JLA: Riddle of the Beast (2001)

And in the far north, Gotham Crags is a place of ghosts, lorded over by its insane ruler!

This is an original graphic novel written by the Scottish writer Alan Grant who has had a long career in comic books. He has co-written many times with John Wagner but probably most notably on Judge Dredd. He has had a long association with the British comic 2000AD also writing Strontium Dog and Judge Anderson amongst others. He had a great run writing Batman in the early 80s in Detective Comics and later Shadow of the Bat as well as the early Lobo mini-series. This book has a host of artists such as Carl Critchlow, Liam Sharp, Glenn Fabry, Gregg Staples and many more.

This book is an Elseworlds books - an occasional series of stories that place familiar DC heroes in unusual circumstances such as historical settings, being villains instead of heroes or with powers swapped with another hero. This book has a high fantasy setting. The World is at an uneasy peace after the defeat of the Beast but this peace is disturbed when the Riddler calls for Robin Drake and tells him of his visions of the return of the Beast and how he must reunite the peoples of the World to rise up against it. After the destruction of his village, Robin sets off on a quest, with the help of some others that he meets along the way such as Zatanna, the bird-like Hawkmen and a cat-faced Green Arrow, to visit the main regions of the World and try to convince them to put aside old enmities and accept that the Beast has returned.

This is a strange book. I wanted to like it as I usually like Alan Grant's work but despite being a 100+ page long book the story felt rushed and lacked detail in places. The variety of artists meant that the book lacked cohesion and it was not clear why so it was felt that so many were needed to work on the book - although their work in the main was good and I like a lot of them in other works. A bit of an oddity but it might appeal if you are a fan of fantasy and are interested in this sort of mashup with familiar characters but it all lacked a certain spark of true originality for me, I'm afraid.

First published on RevolutionSF on Sunday May 22, 2011