I've never had any interest in Tim Drake, but Dixon was sold on Nightwing... nothing great, but nothing bad either.

I believe it was thwhtguardian who'd been patiently waiting for me to get to this one for several years now...



Batman & Dracula: Red Rain (1992)



Script: Doug Moench
Pencils: Kelley Jones
Inks: Malcolm Jones III
Colors: Les Dorscheid
Letters: Todd Klein

Grade: A-


While the Bat Office is going full force with franchise crossovers right now (Batman / Judge Dredd was last month, and Batman vs. Predator is right around the corner), this one is different. As Dracula is in the public domain at this point, Doug Moench and Kelley Jones are free to go with any interpretation of the character that they choose -- there is no built in fan base nor wary copyright holder to cater to. They resist the urge to make nods to previous films, nor to even make Dracula sound or look anything like any Dracula that has come before.

If anything, he's actually almost...Joker-like?



It's a fascinating idea, as well as a clever extension of the red (acid) rain symbol behind this all -- when we corrupt our own environment, what does that corruption do to us?


Oh, Batman has tangled with vampires before. I wonder if Moench was familiar with the Monk storyline that was published less than a year before he began his own stretch on Pre-Crisis Batman. The continuity was tightly adhered to back then, so it's possible. That storyline was an absolute classic, and yet I think I like this one even better. That one also deals with a Batman who is transformed and becomes a true "bat man"


Conway and Colan's story



This story

Of course the difference here is that Bruce isn't a full vampire. Tonya has turned him into a sort of hybrid with all the abilities of Dracula while still being alive. I wonder if Moench was borrowing from Marvel's Blade a bit with this idea for a hybrid vampire/human hero.

Moench and Jones are just firing on all engines, and brilliantly so. Best yet, wheres Jones does an impressive job making Batman look like a terrifying monster (even before his transformation), Moench walks the same careful line he cultivated in his first Batman run, as well as in The Prey storyline from Legends of the Dark Knight. This is an extremely dark story, and yet Batman's heroics are unquestioned. He is a good person who genuinely cares for Alfred, for Commissioner Gordon, and for the city, and he can still even be a little playful at times:



There are a ton of reasons why Moench is my favorite Batman writer of all time, but the most clear one here is that he can be darker than Frank Miller and still leave Batman an untarnished hero. And this works especially well when you've got a Kelley Jones making him look utterly terrifying on the page.




But the real heart of this story isn't Moench's Batman; it's Tonya, a former bride of Dracula who now leads a vampire resistance against him.



Seriously, why did EVERY '90s comic chick have the Elektra/Psylocke leotard?

Her backstory is extremely compelling. When Moench used to write horror stories for Warren, Skywald, and Marvel, he would often recycle elements from horror movies he'd read and seen. With Tonya's backstory, there's a little Interview with the Vampire (not yet a film, but well-known as a novel):



And I Am Legend / The Omega Man:



All together, it makes for one hell of a compelling origin. But perhaps most memorable is the effect she has on Batman by visiting him each night, slowly transforming him into the warrior he must become in order to defeat Dracula:





If you know your Pre-Crisis Doug Moench Batman, this is Nocturna 2.0.



His obsession with her and, consequently, with the night makes far more sense here, although I think his need for her was too underplayed when she died at the end of this story. It's clear Moench wanted to do more with their relationship and found himself with too few pages left.


The final thing I truly love about this story is how differently it uses the Elseworlds concept. There's nothing especially different about the world this story begins in, as opposed to the normal Post-Crisis DCU. Instead, it's where the story ends up going. Moench truly sets this up like the beginning of an ongoing series where Batman is part vampire:



New locale, new abilities, new conditions and psychological challenges with which to frame an ongoing narrative. I so wish such a series existed. Fortunately, there are two sequels coming down the road, and I cannot wait to read them.


I do have one major objection with this story. When Moench used to write vampire stories, he had so much fun mocking the absurdity of the rules that governed vampires. So many of his stories found obnoxiously creative ways to take down vampires, and we see some of that continue here. Take, for example, the vampire's inability to approach or look at crosses:


from Vampirella #29


from Eerie #44


from Vampire Tales #4

and finally, "Cross of Blood," from Creepy #46, where a cross written in blood on a door causes a vampire to spend the rest of eternity sealed in a room:



Moench taps into that here, where Batman has a particularly clever moment while staring down Dracula:



Literally another cross of blood.


