Nearly a decade ago, a friend's significant other asked me how I would read Batman. I've done a bunch of "Netflixizations" of comics, where I recommend an order for binging the best of a comic run, but Batman was the first. It even predates this website. But I never transferred it here because I knew it needed to be thined out and reread. Thanks to my Goodreads challenge for this year, I have recently started rereading my Batman books, based on my previous idea of the canon. My ideas have changed a bit since then.

Season One is probably the most similar to my original concept of the seasons. It starts and ends the same, but I've tweaked some titles as some have gone out of print since my initial concept, and some hadn't yet been written.  

Episode 1: A Bat, A Cat, And An Unlucky Lieutenant
(collected in Batman Year One...and if you want more throw in Catwoman: Her Sister's Keeper)
by Frank Miler and David Mazzucchelli...and Mindy Newell and JJ Birch

Bruce Waye returns to Gotham after a long absence following his family's murder (this premise may seem familiar) at the same time a cop named Jim Gordon shows up in town. Cue corrupt cops, crime family shenanigans, a prostitute in a cat suit, and a District Attorney trying to do his best. This is the basis for the TV version of Gotham, the movie Batman Begins, and much more. It's one of the comics from the mid-80s that revolutionized comics, but it has managed to age much better than its peers.  If you want to see the Catwoman story from Year One fleshed out, check out Catwoman: Her Sister's Keeper, it's not as good, but it's a more in-depth examination of Selina and Bruce's first few meetings from Year One.

1 episode 

Episode 2: Monster Men
(collected in Batman & The Monster Men)
by Matt Wagner

A mad scientist named Hugo Strange who works for the Falcones and Marconis (from Year One) is trying to create a race of violent mutants for...reasons. Bruce Wayne's love interest, Julie Madison, and her father end up peripherally involved and Batman worries he won't be able to keep his doulbe life together. 

1 episode

Episode 3: Masks & Episode 4: Images
(collected in Batman Dark Legends)
​by Bryan Talbot, Dennis O'Neil & Brett Blevins

Masks has Bruce Wayne waking up in a mental institution. Does Batman even exist? It's a classic trope, but handled superbly here. Images has Batman running into The Joker for the first time. It's not an epic Joker tale, but I really like the idea of The Joker being kind of a C-level villain for most of the first season. I wouldn't include either of the other stories in this collection as part of the series, but the Mike Mignola story is also pretty fun.

2 episodes

Episode 5: The Mad Monk
(collected in Batman & The Mad Monk)
​by Matt Wagner

The Madison/Marconi/Falcone relationship continues to be a problem for Batman, distracting him from what appears to be a vampire outbreak at a castle in Gotham. Once his girlfriend is targeted by the vampire cult, Batman ends up in his first supernatural investigation. Maybe.

1 episode

Episode 6: Death By Design
(an original graphic novel called Batman Death By Design)
by Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor

Gotham looks really cool. Great skyline, weird infrastructure. And it turns out the Wayne family was prominently involved. Of course. When an architect wins a contest to redesign a failed public transit hub, the builders, the union, and the architects become involved in a series of bizarre accidents. The Joker makes an appearance but doesn't appear to have a clue what's happening around him.

Episode 7: Snow
(collected in Batman Snow)
by  JH Williams III, Dan Curtis Johnson, and Seth Fisher)

Batman is having problems with his realtionship with Jim Gordon and the police, so he decides to recruit his own team of criminal experts to help him multitask his crime solving. Meanwhile, Dr. Victor Fries's wife has a medical emergency that hes determined to fix himself.

1 episode

Serial 1: The Long Halloween
(collected in The Long Halloween)
by Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale

The Falcones, the Marconis, Catwoman, The Joker, Jim Gordon, Harvey Dent, Poison Ivy. All sorts of characters make appearance in this massive murder mystery. Probably the finest Event Comic done in the confines of Batman's universe.

3 episodes

Season One is ten episodes of a Batman who hasn't yet decided to endanger children to accomplish his goals.

One of the easiest questions I get asked about Batman is, "Where do I start?"

Since most of us have a finite amount of time to devote to comics, and a possibly more finite budget, the ability to track down a copy of Detective Comics #27 and start reading from there is a crack pipe dream.  Sure, DC has collected the beginning of the Detective and Batman comics in their DC Archive hardcovers, and DC Chronicles, and, yes, if you don't care about the art being colored, you can save yourself a chunk of change and start buying the Showcase collections DC has been putting out.  But, for those of us who didn't grow up with, or grow to love Golden Age and Silver Age comics, these options represent an unrealistic level of dedication.

So when a customer walks into the store, and says "I love Batman.  Can you recommend a good place to start reading from?"  I always recommend Frank Miller's "Year One"  I'll get to why I start there in the next entry.  The problem is when a customer buys Year One, loves it, and returns, asking "What's next?"

There is almost too much next to contemplate.  Unlike your favorite indie comic, or your favorite television show, Batman doesn't have a straightforward chronology.  Hundreds of writers have written official DC Batman stories in the pages of Detective Comics, Batman, Gotham Knights, Shadow Of The Bat, Batman & Robin, World's Finest, Streets Of Gotham, and Batman/Superman to name a few.  Plus, he is often a member of the Justice League Of America, and shows up in just about all of the big DC Crossovers.

It is nigh improbable to come up with a chronology for Batman, even if you start at Year One (which came out in 1986).  But that's what I'm going to attempt to do here.  I'm not going to go issue by issue through the Bat-verse.  I'm going to go by the trade paperback collections that DC comics has released, including all the titles I mentioned above, plus the spin-off series such as Robin, Nightwing, Birds Of Prey, Batgirl, and others.

Apart from skipping the Elseworlds tales (stories that take place completely outside of DC's main universe), I'm going to be as thorough as I can.  I've been buying most of the trades at local comic book stores, and even finding some out of print books in used bookstores, and online. 

