From the Rental Vault: Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (2018)

"What if?" stories are popular in comic-dom, with Marvel even running a monthly series for several years under that title. What if this event happened differently, or this character didn't die? Some of those questions make good stories and some make lesser ones, but the appeal of an alternative history remains strong.

DC comics had done stories like that as well, and in 1989 released one in a prestige book format called Gotham by Gaslight. Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola spun a tale of the Batman supposing Bruce Wayne was born in Victorian times and was confronted with the era's greatest unsolved murder case, that of Jack the Ripper. Although not originally labeled such, Gaslight sparked the DC "Elseworlds" imprint that started a long string of speculative what-ifs. It had its own sequel in 1991, Master of the Future, which was written by Augustyn but drawn by Eduardo Barreto.

The DC Universe animated movie series adapted the story for the 2018 release Batman: Gotham by Gaslight. Screenwriter Jim Krieg faced some obstacles in bringing the tale to the screen; notably the length. The original 52-page one-shot simply did not have enough story in it to make an hour-length animated movie. Krieg and director Sam Liu added in some more recognizable "Batman history" Easter eggs, brought in a few elements from the Master of the Future sequel and included a Victorian-era Selina Kyle (Catwoman, in modern times) as an actress who's also stalking the Ripper in order to protect the lower-class women of Gotham's slums. The interaction between Bruce Wayne (voiced by Bruce Greenwood) and Kyle (voiced by Jennifer Carpenter) helps give a slightly different flavor to this version of the obsessive Wayne quest for justice. The Victorian-era Bruce seems better able to realize the limits of his pursuit and allow room for other people in his life.

Nearly every other decision made by Liu and Krieg, though, makes this particular adaptation one of the weakest in the DC Original Universe Animated Movies series. The animation style resembles the old DC Animated Universe of the 1990s rather than Mignola's grungy Victorian look, flattening the difference between the Batman of the 1890s and today. While much of the individual character animation and some of the combat scenes are well-drawn, a lot of the background work and the multiple-character scenes are flat, jerky and repetitive.

Stripping Batman of his tech and super-computer expertise ought to leave us watching the World's Greatest Detective uncover clues and trace the trail of the Ripper; we get some brief and irrelevant flashes of deduction that wind up not having any real role in uncovering the villain's identity. That identity is completely different from the printed comic, in a twist that makes no sense either within the story or the history of the Batman in general.

Gotham by Gaslight is one of the better-conceived and better-received "Elseworlds" tales, with Augustyn crafting a world that places familiar touchstones in a properly shifted context and logically coherent framework. It more than most had the potential for a monthly series through offering something other than just the same ol' Batman in a restyled costume for a different era or different situation. The animated adaptation throws almost all of that out the window and while it does create an interesting new space for Selina Kyle, that's nowhere near enough to outweigh all of the poor choices studio creators made in bringing the story to the screen.