(Spoilers -- although the strength of the book isn't really that its full of countless unforeseen plot twists)
Think about what you know about Charles Dickens' timeless classic, A Christmas Carol. Three ghosts, Christmas goose, "God bless us, everyone!", and all that. Now imagine it with more Batman. An insane concept? I sort of thought so. Dickens' story is a pretty simple morality tale: an old, crotchety hardass learns through some wacky hallucinations that he should be more charitable and look out for his fellow man. Batman has never strictly operated within the law, but the general goodness of his character is never really questioned, and if he has any faults, lack of charity isn't one of them. It's not often that a Batman arc goes by without Bruce Wayne showing up some place or another in Gotham to attend the ribbon cutting of some public works project that he's financing. That said, given that this book, Batman: Noel, was being drawn by Lee Bermejo, whose art made the Brian Azarello penned Joker a delightfully haunting experience, I knew I had to pick it up. This is Bermejo's first stab at writing as well as penciling and my only hope was that his Dickensian Batman idea would hold up. It's maybe not perfect, but I can happily say that it mostly does, and when paired with his strikingly gorgeous art, his book is a very fun read.
Batman: Noel is told a bit like a Christmas book. That was Bermejo's original idea, although he strayed from it being strictly that as he continued to develop the concept. Still, the book has sparse dialogue except for a couple of specific scenes, instead making use of running narration, and only a little of it on each panel, so that the art has room to breathe and so the pictures tell as much of the story as the text. The first few pages in fact are mostly wordless, and show us snow-covered old brick buildings with chimney stacks billowing smoke to at least give us a little bit of the feel of Dickensian England, even as the story is set in modern day Gotham. The first character we're introduced to is Bob Cratchit, who exists just as he is in the Dickens story. He's broke and he has a son named Tim with a bum name. The narration tells us that Scrooge is making him work on Christmas, but this doesn't seem to match up with what's going on in pictures because we see him delivering a package with a hand-scrawled note on it from the Joker. But then, suddenly, Batman shows up, rolls a 20 on his intimidate check as he calls Bob low-life scum and places a tracer on him. So what's going on is that Batman is Batman in the actual dialogue, but he's standing in for Scrooge in the narration. Bob's "working for Scrooge on Christmas" by being Batman's lead to finding the Joker.
Bruce returns back to the Batcave, where Alfred expresses his displeasure with using the father of a young boy as bait for the Joker, gently reminding Bruce that Jason Todd once got a face full of Joker-wielded crowbar. Alfred departs to find Bruce some medicine for the cough he seems to be developing, and Bruce, now alone, looks at Jason's old Robin uniform and sees a vision of Jason telling him that he needs to pay or there will be consequences. That's right everybody: Jason Todd is Jacob Marley. So now Batman we know that Batman is also going to be visited by three "ghosts" and so he does, although unlike Robin/Marley, these are actual flesh-and-blood encounters. Batman briefly stops over on the Gotham PD rooftop to meet with Jim Gordon, who here has his usual bristly mustache and square-rimmed glasses, but smokes a pipe that evokes Sherlock Holmes and dons a red scarf to get in the Dickens spirit. Gordon says that Catwoman has information on the Joker.
Batman meets Catwoman on a rooftop at exactly 1 AM, and thus she stands in for the Ghost of Christmas past. She tries to goad Batman by showing him a bag full of cat-burgled jewels, and when he says between hacking coughs that he doesn't have time for this crap, she reminisces about how he used to be different and less serious. The Ghost of Christmas Present is Superman who basically tells Batman to have more faith in people and to get off his high horse a bit as far as calling everybody who slips up a hopeless scumbag. The Ghost of Christmas Future is filled in for by the Joker, who just skips the moralizing and straight-up buries Batman alive. The book ends with Batman emerging from the grave ala Batman: RIP and arriving just in the nick of time before Joker pipe-wrenches Bob and his family to death. The gist of the scene has been done countless times, countless different ways, but it's gorgeous to look at here, like the rest of the book, and Bermejo has some fun writing for the Joker, having him make quips about Clue, the board game, and being disappointed in Bob for trying to defend himself with a baseball bat, which isn't a Clue weapon.
Bermejo's art, in collaboration with an Italian colorist named Barbara Ciardo, is easily the best part of the story. It looked more painted than penciled, the way Alex Ross's work is, which works with the idea of modern Gotham as a pseudo-Victorian setting. It has much less of a rough and gruesome feel than his work on Azarello's ultra-dark Joker story, and it uses a lot of bright reds and casts a lot of warm light on people's faces as if from a fireplace to fit in with the Chirstmas theme. At the same time though, there is a darker gothic motif to it that any self-respecting Batman story has, especially in the Batcave and on the rooftops. Bermejo's faces are gorgeous, with tons of expression in them. He draws Batman as perpetually furious and border-lined crazed, while the scenes with Bob and Tim are intimate and genuinely heartwarming. Overall, the book's Chistmasy yet not always rosy look ends up reminding me of a Norman Rockwell painting, if he had one step less myopic a view on life.
I don't know if the book is a masterpiece. The Batman is Scrooge analogy is never really sold perfectly. Batman never comes across as a man who desperately needs to save his soul, mostly just a guy who's acting like a bit of a dick. Batman here is kind of like a less vulgar version of Miller's "goddamn Batman" persona: angry, abrasive, and obsessive to a fault, but still a man clearly on the side of good and not evil. Seeing people from the Bat-verse as stand-ins in a Christmas Carol retelling is still a lot of fun, and when they're being drawn by Lee Bermejo it's hard to look away. This is a very different book from Joker, but it'll fit nicely on my bookshelf alongside it, nevertheless. Noel is very much worth picking up.