The order that I recommend reading Batman in is not necessarily by issue number.  It is by what I think is currently in continuity, and how it would be presented if the book was by one author (other than Grant Morrison, who has a more complex understanding of how time works than I).  I am absolutely open to people presenting alternate chronologies.  So if you read an entry, and think "Hey, that event took place before" for example: "No Man's Land.  There's no way it can happen after Bruce adopts Tim Drake as his son."  You don't need to send me hate mail, or call me a clueless moron, just tell me why you think I'm wrong, and I'll either explain my reasoning, or else defer to yours and make a correction.

The only real limit I have is that because DC makes interesting decisions when compiling and releasing trades, there will be hiccups in the reading order.  For complaints about DC's trade paperback policy, please e-mail Dan Didio, not me.

I'm forward dating this entry, so it will always be up top.  It may be edited as the series progresses.  Hope you enjoy reading this, and that it's helpful.  Feel free to comment.  I tend to only bite when provoked.

In the mid 1980's DC decided to clear up fifty years of continuity in their universe by putting out a series called A Crisis On Infinite Earths.  As someone who didn't know too much about DC characters and storylines when I initially read it, I found it a confusion of huge events involving too many characters.  My opinion of that title has changed over the years, but I still think it would be a terrible place to start reading comic books.

What followed Crisis was the rebooting of several of DC's most popular characters.  The most successful of these was Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Batman: Year One. 

The story opens with Lieutenant James Gordon moving to Gotham and joining their police force, while Bruce Wayne returns to Wayne Manor after twelve years abroad.  And it follows the two as Gordon fights Gotham City Police Corruption, and Bruce Wayne dons the cowl for the first time.  We also see a prostitute named Selina Kyle transform herself into Catwoman.  And when the Gotham Police Department goes under investigation, District Attorney Harvey Dent is called on to the case. 

If this storyline sounds a bit familiar, it's because Year One was one of the main sources for Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins.  The story also involves The Falcone crime family's attempt to keep a tight grip on Gotham, mostly by controlling police commissioner Loeb (no relation to Jeph , as far as I can tell).

Mindy Newell and JJ Birch's Catwoman: Her Sister's Keeper is a companion piece to "Year One", which focuses on the Selina Kyle storyline.  I recommend reading it just after Year One while the story is still fresh in your mind.  There are a couple of scenes that appear in both books.  And it's always interesting to see a scene drawn by two very different artists.  Mazzucchelli employing a very comic-noir style while Birch's work looks like it would be at home in early Sandman comics. 

It's also interesting to see how the two handle dialog.  Miller has a "gritty" cop drama style with characters speaking with no flash or style.  There's no sense of him trying to be witty, it reads like real people in a real situation.  Newell, on the other hand, employs a lot of 80s snappy patter that, much like old paper, has yellowed a bit over the years.  It's not bad writing, it just includes the occasional pop culture reference that is no longer in the vernacular.  "You're a better nun than I am Gunga Din" is a "Where's The Beef" for movie nerds.  It's still a solid story, and an important character study of Selina Kyle.

So this was the easy entry.  Where to begin.  How to become familiar with the early characters.  We've established Bruce as the Batman, Selina as Catwoman, James Gordon as a flawed but well intentioned police officer, The Falcones as the family you least want to fuck with, and we've met Harvey Dent.  We also have Gordon mentioning that there are more Falcones back in Chicago that he has a history with.  And, as the story comes to a close, he stands on the roof, waiting for Batman, so he can tell him about a new criminal in Gotham; The Joker.

Batman Year One: Story 5/5, Art 5/5 with some back matter by Mazzucchelli.

Catwoman Her Sister's Keeper: Story 4/5, Art 3/5

Everyone has that friend.  The one who watches a lot of standup comedians and reports the jokes they heard as their own.  I can't tell you the amount of times I've heard the whole Scooby Doo stoner theories.  The snickering moron who wonders aloud about Smurf sex lives.  That person will always give you a little elbow to the ribcage and make some remark about Batman's "inappropriate relationship" with Robin.

Of course, that person doesn't know that there have been several Robins, and that one of them is his son.  That person has no idea about Batman at all, apart from possibly having seen the 90's movie franchise and a few scattered episodes of The Animated Series.   But most importantly, that person doesn't know how both Batman and Bruce Wayne are defined by the women in their lives.

It's no mistake that, in the modern era retelling of Batman's first few years, Catwoman appears several times before we get our first glimpse of The Joker.  While The Joker is often regarded as Batman's nemesis, it's his relationship with Selina Kyle's alter ego that gives us a feeling for who Bruce is under the cowl. 

Batman And The Mad Monk opens with Bruce standing up his current girlfriend, Julie Madison, to capture Catwoman.  He sends Alfred to send his "sincerest regrets" to her, and to let her know "his scheduling problems won't be changing any time soon."

Another thing not changing anytime soon is Jim Gordon's problems with the hierarchy of the Gotham City Police Department.  The new Commisioner, Grogan, appears as corrupt as Loeb was, and has sent some officers to deliver a message to Gordon, just as Gordon is awaiting Batman on the roof (he calls him with a Batpager...still no signal yet)

At the end of the first chapter of the story, we're introduced to the villains: vampires!  In particular, a cultish vampire leader named The Monk.  While he's not known as one of the front-runners of Batman's rogues, he goes all the way back to Detective Comics #43.  In fact, this entire trade is a reimagining of the very early adventures of Batman. 

It's not long before The Monk's cult kidnaps Julie Madison.  While the Batman is off rescuing her, her father, Norman Madison, mistakenly thinking Batman is stalking him, decides he must permanently erase his connection to organized crime by killing Sal Maroni.  It doesn't go well.

Neither does Julie's rescue from The Monk Cult.  She manages to survive and, in the process becomes the first non-butler to discover that Bruce Wayne is Batman.  But Batman's dangerous life, plus his role in her father's death leaves Julie unable to cope with Bruce's night life, so she takes off for Africa.  Also during the course of the action, Jim Gordon decides his interactions with Batman are too risky, so at the end of this story Bruce is left only Alfred as an ally, but as he Spider-Mans his way into the Gotham skyline, he goes directly past a billboard for The Haly Circus featuring The Flying Graysons.

