Graphic Novel Review: Legends of the Dark Knight

Legends of the Dark Knight: Norm Breyfogle Volume 1, by John Wagner, Alan Grant, Norm Breyfogle and Steve Mitchell, DC Comics.

This week’s graphic novel of the week is this 520-page hefty hardcover, which reprints a large chunk of the Norm Breyfogle run on Detective Comics from the late 1980s. Breyfogle was an artist who brought a new dynamism to Batman and his style was very different to the artists who had come before him in the same decade. The stories here start of as those written by DC stalwarts Mike Barr, Max Allan Collins and Jo Duffy but with Detective Comics #583, they are written first by the British team of John Wagner and Alan Grant and then Grant on his own. This was seen as quite a bold move as it was the first time that British writers had tackled Batman on a regular basis. They brought their own voice to the stories while maintaining what made for a classic Batman tale. Breyfogle is a talented storyteller and he keeps the action moving at a decent pace here. His Batman is suitably brooding and elegant when he needs to be and there is a sense of fun and adventure here that has sometimes been lacking in the more recent Dark Knight Detective tales. Wagner and Grant also manage to walk that line between straight detective stories and ones with a more supernatural bent. It is testament to their talents as writers that they seem as comfortable writing a story about a man high on super-strong ecstasy as they are in a story featuring Kirby’s The Demon. Breyfogle spent a long time on the character and his portrayal was influential in shaping the look of Batman for the late 1980s, so it’s only correct that his work is commemorated in a book like this.

Legends of The Dark Knight: Norm Breyfogle Volume 1 HC (Batman)