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Batman
Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #54
Featuring art by Mike Mignola! Batman's battle with a deranged killer in an old Gotham City graveyard leads to the shattering of an ancient crypt and the unleashing of an incredible supernatural force that threatens to consume the Dark Knight's sanity, his life...and his very soul!
26 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 1, 1993
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80 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 12, 2016
Mike Mignola drawing Batman? Automatic sale! So this one is from November 1993, around the time Mignola began his first Hellboy book, Seed of Destruction, and then everything changed for him after that. This comic - Legends of the Dark Knight #54: Sanctum - is basically a dummy run for Hellboy with Batman as the protagonist.
Though Dan Raspler (a guy I’ve never heard of before) is credited as the writer, Mignola also contributed to the story and it really shows. The issue opens on a moonlit night in a graveyard filled with cherubic Victorian-esque gravestones - pretty much Mignola’s favourite location to draw!
Batman’s fighting some blood-collecting creep called Lowther and makes a meal of it, accidentally kicking him onto some spikes; yeah, Batman kills someone. That was pretty shocking but because this is the Legends of the Dark Knight, a series that focuses on Batman’s early years, I suppose it was intended to show an inexperienced Batman - someone who hadn’t yet learned to not kick people onto spikes?
From there Batman meets a malignant spirit who monologues for the rest of the issue, covering other Mignola staples like 19th century secret societies worshipping some obscure demon/god, lost loves, eternal life, blood sacrifices, black magic, and so on. It’s pretty clunky exposition and not the most interesting of stories. You could also basically replace Batman with Hellboy and it’d work just the same - maybe better because Hellboy doesn’t have the same no-kill code as Bats.
Mignola’s art is definitely the highlight of this comic with little else besides to recommend it. If you want to check this out for yourself anyway, it’s up on Comixology.
Though Dan Raspler (a guy I’ve never heard of before) is credited as the writer, Mignola also contributed to the story and it really shows. The issue opens on a moonlit night in a graveyard filled with cherubic Victorian-esque gravestones - pretty much Mignola’s favourite location to draw!
Batman’s fighting some blood-collecting creep called Lowther and makes a meal of it, accidentally kicking him onto some spikes; yeah, Batman kills someone. That was pretty shocking but because this is the Legends of the Dark Knight, a series that focuses on Batman’s early years, I suppose it was intended to show an inexperienced Batman - someone who hadn’t yet learned to not kick people onto spikes?
From there Batman meets a malignant spirit who monologues for the rest of the issue, covering other Mignola staples like 19th century secret societies worshipping some obscure demon/god, lost loves, eternal life, blood sacrifices, black magic, and so on. It’s pretty clunky exposition and not the most interesting of stories. You could also basically replace Batman with Hellboy and it’d work just the same - maybe better because Hellboy doesn’t have the same no-kill code as Bats.
Mignola’s art is definitely the highlight of this comic with little else besides to recommend it. If you want to check this out for yourself anyway, it’s up on Comixology.
November 25, 2020
Mike Mignola does Batman, Hellboy style. It’s not bad, though it does have some moments that made me raise an eyebrow (Batman basically kills a guy). It’s better to just imagine Hellboy in place of Batman here, it works just as well and basically becomes a really solid Hellboy one-shot. The art is the real draw here, and while it’s Mignola’s earlier look from the 90’s, it’s still fantastic, especially when lovecraftian horror comes into play. Overall a nice read, though better suited for Hellboy fans rather than Batman’s.
October 6, 2022
A proto-Hellboy story. Mike would have been working on Hellboy while doing this. It has all the visual tropes we'd see later in Hellboy like cthulu monsters and stone angels. Essential for Mignola fans that want to see the shift from his 80s work with P. Craig Russell and his revolution in the 90s with Hellboy.
April 8, 2023
Being 50/50 on Mignola as a creator, this was either going to be a hit or a miss for me. Whilst I'm aware that the writing credits mainly fall to Raspler, Batman: Sanctum still has that Mignola feel to it: heavy on prose, big on fantasy, and very reliant on flashbacks to push the narrative. It tries to question morality through the use of the supernatural, but it isn't executed in a way that's particularly to my taste. More a reflection of personal preference than quality, this gets regrettably gets a two from me.