Story 4/5, Art 5/5

Galactus and The Dark Phoenix eat planets and suns.  The Red Skull cashed paychecks directly from Hitler himself.  But ask your average person who the scariest villain in comics is and they'll choose either Lex Luthor, Magneto, or The Joker.  Lex is a MENSA level billionairre who hates aliens and poor people.  Magneto is a Holocaust survivor with the power of magnetism (he's not so much a fan of Red Skull).  But The Joker is perhaps the most terrifying of all.  He has no super powers, no millions of dollars, he's merely a sociopath with a sense of humor, and a very complicated relationship with Batman.

But where does The Joker come from?  What set him on his life of crime?  Who was he before he showed up in Batman's rogue gallery?  What's his real name?

What makes The Joker an effective villain is that those questions have never really been answered.  There's no Holocaust in his background.  There's no absuive parents.  No orphanned when your parents threw you out of an airplane before they were enslaved by aliens.  The Joker occasionally offers a piece of his past, but will later contradict it.  A gag that's used beautifully in The Dark Knight.

So, given The Joker's muddled history, it's not much of a surprise that, even by comic book standards, his continuity is an erratic mess.  Several writers have written origins or first appearances for The Clown Prince Of Crime.  Most notably in recent years, Ed Brubaker and Michael Green.

Lovers and Madmen by Michael Green serves as a possible origin story.  An expert thief gets bored of how perfectly he executes his crimes and contemplates getting out of the business when he runs across Batman, and becomes obsessed.  (There's a fun little scene in a bar where "Jack" discusses his boredom at work with a blonde psychology student who calls him Mr. J.)

During "Jack"'s crime spree, Bruce Wayne meets a woman named Lorna.  The introduction of a love interest in a story involving The Joker can only mean one thing.  She gonna die.  And, of course, Batman has to watch.  With Lorna bleeding in his arms, he decides he can't go after Jack, so he tosses his baterang after him, marking his face into a permanent smile.

Now willing to do whatever it takes to pursue Jack, he calls in a favor from the mob, and consults a Gotham psychiatrist named Jonathan Crane, who labels Jack's methods insane.  While the mob is holding him, Jack escapes and gets in a gun/fist/lead pipe fight with his captors, and ends up falling into a vat of anti-psychotics.  Voila, Joker.  Whose first two acts are a crime spree, and an act of altruism (paying all of the future Miss Harley Quinn's college expenses).

Also, it turns out that Lorna doesn't die, but decides Gotham isn't safe, and Julie Madisons out of town.

Story: 4/5, Art 3/5 

The Man Who Laughs doesn't bother with The Joker's past, but focuses on his first crime spree in Gotham.  It could almost be a follow-up to Lovers And Madmen, except that Gordon and Batman are unfamiliar with The Joker, despite having arrested him at the close of Lovers And Madmen.  The whole story is pretty much a three issue summation of  a Joker story.  There's gas, there's the relationship between Batman and Gordon, and Batman blaming himself from creating The Joker.  This story also outs Gordon as being associated with Batman, allowing him to create The Bat Signal.

Story 3/5. Art 4/5

The Man Who Laughs trade paperback also features a backup story,with pencils by Patrick Zircher, called "Made Of Wood".  If you're reading this for chronological sake, put the book down as this story comes waaaaaaay later in The Batman mythos.

You'll have to excuse me, I'm terrible with remembering names.  I once spent four hours calling my ex only "Hey...you." until I remembered it.  Of course, we'd only dated for about a year, so he's really lucky that I recognized him at all.

If you want me to remember you, you really have to make an impact.  Strangle a hamster with its own intestines, show me The Green Lantern tattoo on your ass. 

So far in this continuity we've been introduced to a variety of Batman's rogues: The Joker, Catwoman, The Monk, and, Hugo Strange.  We've also seen a few cameos of future villains: Harvey Dent, Harley Quinn, and The Scarecrow.  But, apart from The Joker, we haven't had a major supervillain crime spree yet.  The Long Halloween is on the horizon, though, and that involves a bunch of supervillains, so it's time to get to know as many of them as possible.

In Batman: Four Of A Kind we witness Batman's first encounters with  Poison Ivy, The Riddler, Scarecrow, and Man-Bat. 

It's not an ideal way to introduce them.  I'd love to list trades that fully flesh out their origins or first appearances, but this is a decent primer to characters who will shortly become very important to the Batman Universe.  Also, although we don't see why or how, halfway through this trade Jim Gordon gets promoted from Lieutenant to Captain.

Alan Grant opens up the collection with the introduction of Poison Ivy who first poisons Bruce Wayne, and then poisons Batman, informing him that both he and Wayne will die that night because the only antidote to Poison Ivy's kiss is a second kiss.  The art is very Vertigo 90s style, except for Batman's cowl which looks a bit like Matt Wagner's and a lot out of place with the rest of the art.  But Brian Apthorp's one and two page spreads are gorgeous.  And there are several very well drawn humorous facial expressions.

Story 4/5, Art 4/5


Chuck Dixon handles The Riddler story.  He's one of my all-time favorite Bat scribes, but his Riddler story is your basic "my parents didn't love me, I felt invisible, so I turned to a life of crime" origin, which seems inadequate for someone as clever as The Riddler.  There's a lot of silver-age craziness to this version of Edward Nigma that we don't really get in the modern age.  The art by Kieron Dwyer is very noirish.  His Riddler outfit seems lazy (just penciled question marks with no dimension, design, or color to them), but everything else works.

Story 3/5, Art 4/5


Doug Moench's Scarecrow tale is very telly.  "Yeah -- You sure look like a scarecrow!"  "He also looks like a different crane -- Ichabod Crane!"  Eeeks, zero subtlety or trust in the reader's ability to notice Crane's physique or notice the Crane/throwing pumpkins connection.  The writing made slogging through this chapter very difficult.  The flashbacks, in particular, are absolutely terrible.  But you do end getting the full origin story.

Story 1/5, Art 3/5


Chuck Dixon returns to wrap things up with the origin of Man-Bat.  The meek Kirk Langstrom is getting ready to marry his beautiful fiance, but he's incredibly wrapped up with his genetic research.  And when his research project is rejected, he takes drastic measures and turns himself into the Man-Bat.  It's not a life changingly fantastic story, but after the mediocre Riddler tale and the awful Scarecrow, it seems fantastic.  Quique Alcatena's artwork is very consistent with the style of the mid to late 90s Batman.

