Batman Forever: Official Comic Book Adaptation (3rd Printing)

   Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of the movie Batman Forever opening in theaters. That means I was 16 when I took my then 5-year old sister to see the movie. God, I am officially old...

    In honor of that milestone (of the film's release not my being old), members of the Facebook group 'Unite Fans of the DCU Project' decided to either watch the movie again or read/ reread the official comic book adaptation of the film. I hadn't read my copy before, so I went with reading the comic book.

   So how different was the comic from the movie? It was mostly faithful to the movie, but the scenes sequences were skewed. In terms of the beginning of the film, it doesn't start with Batman stopping Two-Face from robbing the Second National Bank of Gotham. Instead, it starts at Arkham with guards discovering that the criminal has escaped the asylum and then it goes to Wayne Enterprises with Bruce Wayne meeting Edward Nygma for the first time. After Wayne refuses to conduct further research on Nygma's sonic brainwave transference device, the action goes to Gotham Bank where the movie original started off.

  After that slight change in plot, the book follows the film's plotting pretty much without any new scenes. There was some extra dialogue thrown in. For example,  Two-Face and Riddler getting high off of Nygma's brain drain machine after the two antagonists first meet. 

  The only other major change in this book is the appearance of Batman. Until the third act, Batman is drawn in the same costume that Michael Keaton wore in Batman and Batman Returns. I'm pretty sure Val Kilmer's Batman did not wear that costume at any point in the film.

    So why the change? It's not like they thought Keaton was going to be playing Batman in the third film. He had made it clear that if Tim Burton didn't direct, he wouldn't wear the cowl. The art team did a very good job of rendering the characters to look like the actors that played them and it's clearly Val Kilmer as Bruce Wayne in the first two acts of this book. So again I ask, why did the artists draw this Batman in the wrong costume?

   For a comic book adaptation, it was actually pretty good. The story was faithful to the source material. The art was near photorealistic and the colors were vibrant just like in the movie. I consider this a dollar well spent and worthy to be a part of my collection forever.
  
   Worth Consuming

    Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.