Free Comic Books
Dark Allegiances
Set in the late 1930s, this has Bruce Wayne as an industrial designer and a bit of a rougish swashbuckler (you know, the kind of character Howard Chaykin likes to do best) who dons the Bat costume as much to tackle racist secret society's like The White Legion, or to defend union workers from overzealous police, as much as he does street crime.
The story is pure 1950s film noire, though with a decided twinkle in the eye. The dialogue's snappy and witty as Batman uncovers a plot masterminded by a right wing senator and an entrepeneur who is Bruce Wayne's associate. There's a beautiful dame who's being blackmailed, an old fashioned Batman scene at a theme park made up of giant props, and a nice sense of period throughout, in the story and pictures, from the opening newsreel sequence on.
The period's not always as well served by the dialogue, though. Would they have really used colloquialisms such as "Kick his ass" back then?
Dark Allegiances is a great read for many reasons. There's the brisk tempo and scene layered on scene to form a real story, not just a couple of extended action scenes loosely strung together. There's Chaykin's crackling dialogue, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes amusing, frequently naughty, almost always on target. There's Chaykin's great, semi-realist art (though he rushes the hands at times). There's the clever lettering quirks of Ken Bruzenak and the evocative colouring. There's the evocative period ambience mixing nightclubs, political movements, and more. There's the fun way of "Elseworld" stories where familiar faces are worked in. Though here Chaykin takes a kind of odd track. Instead of inserting familiar Batman characters, he throws in characters who evoke them, but aren't quite them in look or name. The Penguin, Two-Face, the Joker, and the Catwoman are all represented, but Two-Face, for instance, isn't called Harvey Dent, he's a senator named Caldecott Pewtie.
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