Story 4/5, Art 4/5
Overall Rating for Four Of A Kind: Story 2/5, Art 4/5



Collected Legends Of The Dark Knight has three stories of very different styles from the Legends Of The Dark Knight series from the early 90s.  James Robinson and Tim Sale open the book with Blades, the story of Gotham's second vigilante, a swordsman, The Cavalier.  The swashbuckling hero becomes a more public face than Batman, and the public adores him...until they discover that he's been leading a double life as a jewel thief.  What Batman doesn't know (he's busy solving the murders of elderly Gothamites by a killer named Mr Lime.) is that The Cavelier is stealing jewels for Mr. Salt (apparently James Robinson likes tequila) to protect the love of his life from being outed as a murderess.  Alas, his plans go awry when he decides he can't trust Mr. Salt anymore, and he kills him with his sword.  Batman tracks him down almost immediately, and the two engage in a swordfight to the death, and The Cavelier wins!

But he's a good guy at heart, so instead of killing Batman, he draws a gun and walks outside where he is gunned down by the police.

This is one of my favorite lesser-known Bat stories.  And, it alone is worth the price of this book.

Story 5/5, Art 5/5  


Alan Grant and Kevin O'Neill show up to do the second story, The Legend Of The Dark Mite.  And while I can't say for certain that either of these men have done hallucinogens, all signs point to a very colorful yes.  This is the origin of Bat-Mite, and as it proclaims on the very fist page "This is NOT an imaginary story."  It's the story of a drug addict who sees the error of his ways when confronted with a tiny Batman-like creature who shows him what his life would be like if he contnued his life of crime.  We see this story as he tells it to Batman from his cell at Arkham.  It also involes a neat two spage pread of assorted DC characters as mites.

Story 4/5, Art 4/5


John Francis Moore and P Craig Russell close out the book with Hothouse, the story of Batman's second run in with Poison Ivy.  The story uses the familiar Batman trope of rehabilitated Bat-rogue turns out to be not so rehabilitated, as Poison Ivy gets involved with a drug ring that makes hallucinogenics from plant pheromones.

Story 4/5, Art 5/5
Overall Review For Collected legends Of The Dark Knight: Story 4/5, Art 5/5


Did you ever see that episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer where Buffy believes she's actually in a mental hospital, and that her entire slayer life has been a series of psychotic episodes?  Well, it's possible that Joss Whedon read Bryan Talbot (who does double duty as writer and artist here)'s  Mask, the first story in Dark Legends.  After stopping a crime Batman wakes up in a hospital where he's addressed as Bruce Wayne.  Terrified that he's been found out, he soon realizes that he's not a billionaire playboy, but a drunken homeless person with delusions of a superhero life.

Story 4/5, Art 4/5


Dennis O'Neil and Bret Blevins come up next with Images, yet another "first encounter with The Joker" story.  It is very similar to The Man Who Laughs, in that it retells the Joker's origin.  Joker chemicals, Batman blames himself for turning The Red Hood into The Joker, rich people die, Alfred tells Bruce to stop blaming himself.  If you've not read any of the other Joker origin stories, it's okay, but it does not hold up against many of the other versions of the tale.  The art is ok, but Batman's physique shifts a little from page to page.

Story 3/5, Art 3/5


Batman goes to Chinatown for Tao by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson.  It's an interesting change of pace from the usual Gotham supervillains and mobsters, but it really reads like a white Western guy writing about Eastern culture.  And the art is very much a product of its era, having a very early nineties almost Vertigo style.

Story 2/5, Art 3/5


The gem of this collection is the Dan Raspler and Mike Mignola scribed story: Sactuary.  If you've ever wondered what Hellboy would look like if it starred Batman, you'll find the answer here.  The story's locale alternates between a graveyard and a gothic afterlife, so it's perfect for Mignola's art.

Story 4/5. Art 5/5
Overall Review for Dark Legends: Story 3/5, Art 4/5

Blame it on the Infinite Final Crisis On Infinite Multiple Earths.  Blame it on Superman's tendency to spin the globe around whenever someone he loves dies.  Blame it on the rain (that's what's fallin' fallin').  One of the major problems with a giant universe written and edited by hundreds of creators is that there's a whole mess of contradictions in comic timelines.  Unfortunately for Year Two: Fear The Reaper, most of the stories it contradicts are more appealing.

This collection opens with Jim Gordon being named Commissioner of Gotham (don't get used to it Jim, you'll be back playing Captain?  Lieutenant?  Head groundskeeper? in the next collection), and publicly revealing (drum roll, please) The Bat Signal!  Which, of course, we've already seen.

There's a lot of familiar tropes in Mike Barr's story: Bruce Wayne falls in love with a girl whose father's life is intertwined with Batman's (see Batman & The Monster Men), her father turns out to be another vigilante in Gotham (see Blades), but this is a vigilante who's not afraid to kill (that hasn't come up yet, but it's not far off on the horizon), and the villain is connected to Batman's past.  In fact, to take down The Reaper, Batman must cross Leslie Thompkins, Alfred, Commisioner (for the moment) Gordon, the Gotham City Police Department, and his past by teaming up with small time thug Joe Chill who (spoiler alert) KILLED HIS PARENTS.  Bruce's love interest, Rachel Caspian,'s mother was killed by a masked murderer on the family's way home from the circus, which mirrors Bruce's childhood trauma in an almost aggressively forced way.

By the end, of course, everyone realizes that Batman only teamed up with villains to take down a larger villain, and they forgive him.  But the girl, of course, is traumatized by her father's death (see Batman & The Mad Monk), and decides to become a nun, instead of marrying Bruce.

I realize this entry sounds a bit harsh.  Some of the stories that I've referenced were written AFTER Year Two: Fear The Reaper, so I'm not trying to imply that Barr's work is derivative,it just doesn't hold up as well as the other stories.  The writing is fine for a book written in 1987, but Frank Miller's Year One was written the same year, and it still holds up.  There's also the issue of this collection being heavy handed with the family theme.  Bruce's family in relation to other characters' families comes up again and again, and it's tough to make it feel fresh, but many writers did.  Barr does not.

