By Yoshinori Natsume
CMX, 192 pp.
Rating: None
Yoshinori Natsume, creator of Togari, brings us this tale of Gotham City’s Dark Knight. A mysterious rash of murders has been occurring in Gotham, murders which leave the victim without a face. Who is the killer and what links does he have to Bruce Wayne’s past and his training in Japan? The crux of Batman: Death Mask rests upon Wayne’s drive to become Batman and whether he did it in the simple pursuit of vengeance or something larger, a desire to better the world. This Big Question is paralleled and contrasted by the stories of several of the supporting characters, all of whom are original to this book.
The story is one of those snazzy instances of Batman coming face to face with the supernatural; Batman fits nicely into the world of the occult, despite being a spandex-clad superhero. In this case, it’s a supernatural critter with a distinctly Japanese flava, complete with a faux folk tale origin. While there are a few uneven moments in the middle of the book as Yoshinori struggles to manage the various plot and subplots, they do converge in the end with only a few minor bumps. Several of the subplots referenced in the climax had only been mentioned in passing or offhandedly earlier in the book, so there was definitely a moment or two where I was left scratching my head and found myself flipping back through the book.
Yoshinori’s artwork here is generally solid stuff. Everything flows nicely, the action scenes look fantastic and Natsume uses several of his Togari art tricks to wonderful effect here. The lines become thinner with a bit more cross-hatching for the fight scenes, which create a feeling of movement in them. There are also a few scenes with supernatural elements where it looks like he may have used a brush for the inking, which is a great touch. If there was anything bad about the visuals, it’s that Yoshinori didn’t do more with the backgrounds. Gotham City is a major part of the Batman mythos, almost a character in its own right, but there’s very little in the backgrounds that make it feel like something other than a generic big city. Admittedly, the story moves along at a brisk pace and there’s a lot of time spent in Japan via flashbacks, but I really would have loved to have seen more of Yoshinori’s take on Gotham itself. Actually, now that I think about it, we didn’t get to see the Batcave, either.
The book comes with a few nifty special features, including thumbnails of the covers for the monthly comic (in black and white, however), a short interview with Natsume about the project, and a one-page piece created solely for the collection. It’s also worth noting that the book was originally serialized in a monthly comic format consisting of four issues at $3 a piece. That means that folks who are first reading it in this collection will be saving themselves about $2. Nice little deal. Overall Death Mask was a pretty good Batman story that should be readily accessible to anyone with a limited idea of who and what Batman is. Hopefully this will lead to similar projects from either Natsume or other Japanese creators, or maybe even a re-release of Kia Asiyama’s Batman: Child of Dreams book.
Batman: Death Mask is available now.