November 25, 2023
7.5/10
This first Hellboy story from 1992 contains in a nutshell all the visual, rhythmic, staging and thematic tropes that will characterise the series until its very end.
Explorations of graveyards, Victorian houses and solemn environments. Slow sequences of stone made close-ups, melancholic marmoreal beauties.
Zooms on stabbing hands and falling knives (and you may know where this will go later on...)
Tentacular supernatural entities beyond human, beyond death.
Desperate mischievous ghosts, suspended between worlds, who pretend to know more than what they actually do, and try to talk shit about the sentiments of our protagonist.
And of course, the inevitable: a floor breaking and Hellboy falling downstairs!
It is all here, and it is beautiful, as usual. Actually, even better than the following and more verbose Seed of Destruction.
Only downside of this short story: it is never explained why in this, for some bizarre reasons, Hellboy is dressed like Batman.
This first Hellboy story from 1992 contains in a nutshell all the visual, rhythmic, staging and thematic tropes that will characterise the series until its very end.
Explorations of graveyards, Victorian houses and solemn environments. Slow sequences of stone made close-ups, melancholic marmoreal beauties.
Zooms on stabbing hands and falling knives (and you may know where this will go later on...)
Tentacular supernatural entities beyond human, beyond death.
Desperate mischievous ghosts, suspended between worlds, who pretend to know more than what they actually do, and try to talk shit about the sentiments of our protagonist.
And of course, the inevitable: a floor breaking and Hellboy falling downstairs!
It is all here, and it is beautiful, as usual. Actually, even better than the following and more verbose Seed of Destruction.
Only downside of this short story: it is never explained why in this, for some bizarre reasons, Hellboy is dressed like Batman.
October 13, 2025
Beautiful, evocative art, amazing story!
May 19, 2023
I think this is some of the most beautiful art mignola ever produced. The main downside of the story is how short it is. It's just "evil murderer trys to drink batman's blood, fails, the end" it could have had something more
April 14, 2021
Batman kills in self defense and pays the price. Beautiful art and a great story makes for one of LotDK's best issues.
March 26, 2024
Batman but make it Hellboy. The art's great.
January 12, 2025
3 Stars for Mignola’s art. A proto Hellboy story by Mignola before Hellboy.
December 29, 2025
I need to have this!
February 7, 2026
Honestly, it was only ok. Mostly some screw-on headesque art with a dead guy babbling. The final image of the eldritch horror was cool.
March 28, 2025
Batman traces a murdering occultist to a Gotham graveyard and after a fight that results in the killer's accidental death, the bat falls into a crumbling sepulchre and loses consciousness. The resident of the crypt is revealed to be a vampire, who begins to reanimate after being exposed to Batman's blood and feeds the caped crusader a nightmarish shared dream to distracted him while the immortal villain drains him of life.
This had a rich, spooky mood with a starkly colored Gothic aesthetic and a tense, punchy narrative. In other words, it's by Mike Mignola. I did feel the shared dream conversation could have been more introspective or thematically driven ala the vision from the classic superman special "For the Man Who Has Everything" but it was still entertaining. I'm not the biggest fan of Mignola's art but it's undeniably full of personality and does a very good job expressing the mood and framing the story.
This had a rich, spooky mood with a starkly colored Gothic aesthetic and a tense, punchy narrative. In other words, it's by Mike Mignola. I did feel the shared dream conversation could have been more introspective or thematically driven ala the vision from the classic superman special "For the Man Who Has Everything" but it was still entertaining. I'm not the biggest fan of Mignola's art but it's undeniably full of personality and does a very good job expressing the mood and framing the story.
June 11, 2014
This could have been better. A Legends Of The Dark Knight "one shot" that just didn't have the page count to deliver.
April 8, 2017
This is a small short story, not so much in the batman universe ,it doesn't matter .Replace Batman by Hellboy, Bam!!! You are in the Hellboy universe.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews