Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
It had to happen eventually that one of these animated movies would emerge as an object lesson in adaptation that’s faithful in some ways and divergent in others, to ill effect in both realms. Batman: Gotham by Gaslight was a critically and commonly well-received 1989 Elseworlds comic that asked, What if Batman, but steampunk? and What if Batman fought Jack the Ripper?, which was the style at the time. This film adapts both of those questions directly, although it chooses a different culprit for who the Ripper turns out to be (it’s still an effective mystery, but who’s behind the Ripper’s blade in the comic is that story’s equivalent of The Joker, that comparison is absent here and the killer is someone else. Gotham by Gaslight transports the (apparently) eternally fertile narrative ground of a serial killer in the London Fog has been transported to the nearly identical (but explicitly American, even in this setting) city of Gotham, where the city streets are stalked by two different disguised men. The first, of course, is the Ripper, whose true identity forms the core mystery of the story. The other is a Victorian Batman, who is in fact the city’s recently returned prodigal son, the orphaned billionaire Bruce Wayne (Bruce Greenwood).
As with a lot of What if [Character] but [Specific Era/Location]? stories, this one transports all of the accoutrement of the character to the time and place that the author (or, more commonly, fanfiction writer) has a fascination with. So, while “Catwoman” isn’t here, Selina Kyle (Jennifer Carpenter) is, as an actress and singer who grew up as the daughter of a lion tamer, hence a handiness with a whip and an affection for cats. Leslie Thompkins, the kindly child psychologist who helped mend the young Bruce’s psyche in the comics, is here Sister Leslie (Grey Griffin), who ran the orphanage in which Bruce was raised. There’s a district attorney Harvey Dent, a showgirl (and, lest we forget because this is a Ripper story, sex worker) Pamela Isley, a police Commissioner named Gordon, a Doctor Hugo Strange, and so on and so forth. It’s a conceit that I think can be fun and rewarding, but can also be kind of tired. In fact, the thing that I felt most weighed down that recent Matt Reeves Batman movie was the fact that it was a Batman movie, and thus in the middle of this high budget, grimy neo-noir featuring some interesting creative choices, decent editing, and occasionally great visuals, you also had to have Colin Farrell as the Penguin for some reason. This kind of “Batman skin on a Victorian period piece” integration of the whole rogues gallery usually works best when the narrative finds something interesting to do with it or a way to twist expectations, and it does do that here in one small way, as there is both a Two-Face and a Harvey Dent, but they are not the same person here.
Visually, the most frustrating thing about this one is that it uses the general design aesthetics of the source material (simplified for animation) but none of the grain or grit that made that one’s overall look so memorable. In fact, although there have been other releases in this overall franchise that looked worse, the discrepancy between the mood and atmosphere of the original comic and this adaptation make this one feel cheaper than those others. For instance, take a look at this page of the original comic, which evokes both the yellowing of a newspaper and the sickly yellow light of the oil lamps in the district in which the scene takes place. It sets a tone that is lacking from this movie. That’s an overall issue with a lot, but not all, of these movies. When adapting from a well-liked source material, one can choose to try and imitate the original art as closely as possible while also “sanding off” some of the detail work that would be too difficult to animate (like New Frontier or All-Star Superman), or make something that looks completely different (like Doomsday’s use of a more Bruce Timm style, or Superman vs. The Elite’s Tartakovsky-esque crescent moon head shapes). This chooses to do some detail sanding in order to ape the art style of the original, but in doing so genericizes the overall feel of Mike Mignola’s pre-Hellboy artwork and the moodiness that made the graphic novel memorable enough to attempt to adapt nearly thirty years later in the first place. Paradoxically, this one is well-drawn but ultimately flat-looking, and not dynamic enough or visually arresting enough to really capture your attention.
That said, if you’re going to watch this one, it’s going to be because you’re interested in seeing who the Ripper is, and I won’t spoil that for you here. It’s a novel (and welcome) choice to forego any Jokery completely, and the twist is satisfactorily executed, with the fact that the Ripper was driven mad by the inhumanity he witnessed during the Civil War being an interesting touch. Performance-wise, the return of Greenwood to the Batman role after previously voicing him in Under the Red Hood is a good one, and his performance helps inflate some of the limper elements of the story. When it comes to the casting, however, the standout here is Anthony “Giles from Buffy” Head as Alfred, although he is underutilized. Perhaps you, dear reader, have not seen so many of these that you need them to be visually dynamic in order to be appreciated, and a middle of the road Jack the Ripper story dressed up in cape and cowl will be more fun for you. At the same time, if that’s what you’re looking for, what you really want to get your hands on is the 1989 comic. Your library system probably has a copy! Why don’t you go look that up right now, actually?
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Swampflix 
