It’s the characters that most directly tie into the Lovecraftian tone which are the most interesting. It’s not a bad style per se, but it’s largely unremarkable and gives off the impression of being primarily focused on being cheap and easy to produce. The movie adaptation, on the other hand, has the same generic art style that DC has been using for all of their animated movies lately. Nixey didn’t always succeed in that attempt, but there was always at least a distinct artistic style meant to match the story’s atmosphere. The original comic was drawn by Troy Nixey who mimicked Mike Mignola’s signature style. While that harrowing tone is delivered by the narrative, the visuals are often much less impressive. That feeling of uneasy mystery, as if something that shouldn’t be has come, persists throughout the film as one of its strongest elements. Journal entries and disturbed animals are all hallmarks of Lovecraft’s style, and the movie’s intro sequence feels like it could have come straight out of At the Mountains of Madness, right down to the mutated penguins. There’s an atmosphere of dread as the world slowly reveals more of an unknown something that goes against the natural order. A lot of modern writers reduce his works to Cthulhu and big tentacle monsters, but Mignola manages to understand the subtler aspects. Immediately, the film’s opening perfectly captures the feeling of Lovecraft. It’s an adaptation that is surprisingly faithful to the source material, and with that comes both the comic’s strengths and weaknesses About 20 years ago he wrote Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham, (you can read our review for the comic here) injecting that unique Mike Mignola/Lovecraft style into the world of Batman, and now it’s been adapted into a feature length film. As such, there was no better person for the task of writing a Lovecraftian Batman story than him. For decades he’s brought the same incomprehensible cosmic horror to life with his incredible Hellboy series, along with its various spinoffs. If there’s one name that should come to mind when you think “Lovecraft” and “comics”, it’s Mike Mignola.

Batman the doom came to gotham