The art here is also very telling of its era.  The penciling duty goes back and forth between Alan Davis and Todd Macfarlane.  There's a lot of eighties hair and some inconsistent experimentation with cross hatching in the Macfarlane issues.  But while the art certainly screams 80s, it screams it in a good way.

The follow-up story, Full Circle, also appears in this collection.  This story is set a year or so later, and I recommend skipping it for now.  I actually own Full Circle as its own collection, and have it placed in the appropriate chronological location on my bookshelf.  But that's because I'm OCD.  You can just come back to this book later.

Story 2/5, Art 4/5

In 2009, Chris Claremont began the odd alternate timeline series in the Marvel Universe called X-Men Forever.  The series picks up from Claremont's 1991 X-Men run, and presents the timeline as he would have written it, had he not jumped ship to Image comics.  While it's completely ridiculous, it's a focused examination of the X-Men by one of the series's premiere writers.  Batman Confidential is a DC series that focuses on stories from early on in Batman's career.  It's written by several long-time DC writers like Peter Milligan, Sam Kieth, and Royal McGraw. I included one of the story arcs, Lovers and Madmen in a previous entry, but Rules Of Engagement helped clinch my decision to not include any more of the Batman Confidential series as part of this project.  If something contradicts the chronology it needs to be at least fun, and this series seems more an exercise in frustration.

Rules Of Engagement is about Bruce Wayne/Batman's first encounter with Superman's nemesis, Lex Luthor.  The plot outline: Lex Luthor sets up WayneTech to look dangerously inept in front of a group of defense contractors, all in the name of world domination!  The evil, hand rubbing, mwa-ha-ha-ing bald guy attempts to take over the world because he doesn't like superheroes.  Batman, of course, takes him down in the end.  While the story is fun, the dialog is...questionable, and Whilce Portacio 's art is trapped forever in 1991.  This was the first book that I had to struggle to finish.

Story: 2/5, Art: 2/5
 


If Nancy Reagan was as devout a Batman reader as Barack Obama is a Spider-Man fan, her favorite collection would probably be Venom.  It's the first time in continuity that we encounter the designer drug, Venom, a pill (and later inoculant) that shows up repeatedly in Gotham. 

After failing to save a little girl from drowning in the sewer (a girl who's father happens to be the creator of Venom), and then tearing a deltoid muscle during a workout, Batman gives into temptation and begins taking Venom to bulk himself.

It's not long before the now super-strong Batman has his senses dulled and starts making dubious decisions.  He goes so far as to drive Alfred away, and is then asked to kill Jim Gordon.  The conversation around taking Gordon down has one of my favorite continuity nerd jokes when Batman refers to Gordon as "Lieutenant or Captain or whatever he is".

Spoiler alert : Batman doesn't kill Gordon.  But every character introduced in this story dies by the end.  The curious omission in this story is that it feels like it should be the origin of Bane.  Venom is the drug that enables this future villain to bulk up and battle Batman.  And the island that the villains retreat to is Santa Priscia, which is where Bane grows up.

This is a well-told introduction to Batman's relationship with drugs.

Story: 4/5, Art 4/5



J H Williams III is one of my favorite Batman Universe artists of all time.  His work on Detective Comics is one of the most beautifully rendered pieces of art I've seen in comics.  But before he ever laid a pencil to page in Detective, he wrote a story arc for Legends Of The Dark Knight along with Dan Curtis Johnson that's collected as Batman: Snow.  The story focuses on two important events: Batman's first foray into working with sidekicks, and the origin of Mr. Freeze.  Much like the much maligned movie, Batman and Robin, the author chooses to borrow Freeze's origin from The Animated Series (the episode, Heart Of Ice, won one of the series's two Emmys).

The Freeze origin is the most tragic of the villain origins in Batman's rogues gallery.  But this story intersects with the fascinating story of Batman assembling a team of experts to help him fight crime.  After Jim Gordon declines to assist Batman on an investigation, he recruits an awkward technology expert, an unsatisfied FBI investigator, a journalist famous for profiling criminals, and two rehabilitated criminals to serve as the brawn.

His strategy to get the team to bond is to turn them against him, which is a terrible strategy utilized by angry middled aged losers guilted into coaching Little League Teams, and antagonistic old men.  It is sort of working when Mr. Freeze (sans terrible puns about the cold) gets involved.  By the end of the issue the team has decided to disassociate with Batman (but hint that they may continue on their own), and Batman tells Alfred he is thinking of trying another strategy.  On his kitchen table is a newspaper mentioning a circus featuring The Flying Graysons.  The Robin is coming soon teaser is used in several different books, including Year One, and The Long Halloween.  The way I choose to fit it into chronology is that he misses the circus when it comes to town during Year One, but that this story, as well as Rules Of Engagement and Venom, coincides with The Long Halloween.  There are several references in each of the stories about working with Harvey Dent (who doesn't actually get any face time, just gets his name dropped), who is a major player in The Long Halloween, after which, well, he doesn't work with Batman anymore.

Story: 4/5, Art 5/5

One of my friends majored in Media Studies. His homework included watching as much popular television as he could find time for and study how it worked its way into the lexicon. He already had experience with a lot of the shows that make up today's established pop culture: Lost, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Futurama, The Office, Scrubs, American Gladiators 2007. But, surprisingly, he had no experience with Buffy/Angel or Doctor Who.

That's not entirely true, he'd seen parts of a few Buffy episodes when we were roommates. He'd scoffed at scenes that he had no context for, and after a few months, he treated walking into the room while I was watching Buffy with the horror most people would reserve for walking in on their grandmother naked with a jar of banana marmalade and an underage squirrel monkey.

Two years later, he would call me to discuss the finer points of season six, and how much he appreciated Jonathan's story arc.

