Oh, this is one cool undertaking, and one seriously well-crafted look at the Batman mythos that has not been, to my knowledge, done to date. And let me state that I am not easily impressed by reference works of this sort as I’ve seen far too many of these published that should have left unpublished. As I said in reviewing Hellboy — the Companion:
It’s really hard to do a companion to a long running series well. Roger Zelazny’s The Amber Chronicles was well served by Theodore Krulik’s The Complete Amber Sourcebook and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series got a better than decent look-see in Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion — A Dreamer’s Guide to the Award-Winning Comic Series, but I hope we see an annotated Sandman someday as there’s much hot discussed in Bender’s work.
Now I’ve looked at and reviewed a number of Batman-related reference guides, including Paul Dini and Chip Kidd’s Batman Animated and Scott Beatty’s The DC Comics Action Figure Archive but this is the first work I’ve seen that covers every aspect of the Batman ‘verse, no matter how obscure it night seem. At just under four hundred oversized pages, The Essential Batman Encyclopedia is an awesomely entertaining collection of facts, fiction, and more than a bit of good old-fashioned trivia about the Dark Knight and everything in his realty. (Minor kvetch — it would have made a finer book if it had been done in hardcover, as I am a bit concerned about its durability when used repeatedly. At thirty bucks, it could well have been hardcover instead of trade paper!) Greenberger, is, not surprisingly, a former DC Editor who was one of their ‘Continuity Cops’, which makes him one of the few folks who could pull this endeavor off successfully.
The Essential Batman Encyclopedia is based on and is greatly expanded beyond what was covered in the 1976 (reprinted, 2007) work by Michael Fleisher called The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes, Volume 1: Batman. (Reprinting outdated reference works is silly.) This work covers almost seventy years of Batman history in one book — an impressive feat given that Batman appears almost everywhere in the DC Universe, and even appeared in the Wildstorm Universe on more than one occasion. (The last time is in a series that is currently ongoing as of June 2008 and which is not in here.) I think Greenberger decided to omit the DC/Top Cow cross-over series that Batman appeared in, but it may be referenced here and I didn’t spot it.
Everything covering the evolution of the Batman continuity is here including major DCU storylines like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, Identity Crisis, and War Games, as well as major Batman information from his team-ups in The Brave and the Bold and the various Justice League and Outsiders titles. I’m impressed — this is the first time anyone has tackled the DCU in all its complexity without dropping the ball in some way!
Quite lavishly illustrated with drawings, photographs, and some full-color comics action in the middle of the encyclopedia, The Essential Batman Encyclopedia is a must for any serious fan of Batman, and fans of the greater DC Universe will find much worth knowing here.
(Del Rey, 2008)
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