Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
At times in life, a diversion is needed to take the subtle agony of the daily grind away, a sense of humour keen and required to withstand even the most arduous of days and if not for love, humour would have no way of being reigned in from being nothing more than cruel and absurd.
Whilst Batman: Mad Love and Other Stories has charm and great feeling, especially with the back story to the beginning of Harley Quinn, it somehow doesn’t have the same sense of reverential gravitas that is attached to stories such as Batman: The Long Halloween or the Dark Victory outings. The charm of seeing the arts supplied by Bruce Timm and his team is to take a step back to a simpler, perhaps even less crowded and depth ridden time, to an age when the detective comic was a King, not an Emperor.
In the stories there are many standout reasons in which to enjoy this particular collection, no less than in the Paul Dini scripted cover title story, Mad Love. This story alone is a knockabout task, one of those moments in graphic novel history that makes it a true pleasure to be considered a comic book lover and the shared sense of history that comes with it. The introduction and back story of a character that was made for the television animation series, fleshed out, given a frail human quality and ramped up to fit in with the psychopathic intrinsic worth of the likes of The Joker and the near damaged insanity of Poison Ivy. Harley Quinn might not be the most dangerous lunatic to grace the dark side of Gotham City, but she sure is one of the most interesting to grace the pages of Batman.
With other stand out-stand alone stories such as Bruce Timm’s brutal but so well drawn and scripted Two of a Kind, the interesting diversion afforded by Jolly Ol’ St. Nicholas and the night in the life tale of The Joker in Laugher After Midnight, Batman: Mad Love and Other Stories is charm personified, it gives a fresher angle of lighter entertainment compared to the dark, but wholly riveting aspect that graphic novels have undergone in the last 20 years.
A wonderfully amusing set of tales in which to play with after the lights have been taken down a notch or two, not enough to make sure that the night light is in a prominent place to ease the tension, but enough to feel the chilling wind of Gotham racing through the veins.
Batman: Mad Love and Other Stories is available to purchase from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool
Ian D. Hall