When he realized it was time to tackle Doctor Who, he didn't just pick up with Christopher Eccleston, he went all the way back to the pilot episode and watched the entire series. When discussing the Russel T Davies era Dr. Who, he talked about how, whenever there was an event, Mr. Davies "throws a lot of Daleks at the plot until it cowers in fear at the corner of the episode".

A lot of lesser comic writers, when they are asked to helm an event "throw a lot of Daleks at the plot." Super-villain team ups are generally a nifty idea that doesn't pan out. Villains don't work well together, they're villains. And often their schemes cross purposes.

In The Long Halloween, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale manage to include a majority of the major villains in the Batman pantheon without making them feel superfluous.

It helps that the costumed villains aren't the focus of the book, rather this is a return to the crime families from Frank Miller's Year One. The story opens at a wedding ceremony for one of the members of the Falcone family. Bruce Wayne has been invited, in hopes that he will help them in their quest to be financially supported by Gotham City Bank, which Bruce is a trustee for.

He declines.

Meanwhile nosey district attorney, Harvey Dent, is in the event's parking garage taking down license plate numbers. He gets jumped by Falcone's men.

Later on in the evening Batman interrupts Catwoman breaking into Falcone's safe while Harvey Dent and Jim Gordon discuss their differing methods in gathering evidence.

A lot of what makes The Long Halloween work as a story is that it's one of the few modern era Batman stories that's actually a self-contained mystery. In 2010, Grant Morrison has been writing Batman and Detective as a long running mystery but it, if not requires, is greatly assisted by knowing all seventy years of Batman continuity. The Long Halloween requires only that you read The Long Halloween. Tim Sale litters the book with clues that you can piece together to solve the core mystery: Who is Holiday?

At the end of the first chapter, two members of The Falcone family are killed by an unseen assassin. Harvey Dent is also targeted, and he and his wife are believed dead.

Chapter two throws Solomon Grundy (born on a Monday) into the mix, and a whole nother mess of Falcone men are slaughtered at a Thanksgiving dinner.

The third issue focuses on an insanely jealous Joker who feels that Holiday is stealing his spotlight, and he pursues Holiday's identity as vigorously as Batman, Gordon, and Dent (albeit with very different methods). And while Batman is foiling Joker's New Year's Eve Massacre plans, Falcone's own son is murdered by Holiday.

The fourth chapter opens with Gordon and Dent going after their prime suspect in the Holiday case: Bruce Wayne. There's an excellent scene where the two of them are turned away by a deftly devious Alfred who politely inquires as to whether they've remembered to get their wives Valentine's Day presents. Holiday wreaks absolute havok on Falcone's business while Poison Ivy gets thrown into the mix.

Ivy has had a tryst or two with Batman before, but this time she's targeting Bruce Wayne for the Falcones. Their plot is foiled when Catwoman comes to Bruce's rescue.

Catwoman's dubious relationship with Batman (mirrored by Selina Kyle's relationship with Bruce Wayne) is one of the intricacies that makes this story work. This isn't just a hodgepodge of villains gathered to take down Batman. Villains are working purely for their own selfish reasons, they just happen to occasionally overlap.  The exchanges between The Scarecrow and The Mad Hatter that take place in chapters nine and  ten, where The Scarecrow speaks only in nursery rhyme, and The Mad Hatter speaks only in Lewis Carrol verse are fantastic.

By the time we get to chapter eleven, Roman Holiday, we've seen The Riddler, The Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, and The Calendar Man join the fray. More Falcones keep dying, and both Batman and The Riddler are forced to throw out theory after theory as to who Hoilday is. After his own father is killed, Sal Maroni, Falcone's chief rival turns himself in to Harvey Dent under the ruse of bringing down Falcone. But when it comes to give his testimony he throws acid at Dent's face, and, voila, we have the origin of Two Face.

Two Face rounds up all the villains from the story (plus The Penguin) to confront, and ultimately kill Falcone, thereby ending the old school mob rule in Gotham, and bring forth an age of super villains.

In the end we have a couple of surprise reveals regarding Holiday. Both of them much cooler than the usual suspects (sorry Grant Morrison fans, it's not The Joker). Often when you get a last chapter reveal it's either glaringly obvious or else it contradicts an important aspect of a character. Both reveals regarding Holiday caught me by surprise the first time I read the book, despite one of them being telegraphed by both Loeb's dialog and several panel clues by Tim Sale.

The art in any Batman story is as important a character as any villain. Whether it's Miller's television paneled layouts in The Dark Knight Returns or Dave McKean's creepily shadowed Arkham Asylum. Gregory Wright's muted colors are a key player in The Long Halloween. Apart from some vibrant reds when The Joker is involved, the art is intentionally flat, and occasionally just grays. Whenever I see the art from this book I think of Boyz II Men videos. Their director always tweaked the colors, sometimes washing out their bright red suit jackets, other times shooting in black and white, and then coloring in blue jeans.

I doubt it's an intentional metaphor, but the lack of backgrounds throughout most of the panels really drew me into the action. Sometimes a busy background distracts me from the story as my eyes vacuum in all the extraneous details. Everything Sale has drawn into this story is purposeful. It provides the perfect pacing for Loeb's story.

There isn't really a flaw anywhere in this collection. The only drawback to it from the perspective of putting together this Bat-chronology, is that it's a year long story. Each chapter taking place on a holiday (Halloween bookending the year). A lot of the books that will follow take place during The Long Halloween. Were I attempting the absolutely insane project of trying to do the chronology by issues instead of trades, I would space this collection out amongst some of the other stories.

　

Story 5/5, Art 5/5

It's been teased at the end of several collections.  Ads for The Flying Graysons in newspapers, Circus billboards, Bruce discussing taking dates to the circus.  Finally, in Dark Victory, Dick Grayson debuts.  But, uh, not just yet.

The volume opens with the new DA (who replaces Harvey "Don't Call Me Harvey Anymore I'm Two Face Now" Dent) catching us up with one of the villains from The Long Halloween (which was also created by Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale, and Gregory Wright): Holiday.  The crux of this story is the rise and fall of the next generation of Maronis and Falcones, Carmine Falcone and Sal Maroni having been killed during The Long Halloween.  Carmine's daughter, Sofia, who was paralyzed after plunging out of a building makes a deal with Sal's sons to go after Harvey Dent.

