Review: 'Batman: The Ultimate Guide (New Edition)'

With yet another Batman movie being the most hyped new release, it is a fine time to get more new Bat-product onto shelves. Although Batman: The Ultimate Guide is apparently not 100% new since it is an update of a book originally published in 2001 (though, it must be pretty different since it was written by a totally different author and details a lot of Bat business that went down in the past twenty years), and it is only an ultimate guide if we forget that Batman has had a very active life off of comics pages (which would require some sort of Hugo Strange brain-eraser thingy), it is still a neat, if brief, trip through 80-something years of Batmania. 

Author Matthew K. Manning had a potentially difficult task in distilling Batman's many, many, many iterations in the comics down to a history that could fit on 200 image-crowded pages. He included profiles of the Batmobile, the Batcostume, the Batcave, the Justice League, and Gotham City,  as well as various friends, foes, and love interests. There are a few profiles of key comic issues with synopses and illustrative panels. There's a spread on that time Green Lantern turned Batman into a zombie. I even learned a few things (I had no idea False-Face appeared in the comics in 1958 and was not an invention of the sixties TV-series), but the book's main draw is it's colorful, spectacular, and varied rogue's gallery of images.