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.

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

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