The plan is to cause chaos at Arkham Asylum by freeing assorted villains, including Solomon Grundy (born on a Monday), Calendar Man, and Poison Ivy.  Holiday, Alberto Falcone, chooses to stay behind, earning him an early release with the help of the new DA.  But during the madness, instead of killing Two Face, they allow him to escape.

The main theme of this book is improving reputations.  Mario Falcone returns from Italy to try and clean up his family business, going as far as locking out Sofia when he learns of her criminal plans.  Jim Gordon tries to get back together with his wife Barbara who left him and took custody of his children.  Bruce Wayne tries to establish a solid romantic relationship with Selina Kyle.  Catwoman tries to earn Batman's trust.  And Two Face tries to clear his name when a new serial killer, The Hangman tries to improve The Gotham City Police Department's reputation by killing a corrupt cop on every major holiday.

Once again, Loeb and Sale throw in pretty much every major villain that's been introduced: the Joker, The Penguin, Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze, The Mad Hatter, and The Scarecrow all end up in the mix.  But, as in The Long Halloween, their individual motives flow logically into the story.

In the midst of the story, Bruce finally ends up at the much teased circus, and watches as The Flying Graysons plummet to their deaths when a Maroni underling named Anthony Zucco frays the wires for their trapeze act. 

Bruce Wayne adopts Dick Grayson, but it's Batman who sees Grayson outside one night, prowling for clues.  Batman and Grayson run into each other again when Grayson goes to the circus to research his parents' killer.  The boy is badly beaten, and Batman takes him to the Batcave to care for him, and reveals that Batman and Bruce Wayne are the same person.

I don't want to ruin the end of this for you.  Yes, you do get to see Grayson don the original, short pants Robin outfit.  You also get a great wrap up of a storyline that began with Year One.  but there are still some loose ends, including the fact that Two Face is still missing.

I can't stress enough that Sale's pencils and inks, and Wright's colors are an integral part of Loeb's script.  The combination of visual narrative and dialog is what takes the Loeb/Sale/Wright trilogy from great Batman story to Classic Work Of Art.

Story 5/5, Art 5/5


Chuck Dixon picks up the dangling threads from Dark Victory for Robin: Year One.  We get to see how Robin is perceived by a befuddled Jim Gordon, an ambivalent Batman, a loyal Alfred, and the angry criminals of Gotham.  There's honor in being taken down by the Dark Knight, but a little kid in pixie boots, short pants, and a yellow cape?  That's gotta hurt.


After busting some small time criminals, Robin finds himself entwined with The Mad Hatter's scheme to kidnap and brainwash some young girls (his usual M.O.) and sell them to a diplomat named The Generalissimo.  In a startling development for a Batman story, it turns out Robin knows one of the victims from school (Jenny Noblesse), and she has a crush on him.

Robin ends up saving the day with some help from bumbling millionaire Bruce Wayne, who happens to be on The Generalissimo's yacht for a cruise. 

The next villain up to be taken down by The Boy Wonder is The Killer Moth, whose story takes up a whopping seven pages before Robin takes him down.  There's also a three page battle with Blockbuster (who will end up being one of Dick Grayson's major villains years later) before we get to the main villain in the story: Two Face, who's been on the run since the end of Dark Victory.

Two Face has decided that the easiest way to bring down Batman is to take out his new sidekick. He also decides to enact revenge on the judge who presided over his trial during The Long Halloween.  While Batman and Robin are on the case, Jim Gordon expresses his concern that Batman has taken on such a young sidekick.  And when Two-Face later tells Gordon that he's killed Robin (Spoiler alert: he hasn't.  After taking a beating, Batman takes him to Leslie Thompkins's clinic to heal.), Gordon convinces Batman to retire him.  Grayson isn't too keen on retiring from being Robin (poor kid got forty years in pre-Crisis continuity, and he's barely five comic issues into being Robin in modern continuity, and he's already being let go), and when Mr. Freeze steals the blood supply from the hospital where Grayson is being rehabilitated, he throws on his mask (but not the rest of the outfit) and goes out to take Mr. Freeze down.

Once Grayson foils the Freeze plot, he sees a TV report that Two Face has escaped from police custody, and debates how to handle it when he's jumped by a group of junior assassins run by one of Ra's Al Ghul's assassins, Shrike.  Grayson decides to infiltrate the gang to get back on Batman's good sign, as well as learn new fighting techniques.  After a successful mission to determine Robin's loyalty, the junior assassins are sent to kill Two Face.  Given the opportunity, Robin opts to let Two Face live, and ends up battling Shrike, who falls on his sword and dies.  During the battle, Two Face escapes. 

One of the details Dixon works into this collection is the relationship between Alfred and Grayson.  Alfred taking care of Bruce after his parents died was noble, but could be attributed to his loyalty to the Wayne family.  There are a couple of occasions in Robin Year One, and will be many more in the future where Alfred puts Grayson's health and feelings over his loyalty to Bruce.  Dixon will revisit the importance of this relationship several times in the Robin ongoing series, and even Nightwing.

Story 5/5, Art 4/5

I've never been a fan of Superman stories.  There's something about the silver age goofiness that no one notices it's just Clark Kent with his glasses off that never sits well with me.  He's also too powerful.  And, I'm still baffled by how the most powerful superhero in the DC universe was killed in a seven issue fistfight with a villain who, at the time, had no back story.  One of the few times Superman interests me is when he's shown in the context of other heroes, particularly Batman.

If there is a modern era retelling of the first meeting of Batman and Superman collected in trades, I haven't read it yet.  But Trinity by Matt Wagner (not to be confused with the Kurt Busiek weekly series from 2009) not only gives us a great Superman and Batman interaction, it also serves as an introduction to Wonder Woman, another character who I only enjoy amongst other heroes.  Her inclusion in this story gives us an outsider's view to the odd relationship between Batman and Superman.

