Plot
In the Winter of 1907 children are going missing from the poorest part of Gotham, known as "the Devil's Workshop". The culprit is a grinning white-faced ghoul named Jack Schadenfreude.
Meanwhile, Harry Houdini is in town for a performance and mingles with Gotham's elite. Amongst them is Bruce Wayne, from an Old Money background, and Elijah Montenegro, the nouveau riche, self-styled "Beef Baron". Also in town are other notables, specifically Tom Mix and Leonora Reinhardt. All the high society events are being documented for the "Gotham Globe" by Victoria Vale.
Vale and Wayne attend Reinhardt’s performance as the lead in Medea, where they meet the Baron again. They are then invited to a séance to be held by Reinhardt. An invitation also extended to Houdini, who has an interest in the paranormal. The séance is apparently a success, leading the three to conclude something genuinely supernatural is going on.
The abductions are traced to Montenegro’s meat factory and it soon becomes apparent that everything is somehow connected.
The story is narrated by Houdini. He contrasts his own poor upbringing with that of Bruce Wayne. It also highlights Batman's comparatively poor lock picking and escapological skills, as he learned a number of his skills from studying Houdini's work.
Read more about this topic: Batman/Houdini: The Devil's Workshop
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)