Gotham by Gaslight is a noirish presentation of DC's greatest detective, set in conjunction with Sherlock Holmes as the World's Greatest Detective back then as well as Jack the Ripper, the ever elusive serial killer and a bloody trail of murdered whores in his wake.
It starts off with Bruce Wayne, aka the Batman, accounting a recurring dream of his parents murdered in front of his youngish eyes to Sigmund Freud, a renowned expert on psychology of the time who as it was the case of any respectable psychologists tried to dissect it. It was then revealed Bruce Wayne was under the tutelage of two renowned masters on the elements that make up the man's alter ego for a daunting period of five years, before returning to Gotham, where out of the blue he decided to take up crime-fighting as a nightly leisure dressed ridiculously as a bat. With a portion of the city whores cropping up dead and the general public linking this unsightly affair to an equally unsightly presence amid them, Batman was forced to embark on a search for the real perpetrator, only to have come moments too late at the scene of the crime, where a body lay freshly dead.
The police of Gotham were of no help to the Caped Crusader either, as they were all but eager to arrest the killer themselves by convicting Bruce Wayne the seemingly innocent millionaire for murder and put an end to this ghastly business so as to attend to more important things. Days passed as Bruce Wayne attempted to solve the puzzle that had been the reason to his incarceration and being bound to a hanging, while everyone remained comfortable under the illusion that they had finally caught their killer.
Gotham by Gaslight presents Gotham and its inhabitants in the traditional nineteenth century getup, and this is one of those stories where the killer is whom you least expect to be, with a number of loose ends throughout, such as where Bruce Wayne learned kickboxing. Batman's costume was more of a costume than in any regard bodily protection, as it obviously had been crudely stitched up from pieces of cloth via contemporary tailoring and none of that synthetic affair. Still, it's a costume with a purpose that is to inspire fear in the hearts of the city's evil heart, on those lines at least, whereas Gotham's police force, as it was in modern times, presented itself as an incompetent policing body, with Inspector Gordon, as was his descendant, being the sole exception. All in all, a Batman-origins tale that could have started off a lot better.
The police of Gotham were of no help to the Caped Crusader either, as they were all but eager to arrest the killer themselves by convicting Bruce Wayne the seemingly innocent millionaire for murder and put an end to this ghastly business so as to attend to more important things. Days passed as Bruce Wayne attempted to solve the puzzle that had been the reason to his incarceration and being bound to a hanging, while everyone remained comfortable under the illusion that they had finally caught their killer.
Gotham by Gaslight presents Gotham and its inhabitants in the traditional nineteenth century getup, and this is one of those stories where the killer is whom you least expect to be, with a number of loose ends throughout, such as where Bruce Wayne learned kickboxing. Batman's costume was more of a costume than in any regard bodily protection, as it obviously had been crudely stitched up from pieces of cloth via contemporary tailoring and none of that synthetic affair. Still, it's a costume with a purpose that is to inspire fear in the hearts of the city's evil heart, on those lines at least, whereas Gotham's police force, as it was in modern times, presented itself as an incompetent policing body, with Inspector Gordon, as was his descendant, being the sole exception. All in all, a Batman-origins tale that could have started off a lot better.