Batman: The Blue, the Grey, and the Bat reimagines the caped crusader's story by casting Bruce Wayne as a Union Army colonel tasked by President Lincoln with tracking the disappearance of gold shipments in the Nevada territory. The Union needs these shipments to help fund the ongoing war effort against the Confederacy. Colonel Wayne adopts a foppish personality to throw off suspicion that he might be the mysterious Batman. Along the way, he teams with Agent R - a Native American named Redbird - and Agent H - Jim "Wild Bill" Hickok. He also pairs up with Samuel Clemens, though not in an official capacity. With Redbird's aid, Wayne musters escaped slaves as the Dark Knights to help uncover the conspiracy to steal the gold. Elliot S. Maggin and Alan Weiss' writing plays upon the expected tropes of a Western with various Civil War touches, though they appear to deliberately avoid anything but the most tacit acknowledgement of the Civil War and how it fundamentally reshaped the United States. Weiss' pencils combined with José Luis García-López's inks do a nice job of combining DC artistic styles from 1992 with those found in mid-nineteenth century broadsides. Overall, the narrative is entertaining, but it succeeds more as a concept than in its execution. ( )

A fairly convoluted "Elseworlds" Batman story featuring our hero as a federal agent in the west during the Civil War, and including most of the western cliches and famous folks. The forgettable story itself involves federal gold shipments that are being sidetracked. Novel, but that's all. ( )