Learn About Every Character Connected to Batman With The Essential Batman Encyclopedia
Written: Jul 18 '08 (Updated Oct 08 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Loads of information on characters.
Cons: Not a lot of pictures. Some repetition.
The Bottom Line: The Essential Batman Encyclopedia is a great book for anyone interested in learning more about the characters connected to Batman.
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| dragonfire88's Full Review: Robert Greenberger - The Essential Batman Encyclop... |
Over the years, as I have slowly started to learn more about different superheroes and comic book characters, I have picked up several different books about those characters. Most have been published by DK, and while I do really like the books, I did always feel like there just wasn’t enough information about many of the characters. I was recently browsing the bookstore and discovered The Essential Batman Encyclopedia by Robert Greenberger and quickly grabbed it.
The Essential Batman Encyclopedia is a large paperback book that is about the same size as most magazines, but much longer at 388 pages. The book was published in 2008 and covers things through the November 2007 issues of the different Batman comic books. The book only dealt with characters and situations that came up in the comic books. Things that have happened in the different movies, the cartoons, or the television show were not mentioned if they didn’t originally come from the comic books or end up being adapted into the comic books. I did like that the author did acknowledge the different versions of Batman in the preface and explained that he was not going to deal with them. He also briefly talked about all the alternate worlds and characters in the DC world. That did help that stuff make a little more sense to me.
The book didn’t really have plot summaries for the many different story lines from the comic books, but some plots were brought up through the discussions of the different characters. Background information and origin stories were shared for the more well known, important characters. The things shared about certain characters did fill in a bit about some of the plots, especially the important ones, but there was still a lot of plot information that wasn’t included. The fact that there wasn’t more focus on the actual plots could disappoint some readers.
The Essential Batman Encyclopedia started off with the preface that I mentioned earlier. Before the actual book started was a page titled How To Use This Book. Greenberger explained how he decided on which characters to include in the book. He then went on to explain the organization for the book, which I thought was very helpful. That way if I wanted to look up a specific character, I would know where to look. Characters were arranged alphabetically by last names for characters with birth names. Characters with titles were listed by the title. For characters that had both, there would be entries for both, with the most information being listed under the birth names for heroes. That was because there have been several people to use some of the titles like Batgirl or Robin. With the villains, the more detailed entries were found under their titles instead of birth names. Throughout the book, the author would reference which comic books some of the details came from. Characters that had their own entries were written in all capital letters when they were mentioned in another entry.
The sections for each letter were set off by a full page illustration on the left page and the entries would start on the right page. The first page for each letter would have an illustration of the letter along with one of the characters that fit in that section. The entries shared general information about the different characters. For some characters, who I’m guessing were very minor characters, there were only one or two sentences. Most entries had at least a few paragraphs with the most important characters having more detailed information covering a few pages. If there were different versions of the characters on different worlds, some of the alternate versions were mentioned. How the character was impacted by Crisis on Infinite Earths or Infinite Crisis was also mentioned. I really liked the depth of information there was for the more well known characters and I feel like I understand a lot more about them now. I also thought it was interesting to read about the lesser known characters, including many I had never heard of before. I learned new things about many of the characters I had heard of before as well.
In addition to all the characters, there were also entries on Gotham City, the Gotham City Police Department, the Batcave, Wayne Industries, some of the many gadgets that Batman uses, and many other businesses or groups that were somehow connected to Bruce or Batman. The information shared about Gotham City, which covered the history of the city and how it has evolved, covered two and a half pages. There was a lot of interesting information on the city that I enjoyed reading. The Justice League of America had an entry, as well as a few other superhero groups that Batman was associated with. Some of the other superheroes that he worked with, like Superman and Wonder Woman, also had entries. There were entries for both Superman and Clark Kent, though the one on Clark was very short. The entry on Lois Lane was longer, which seemed a little strange to me. It was mentioned after a few of those entries to check The Essential Superman Encyclopedia or The Essential Wonder Woman Encyclopedia for more information about them.
The information in each entry seemed to be arranged in a logical manner that followed the order things had happened to the characters. There were times though when it looked like some events had been shared out of order because of the dates for the comic books listed. It could be that the earlier information wasn’t shared until a later date. With so many characters that were all connected in some way being discussed, it was inevitable that certain things would be mentioned more than once. That did get a little old, especially when the same information was shared word for word in the entries for two characters.
The Essential Batman Encyclopedia featured several black and white illustrations of varying sizes throughout the book. Some of them looked like detailed drawings that could have been pulled from the various comic books. There was no illustrator listed specifically for the book. The next to the last page had a list of DC artists that had contributed to the book. It wasn’t said if they created the illustrations just for this book or if they were pulled from the different comic books. There were some small illustrations of characters that went along with some of the entries. Only some of them had captions identifying the characters, so there were times when I wasn’t sure who the character was. That tended to happen when there were entries for a few characters I was unfamiliar with on the same page. There were no illustrations for many of the characters mentioned. There were two sixteen page sections that featured full page color illustrations. The first section featured Batman and some of his allies. The second section featured some of the villains that Batman has faced over the years. I would have liked it if there had been more illustrations, especially ones in color.
The Essential Batman Encyclopedia is a wonderful reference to the characters in the Batman world. I loved all the detailed information that shared and I learned a lot about several different characters. Fans of Batman may enjoy the book.
This review is part of elvisdo’s 2008 Funny Pages Write-Off.
Batman Reviews
Batman: The Movie ~ Batman ~ Batman Returns ~ Batman Forever ~ Batman & Robin ~ Batman Begins ~ The Dark Knight ~ Batman The Animated Series - Volume One ~ Batman: Gotham Knight ~ Batman: Mask of the Phantasm ~ Batman & Mr. Freeze: Subzero ~ Batman: The Ultimate Guide to the Dark Knight ~
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Recommended:
Yes
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