By Zack Quaintance — Spend enough time in comics, and you’ll end up with a Batman take, or if you’re outside of the Big 2 corporate structure, a definitely NOT Batman take. This was certainly the case for Tom Peyer, whose first book as the editor of AHOY Comics was the excellent and satirical Wrong Earth, which tells the story of NOT Batman from the Frank Miller school of Dark Knight stories swapping Earths with NOT Batman from the 1966 television series. This week with the release of Cloaked #1, we get a NOT Batman take from Mike Richardson, the president, publisher, and founder of Dark Horse Comics.

Indeed, in Cloaked we get a real world superhero story of an alternate sort of Batman (who is so not Batman that his main weapon is a set of oversized guns). In this world, the central vigilante fought crime for years before eventually disappearing, never having revealed his true identity. The book, which is illustrated by artist Jordi Armengol with lettering by Nate Piekos, opens with a fair amount of exposition, doled out by montage that spans the vigilante’s career and is overlain by a sort of parable.

The artwork is excellent within that opening as well as throughout the rest of the book. Armengol’s work is new to me, and it’s a great fit for a NOT Batman book. You can squint a little, and this artwork is right up there with what’s being done in DC Comics’ excellent out of continuity Batman Black Label work, which comes from superstar artists like Andrea Sorrentino and Jock. It’s very good, and it’s good in a way that conveys gritty themes without ever getting lost in ways that feel derivative.

That’s really a trend throughout this book. I don’t think I’m alone on this, but my heckles raise a bit whenever someone has a real world take on NOT Batman. Call it, oh no a Frank Miller derivative condition. And that for sure happened at times throughout this one. There’s also an added layer where the protagonist chief weapon is guns. Some readers live life in a constant state of being ready to fight about Batman using guns, and this is not going to be a thing for them. There’s also maybe a question of whether guns were the best choice given the nation’s ongoing horrific pandemic of shooting incidents. But I think the usage of those weapons is twofold: A. it doesn’t get more NOT Batman than guns; and B. let’s be real about this, if you’re trying to ground this thing in any sort of reality, you probably have to give your vigilante a gun, as ugly as that feels.

All that aside, where this book primarily succeeds is on the cleverness of its concept. Like the aforementioned Wrong Earth, Cloaked #1 is a comic that has a take on Batman that’s too good not to explore, too good not to play it out on the page even if copyright restrictions prevent you from actually making the comic about Batman. In this book, it is decades after the vigilante is active and now a troubled private investigator is being hired by a very wealthy man to discover that vigilante’s identity.

There are elements of Zodiac here, or at least of the fascination with discovering a secret identity, which for some reason feels more unnerving to me when many years have past. The other major strength of this book to me is the main character. The guy is deeply troubled in ways that feel both real and earned. You get his backstory about midway through the book, and, for me at least, it ices any of the concerns I had about this being just another overly-gritty edgelord vigilante book. And it still very well be all that, but at least in this first issue it walks a tightrope of not tipping into ever feeling derivative.

Overall: Cloaked #1 navigates a minefield of tones and concepts that have had diminishing returns over the years to come through as a strong reading experience. I’m going to follow this one through all four issues of its run. 8.5/10

REVIEW: Cloaked #1

Cloaked #1
Writer: Mike Richardson
Artist: Jordi Armengol
Letterer: Nate Piekos
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Mike Richardson! Twenty-five years ago, a genuine masked hero came out of nowhere to declare war on crime. All of America celebrated the exploits of the black-clad vigilante as he took down one lawbreaker after another . . . and then he disappeared. But when down-on-his-luck investigator Jake Stevens is hired to find the long-missing dark avenger, his inquiries threaten to expose the myth behind the mask. Written by Mike Richardson--creator of The Mask, producer of the Hellboy film franchise, and writer of the 47 Ronin graphic novel‚ and illustrated with gritty realism by Jordi Armengol.
Price: $3.99
Buy It Here: Cloaked #1

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.