Top ten comic book-classic mashups

Will Brooker is Reader and Director of Research in Film and Television at Kingston University, London. He is a leading expert on the Dark Knight, author of the cultural history of Batman, Batman Unmasked. His other books include Using the Force and Alice’s Adventures. He edited the Audience Studies Reader and The Blade Runner Experience, and wrote the BFI Film Classics volume on Star Wars.

Brooker's new book is Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman.

For the Guardian, he named his top 10 comic book-classic mashups--examples that "demonstrate the criss-crossing, intertextual relationship between comic books and more traditionally literary texts." One entry on his list:

Haunted Knight by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale

Loeb and Sale are now most celebrated for The Long Halloween and its sequel Dark Victory, both of which inspired Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight; but prior to those graphic novels, they worked together on three Halloween tales for the monthly title Legends of the Dark Knight. In the third, Ghosts, a sleepless Bruce Wayne is visited first by his father, in Marley-like chains, then by Poison Ivy, and finally by a spectral Joker, who takes Batman to his own grave. Like Scrooge, Wayne learns a new appreciation of life from his encounter with death, and starts a charitable foundation next morning.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue