The setting makes this one of the most unusual of the many DC/Marvel crossovers...and one of the better ones.
Byrne, who at this point in his career had certainly found, defined and perfected his own personal drawing style, takes inspiration from the earlier artists to work on the characters, most obviously Cap's creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and Batman artist Dick Sprang, and filters their styles through his own. The result is something of the ultimate "What if..." story, not simply a "What if...Batman met Captain America in the 1940s?", but more like "What if...DC and Timely had collaborated on a Batman/Captain America crossover in the 1940s?"
It might have gone something like this...although I think it's worth noting that as much as Byrne takes his characterization and design notes from the war-time comics, the storytelling is in a contemporary style. He doesn't try to ape the less-sophisticated format of those earlier years of the medium.
Byrne certainly draws the hell out of this book. When we discussed his first entry in the omnibus, I noted how few Byrne comics I had actually read, and I wasn't too terribly impressed with is take on Kirby's '60s and '70s designs and characters in Darkseid vs. Galactus: The Hunger. His work here seems head and shoulders above that, perhaps because of his synthesis of various styles with his own (There's even a brief appearance by Sgt. Rock and Easy Company that has the look of Joe Kubert's renderings of the characters). Or perhaps the real world, historical setting just gives readers an easier purchase into the visuals than a story sending Galactus and the Silver Surfer to Apokolips can manage.
In any case, I was impressed from the first page, a splash depicting a low-angle view of old-looking skyscrapers reaching up into the Gotham sky, their top floors all in shadow, and the bat-signal hanging above them all (These are far more stylish and detailed looking buildings than the boxier ones on the cover, by the way.)
Perhaps I'm so used to seeing the backgrounds and skylines taken from photographic reference, sometimes just dropped straight into the art via computer, that I am now easily impressed by an artist just, you know, drawing buildings, but Byrne got me with this first page.
We first meet Batman and Robin in the midst of a car chase, in which The Joker is fleeing in his Jokermobile, with the Batmobile in hot pursuit. The Clown Prince of Crime makes an unexpected getaway thanks to an ejector seat, while Batman picks up an unusual clue from the remains of his booby-trapped vehicle.
And then it's over to the frontlines in Europe, where Captain America is fighting alongside Easy Company, although he takes the lead in tackling and defeating a giant Nazi "war wheel", like that which once menaced the Blackhawks (And which is here revealed in a splash panel showing off its great size). Cap and Bucky are ordered back to the United States, to be given a new, more urgent assignment.
On their way back, they come across a hijacked plane, which Cap attempts to rescue by jumping onto it from his own plane, but he misjudges and is about to fall to his death...when Batman, hanging from the Batplane's rope ladder, grabs him, and together the two take on the bad guys and rescue...Robert Oppenheimer?
"Then this priority flight is connected to the Gotham Project?" Batman asks, which readers should recognize as this comic's answer to the real-world Manhattan Project. That project to develop the atom bomb is key to the comic's plot.
The Joker has apparently been targeting elements of the project, and the U.S. Army suspects "he's just a pawn in this business...being manipulated by someone higher up." Their suspect? Millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, who's so clean it seems suspicious. (Readers will of course realize that the idea of Wayne as the bad guy is ridiculous; the actual higher-up ordering The Joker around is on the back cover, Cap's archenemy The Red Skull.)
To get to the truth, the army assigns Private Steve Rogers as Bruce Wayne's bodyguard, cramping both men's styles, and ultimately leading to a scene where a suspicious Rogers jumps through Wayne's penthouse window and the two fight for a few panels, before they come to the realization that they are fighting one another in their secret identities, ultimately shaking hands as Batman and Captain America.
Some investigating follows, in which the two heroes swap sidekicks, and it all leads to a climax in which the four heroes board the Batplane to give chase to the Red Skull's plane, which is loaded with the Gotham Project's "Fat Boy" bomb and racing to Washington D.C., where the Skull plans to drop it.
Obviously that plan is ultimately thwarted, thanks, at least in part, to The Joker. The villains in these things often don't get along nearly as well as their heroic counterparts and end up having some kind of falling out. Here, though, The Joker's disagreement with the Skull comes from his...patriotism?
Upon meeting the Skull in person for the first time, The Joker is shocked to learn he has been working with a Nazi.
"I may be a criminal lunatic, but I'm an American criminal lunatic!" he says, reaching for his gun of Joker gas. (The pair end up blasting one another simultaneously with their respective poison gases but discover they're each immune to the gas of the other).
Ultimately, the Skull has the Joker konked on the head and placed aboard his plane, and the two end up fighting atop the bomb until it's dropped, both plunging out of the plane after it.
A two-page epilogue, which a "special thanks" box credits Roger Stern with suggesting, is set twenty years after the events of the comic and further moves the book into real Elseworlds territory...at least on the Batman side of the equation. The Captain America side is in keeping with his own history, although it is here presented with a twist specific to this crossover.
Next: 1997's Daredevil/Batman #1
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