On the cover of his first issue, Simon Dark is billed as "Gotham City's other protector."  That's a very odd tag line, especially considering that the book has nothing to do with Batman, or anything else that you'd normally associate with Gotham.

Instead, it's set in what seems to be one of the nicer parts of town, save for a group of murderous cultists.  The local neighbourhood hero - sort of - is Simon Dark, a sort of childlike boogeyman figure who lurks in graveyards and pops up occasionally to brutally despatch wrongdoers.

If nothing else, Simon Dark is a commercially odd move for DC.  It's a book about a completely new character who's never been seen before.  It's set in Gotham, but has no guest stars or familiar villains.  Quite simply, it's a cold launch for a new character - in an ongoing series.

Marvel and DC don't do this very often, and there's a good reason why.  Unless the book is accompanied with a barrage of publicity, it usually fails in the first year - even if everyone agrees that it's good.  Quite why DC are expecting a different result from Simon Dark, I'm not sure. 

It certainly has an impressive creative team.  Steve Niles is one of the leading writers in the horror genre, and I can see where he's coming from with this book - Simon is clearly a sort of modern-day Frankenstein, freely adapted for use in the DCU.  Scott Hampton's art is moodily atmospheric, and his character design for Simon manages to tread the fine line between invoking familiar imagery and avoiding outright cliche.

But this is a vaguely-mature hybrid comic hovering somewhere between superhero and - actually, horror is perhaps a bit strong, given the content of the first issue.  Urban legend, perhaps.  Nonetheless, history suggests that these things tend to be something of a niche product. 

I'd like to be proved wrong, though, because I kind of liked the first issue.  There are certainly problems to be worked through.  The cultists are a bit of a cliche.  I question the wisdom of setting the book in Gotham, a setting so strongly associated with a character who seems to be completely unrelated.  And Simon is very obviously a character assembled from bits and pieces of other, more famous characters - he even has Freddie Krueger's jumper. 

But the Frankenstein archetype of the childlike monster is a strong concept and there's enough here to suggest that Simon could work as a contemporary take on that idea.  There's something strangely charismatic about the misshapen lug, enough for me to give the book a chance to rise above its admittedly familiar source material.

Rating: B+

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