Moench has also had a lot of fun with the idea that wooden stakes can kill vampires, and arrows are made of wood:


also from Creepy #46


from Vampire Tales #6

and Tonya has upgraded this concept a bit for Red Rain:




So then why is Dracula such a big threat in this story? A frail old man could take him down in the original novel just by finding his sleeping body during the day, but Moench somehow needs to stretch this threat out to 90 pages, so whereas he's found literally dozens of clever ways for ordinary people to kill Dracula with ordinary means, Batman and Tonya have decided they shouldn't even try to kill Dracula; just his underlings:



Dracula can mind control vampires? Ok, cool. Jim, take a cross and a chair leg at 9am tomorrow. We'll laugh about it over brunch.


I mean, Dracula does end up dying, but if you know Moench as well as I do, the very concept that Dracula would be hard to take down is utter b.s.


Oh, and I guess I have to talk about the very end of the story.

Actually, I won't.

Because, if you haven't read this one yet, you really really should.

So here's a spoiler instead:





Minor Details:

- I love the additional supporting cast of allies Moench lends to Bruce in this story:






- How could Bruce and Tonya be sure that EVERY vampire would follow Bruce into the Batcave?

- Why the Batcave? Why risk letting Dracula (who they had no plans to kill) know Bruce's secret identity? Why blow up the Bat Cave when they could have just blown up some section of Gotham's sewers or something?

- Wouldn't blowing the cave up RIGHT after letting sunlight in actually help the vampires? Explosives can't kill them, but rubble could provide invaluable protection from the sun's rays.


- Not sure what point Moench was trying to make here, but it comes off as kind of wrong:



Sure, the guy comes around by the close, but I still smell a heavy anti-inclusive tone in all this. Doesn't really match anything else I know about Moench, though.


- How does Jones draw Batman and his world so dark and terrifying and then make the Batmobile look like something out of Donald Duck?





Maybe it's an intentional jab at the absurdity of Batman having a "batmobile". Later in the story, it gets blown up and Bruce proudly proclaims that he won't need it anymore cuz he's got vampire wings now.


All in all a brilliantly executed story. There were a few moments of weakness where Moench's prose got a little overly clever and underly entertaining, but even then Jones wowed us when Moench's words didn't. I cannot wait to get to the sequels.

Here's a question to consider amidst the release of all these original Batman graphic novels: if the original purpose of Legends of the Dark Knight was to tell darker, more adult-themed Batman stories that took the character in new directions and were free from the confines of continuity, isn't that also what the graphic novels are now doing? What made O'Neil decide to do this as a gn as opposed to a four part Legends of the Dark Knight story? Is LotDK just the B-level stories that O'Neil doesn't think are exciting enough to stand alone?

You're almost certainly right. Moench had a habit of allowing song lyrics and song titles to serve as the basis for his stories. A few stories of his where the title clearly gives this away include:


"Bad Moon on the Rise" (from Eerie #36, November 1971)
"Won't Get Fooled Again" (from Vampirella #18, August 1972)
"Just A Shot Away" (from G.I. Combat, August 1973)
"The Low Spark of High Heeled Noise!" (from Creepy #57, November 1973)
"Pinball Wizard" (from Creepy #66, November 1974)
"Ain't it Just Like the Night" (from Creepy #80, June 1976)

And that's just from the early days!

Great points all around. Thanks for this. I guess it never occurred to me that the stories in LotDK could all work within their own internal continuity. As for whether or not they were intended to work within the core continuity, they're not even edited by O'Neil, so that would be complicated. I also doubt he would have been on-board with "counting" Morrison's Gothic, which had Bruce and classmates serially raped at the boarding school he attended. But I see your point that they all could have happened.

The events of "Shaman" are subtly alluded to as immediately as The Secret Origins TPB (1989), but not directly referenced there, if that helps. It counted because O'Neil wrote it, of course, just like Venom and Destroyer.

I never thought of the LotDK books as being anything but in continuity. Sure, they didn't get referenced much but there was nothing there that said they were "imaginary" and the were on the whole really good stories which in my mind is the true deciding factor on what makes a story count.