‘The Essential Batman Encyclopaedia’ - Robert Greenberger (Ballantine/Del Rey)

If you were a criminal looking to make it big in Gotham City then it stands to reason that you would want to know as much as possible about the city and the people who live there. Imagine how stupid you’d look in front of your fellow gangsters if they started talking about Poison Ivy and you thought they were talking horticulture… Or what about if people were reminiscing about the ‘good old days’, when the Electrocutioner first came to town, and you didn’t have the slightest clue who he was… Do you know what a ‘Lazarus Pit’ is or what ‘No Man’s Land’ signified? You wouldn’t last long in Gotham City if you didn’t know these basic things, at the very least you would have nothing to talk to people about…
Luckily for would be criminals everywhere, and fans of Batman, I’ve spent the last few days flicking through a book that answers all of these questions and more besides. Robert Greenberger appears to have spent most of his life (or a few hours on Google) gathering every scrap of information on Batman, his friends/enemies and everything else that’s related to Batman in any way and wrestled it all into one huge book. Now, I wouldn’t say that I know loads about Batman but based purely on the size of the book I can safely say that there isn’t much (if anything) missing. There’s also plenty of illustrations inside so people like me, who don’t know a lot about Batman, can see exactly who we’re reading about – the ‘Hooded Hangman’ for example.
This isn’t a book that you can pick up and read from cover to cover but it is great for just picking a page at random and finding out new stuff. I never knew who the ‘Heavy Weapons Gang’ or ‘Killer Moth’ were until I happened to come across their pages…
If you’re a Batman fan who has managed to get their hands on all the comics’ etc then this probably won’t be much use to you as it’s all stuff that you’ve seen before. If you’ve just started reading Batman however, this book will prove invaluable at filling in all the gaps and getting you up to speed quickly.
Batman isn’t really my thing but it’s easy for even someone like me to see how fans could get a lot out of this book. Worth a look in my opinion…

Eight and a Half out of Ten