text by Maria Szafrańska-Chmielarz
The history of Batman, though nominally beginning in 1939, has much older roots. The creation of the comic book hero is disputed – whether the credit belongs to Bob Kane or Bill Fingers; although both authors cite different sources as their inspiration (Leonardo da Vinci’s drafts, Robert the Bruce, Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel ), one of the most obvious inspirations is Sherlock Holmes. Debuting under the detective comics banner, now mostly known as DC, the Batman is not only an action hero, he is above all, a detective, whose greatest asset is his mind and keen observations.
The creators of The Batman comic books have often taken inspirations from Victoriana – the character of Two-Face is clearly inspired by Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Doctor Hugo Strange shares some characteristics with Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, Clayface is a reworking of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1910).
In the 1989 comic book A Tale of Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola decided to take these inspirations to another level and created a story of a fully-Victorian Batman who makes an attempt to catch Jack the Ripper. The popularity of the title resulted not only in more stories from the Elseworlds series, but also in the animated adaptation – Sam Liu’s Gotham by Gaslight, released in 2018.
The movie follows the plot of the comic book very loosely – Batman is once again in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, however the rest of the setting underwent major changes. Instead of a steampunk superhero action story, Sam Liu decided to create a bona fide neo-Victorian narrative. Despite its adventure-oriented plot, Gotham by Gaslight manages to touch upon such topics as prostitution, poverty, corruption, domestic abuse, and war trauma. It also gives a lot of agency to Selina Kyle – more recognizable as Catwoman from DC canon and here a cabaret show girl – she is Bruce’s equal partner and she conducts her own investigation regarding the Ripper. An observant viewer will also notice small nods to the Sherlock Holmes texts and their adaptations. In fact, there are countless novels featuring the famous detective conducting the investigation into the Jack the Ripper case – as his spiritual descendant, it seems fitting that Bruce Wayne was also given a similar narrative.
Gotham by Gaslight is an interesting attempt at merging The Batman canon, the Sherlock Holmes tradition and the neo-Victorian approach. Though the movie itself does not try to be anything more ambitious than a ‘whodunnit’, and does not open up a space for deep discussions of 19th century values/morality, it paints an interesting picture of how the elements of Victorian culture function in the mainstream and which of them are used to create a believably ‘Victorian’ setting for a character that is so deeply embedded in modernity.
