It was perhaps inevitable that someone would come up with the idea of bringing together two of the most loved fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes and Batman. The first to try it was writer Mike W. Barr who arranged for them cross paths in March 1987, in his story The Doomsday Books in Detective Comics no.572, a special issue to celebrate the title’s 50 years (Batman’s arch-enemy The Joker had already encountered a deranged actor, Clive Sigerson, who believed himself to be Holmes in the story Sherlock Stalks the Joker! that first appeared in issue 6 of his own short-lived title in April 1976). Holmes and Batmen finally came together on screen in an episode of the animated TV series Batman: The Brave and the Bold (2008-2011), a series that partnered the Caped Crusader with a fellow hero each week to battle a variety of villains.
Noticeably lighter in tone than its more serious and often grimmer predecessors Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995), The New Batman Adventures (1997-1999) and Batman Beyond (1999-2001), The Brave and the Bold was the perfect place to have the two fictional heroes work together though, perhaps inevitably, the way in which they are brought together is contrived in the extreme.
A seemingly misplaced Halloween-set prologue (the episode was actually broadcast on 20 March 2009) has Batman (voiced by Diedrich Bader) teaming up with Jay Garrick (Andy Milder), the so-called “Golden Age” Flash to put paid to a plot by Scarecrow (Dee Bradley Baker) and his screaming banshee sidekick Scream Queen (a character that only ever appeared in this episode and probably deserves to be revived somewhere) to unleash his hallucinogenic gas on Gotham using pumpkins. The main plot has Batman thwarting an attempted art robbery by Crazy Quilt only to be drawn back to 19th century London by a time-space portal opened by Jason Blood (Baker again), host to the demon Etrigan, who has been framed for a series of crimes actually committed by “Gentlemen” Jim Craddock (Greg Ellis). Craddock (later known to Batman as Gentleman Ghost), is stealing souls from the women of Whitechapel to trade with the demon Astaroth in exchange for immortality. As Batman and Etrigan try to stop Craddock, they are assisted by Sherlock Holmes (Ian Buchanan) and Dr Watson (Jim Piddock).
For a twenty minute romp aimed at children, there’s an awful lot going on in Trials of the Demon! Magical spells, a menagerie of supernatural monsters, obscure villains that would only mean anything to hardcore DC Comics fans… Todd Casey’s script seems rather over-loaded at times though it leaves very little room for its young audience’s attention to wander. The action is virtually non-stop and there’s plenty of humour too – when they first meet, Holmes makes an instant, pretty lengthy and very accurate deduction as to Batman’s identity and the Dark Knight responds by correctly identifying Holmes simply because of “your hat”. There are also plenty of hints that Craddock is an alternative history version of Jack the Ripper – he stalks the foggy back streets of Whitechapel, targeting women that are obviously never identified as prostitutes but adult viewers will likely draw their own conclusions. The first time we see Craddock approach a potential victim it’s almost a shot-for-shot re-staging of a very similar scene in Bob Clark’s Holmes-vs-the-Ripper tale Murder by Decree (1979).
Sadly, the version of Holmes that Batman encounters is from the arrogant oaf school of Holmes portrayals. He’s a bit too good at his job, the episode portraying his deductive skills as his “superpower” and he’s often startlingly rude, particularly to Watson who he dismisses as an “imbecile” at one point. Getting the balance right between Holmes’ supreme confidence in his abilities and his potential unlikeability is always a tricky proposition and they don’t really get it right here at all.
But there’s so much else going on in Trials of the Demon! that it almost makes up for this mis-step. Anyone over the age of 10 might find it all a bit bewildering (there’s enough material here for a full length feature, mercilessly crammed into just 20 breakneck-paced minutes) but the target audience would surely have been enthralled by the non-stop action and mayhem. Whether they’d watch this version of Holmes and decide to explore the character further is rather more debatable – it remains from beginning to end a vehicle for Batman and if one eye was ever cast on ancillary sales, surely it was the Batman comics that would have been at the forefront of the show runners’ mind and not the Conan Doyle stories.
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