo Kilijabob) makes his OTP debut by joining them after savagely murdering women in the streets. That's right, on this episode, we're discussing the one of the quintessential entries in DC's Elseworlds line, and infact the very first book to be given the name - so put on your Victorian hat, hope inside your stagecoach, and witness the familiar origin story of The Dark Knight Detective told anew as he's pitted against legendary serial killer Jack The Ripper in the 1989 one-shot, Gotham By Gaslight: A Tale Of The Batman.

Download Off The Panel

Review: Superman - Speeding Bullets

Ah, the Elseworlds brand. Renowned for it's constant misses rather than a slew of hits, DC Comics' banner of off-shoot stories, featuring their most popular characters released of the constraints of regular continuity, gained it's height of popularity throughout the 1990's. The goal of the brand was to challenge contemporary ideas of such classics as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and The Justice League with alternate takes that varied from the subtle-yet-obvious to the drastically different. On a number of levels, it was an outlet for writers to go nuts with whatever crazy concept they had. What if Batman were a pirate? What if Superman were raised by Darkseid? What if Wonder Woman, an Amazon, was found roaming the Wild West? Those ideas and more were presented to the market, and for a time, fans ate it up. It was an idea filled with a combination of endless potential and plenty of margin for error. And often times, it was error that was presented. So by the time that the early 2000's hit, the idea of DC's Elseworlds was unsurprisingly all but a dead brand, with only a few being books released over a period of year until it was quietly abandoned.