In the Golden and Silver Ages, DC continuity had established their two main heroes as best buddies who played sports together and never had more than the occasional mild dispute.  In 1986, Frank Miller changed all that with The Dark Knight Returns (which, for this chronological project, is considered an Elseworld tale), and John Byrne made it canon with The Man Of Steel.

This story presents us with bumbling Clark Kent missing his train to work.  When the conductor of the train he missed is shot by a sharpshooter, Clark goes all Superman and rescues the train, but doesn't have time to go after the men who caused this act of terror.  Luckily for him, Bruce Wayne was in town, and Batman hogtied the criminals for the police.

The terrorist group is called Purge, and is run by Ra's Al Ghul.  Ra's is an immortal eco-terrorist whose schemes usually involve purging the Earth of humanity.  This time he frees Bizarro, a Superman clone with severe mental limitations, and uses him to obtain a cache of nuclear missiles from a Russian Submarine. He also hires an Amazonian assassin named Diana to train members of The Purge.

During Bizarro's mission, he accidentally releases one of the non-nuclear missiles near the island of Themyscira, home to a sect of Amazon warriors.  The sect believes Superman to be responsible, and sends Wonder Woman to Metropolis to investigate.

Wagner fills this book with a bunch of plot misdirects.  The young Amazon punk named Diana turns out to not be Wonder Woman, and then he sets up an obvious battle between Wonder Woman and Superman over identity confusion, only to have Wonder Woman act very sensibly and work everything out on her own.

It's Batman who causes friction by roughly interrogating a member of The Purge, despite Wonder Woman aiding him with her Lasso Of Truth.  The relationships between the three characters for the rest of the book is fantastic.  Wagner plays them off each other flawlessly, giving them a depth I haven't seen in any other book.  We get to see all three of them exceed the call of duty in their own way.  Each of them adheres to their morals, and apart from their first meeting, and after an unfortunate dip in a Lazarus Pit for Wonder Woman, the three do so without bickering.

As with Batman And The Monster Men, and Batman And The Mad Monk, Wagner pulls double duty as writer and artist.  And with the exception of one oddly sketch-faced panel of Ra's Al Ghul, the book is gorgeous.  Wagner is really up there with Tim Sale as one of my favorite Batman artists.

The story also features a few little cameos, including Dick Grayson as Robin, and this chronology's debut of Aquaman.  We really get to see the DC Universe starting to take shape outside of Gotham, without having to go too in-depth to the other characters.

JLA Year One by Mark Waid comes right after this on my bookshelf.  There's not a lot of Batman in it, so I won't be including it on this website, but this story is in some ways a precursor to it.  And it's a decent read.

As for Wagner's Trinity, it should be no surprise that I give it

Story 5/5, Art 5/5

There's something nearly poetic about how many of the books that portray Batman as being a bad guy are, themselves, terrible.  I lumped Batman Deadman and Teen Titans Year One together mostly to get them out of the way. 

Batman Deadman is by James Robinson, who has done a lot of work for DC, and is best known for Starman.  While I highly recommend the Starman series (currently being released in omnibus hardcovers), none of his mainstream character work really stands out to me as good.  So, while I read this blind for the first few pages, I quickly flipped to the cover to see who was killing my post-Trinity Batman buzz and was not surprised to see Robinson's name on the cover.

Robinson's writing, like Grant Morrison's, tends to stray from typical stories.  And while I applaud him for that initiative, I don't tend to connect with his characters.  And if I don't feel something for the characters, no amount of interesting plot concepts is going to win me over.

What did win me over was John Estes's art, which looks like early 90s Vertigo, if it were made using colored pencils and watercolors.  The details in the background and props make up for the, at best, mediocre dialog.

The basic premise of the story is that while pursuing The Joker, Batman seems to black out and when he wakes up, he is believed to have killed police officers, and is holding an innocent woman at knife point. The story descends into magic and possession and demons, which are not my favorite aspects of comics.

Most of the focus on this book is on characters involved with Deadman, although we do have some Alfred and Jim Gordon moments.

(a biased against possession) Story: 2/5, Art: 5/5

While the two stories aren't supposed to be intertwined, and have two different demons, possession of Batman, and other members of the JLA is also at the core of Amy Wolfram's Teen: Titans Year One.  This time we see Batman's possession through the eyes of Robin.  Batman is behaving as though he was in Frank Miller's All Star Batman And Robin, but with less rat eating and cursing.

Batman isn't the only one behaving strangely, though.  The entire JLA is possessed by a demon called Antithesis. Robin rounds up a few of his sidekick friends in order to discover why the heroes are behaving strangely. So this collection features the chronological debut of Kid Flash, Aqua Lad, Speedy, and Wonder Girl.

This collection is intended for children, and so the voice of the characters is skewed from how they're written in other books.  But The Teen Titans are an important part of the Batman mythos, so I felt their origin story needed to be included.  It's cartoony style is a little out of place in the chronology, but as the debut of the sidekicks as heroes, it's brightness in both art and storytelling can be seen as metaphorical.  And it makes what happens to the team down the line seem all the darker.

Story: 3/5, Art: 4/5

I'm going to add Full Circle to this entry, though it doesn't contain a possessed Batman, but it does continue the theme of characters written in an odd voice.  Batman Full Circle features a very silver-agey Dick Grayson as Robin.  Lots of cheesy one liners, and the classic Batman benches Robin storyline.  Much like the book that this is a direct sequel to, Fear The Reaper, this book has a lot of tropes, and suffers because the tropes are not used as well as they are in other collections.

The concept behind this story is the next generation of the families from Fear The Reaper.  Joe Chill's son and grandson, Rachel Caspian's relationship to The Reaper, and, of course, Batman and Robin.  We also have another appearance by Leslie Thompkins, and your requisite hookers and nuns.

Todd Mcfarlane drew this book, and it's not his best work.  He seems not to know quite how to draw The Reaper.  His proportions linger somewhere on the border of inconsistent and awful.  And Batman and Robin look too golden agey when presented against the designs of the other characters.

Story: 2/5, Art: 2/5

The Full Circle Story is also included in the Year Two: Fear The Reaper Trade.  I would say "I wouldn't waste my money buying this collection on its own." but clearly I not only would, but did.