Bargains. Bargains. Bargains. (Comics Edition)

well, dunno if he retouched the art for the library versions but it's more than fine from book 1 panel 1 imo

dug out the Deadlines and they reprinted Death of Speedy and 93 Million Miles from the Sun, probably a bit more.

He was always good, he just gets better!

lots of cheap DC graphic novels via Kindle at the mo. cheap enough for me to buy another copy of Arkham Asylum rather than digging through boxes to find the copy i already have. (mostly < £2). pity the website's such a shed.

I've just bought an absolute ton of DC books on that sale, and have to stop because I know I'll never get around to them all!

I'm sorta curious about those long Scott Snyder and Tom King Batman runs (maybe Tynion too), which I've barely read any of. Are they worth it?

i think they were ultimately both solid runs. the Synder one went one maybe a bit too long and the King one got cut off a little early and they both sort of have post-run coda series (Last Knight on Earth for Synder, Batman/Catwoman for King)

Tynion's is OK, not amazing but fine. if you get do his, you should start with his Detective Comics Rebirth run first

there isn't really much connection actually, when it comes to plot - more like vibe, '90s Batman family

ends 02 jan, i think, but not sure if that's midnight tonight or midnight tomorrow. but i can't think of new things to pick up so it might just be digital versions of loeg stuff, say, that i already have.

I went ahead and got a few volumes of all three, let's see how it goes. I wanted to give them a read as I was thinking about recent, self-contained Bat-comics I liked (Batman Universe, Catwoman Lonely City and Arkham: Order of the World) and realised I hadn't read an actual Batman run in quite some time.

It's kinda weird how selective DC can be in the older material they release digitally. I checked two recent-ish Omnibus editions of the 90s Kelley Jones Batman run and found that there was a digital version of the second volume....but not the first?!

haven't read Order of the World but i don't think you'll regret those first two, like 'em both, esp. Lonely City

am getting errors trying to download loeg Vol 2 (i am using deliberately old version of the Kindle-for-pc app though so maybe that's the problem)

What are some good Batman runs for fans of the classic Frank Miller stuff (especially Year One), Arkham Asylum, Killing Joke, etc? I’m also ok with the New Frontier approach. I don’t like Kelley Jones Bat stuff.

I’m getting back into Super Hero stuff a little but most of it is so bad! I really don’t know where to start. When I was a kid I mainly stuck to mutant comics but I’m not interested in that at all now. At the Barnes and Noble half price hardcover sale I bought Killing Joke deluxe, Alex Ross’s Full Circle and New Frontier.

I expected to like the Fantastic Four book a lot more, but the art is a drag. Ross is totally a cover/poster guy. The art is too ON to gel with the story, it is distracting.

I had a copy of Killing Joke when I was a kid; the new edition is pretty nice. I actually like the recoloring for once. The story is crueler and thinner than I remembered but it still holds up. Was this the first time the Joker went really dark? The art is amazing, what else should I check out by Bolland?

New Frontier is good for what it is.

I also read the Miracle Man omnibus which I don’t know what to think of. I need to read it again because it swerves a lot. Alan Davis and Totleben are great, Veitch is terrible. It mirrors Swamp Thing, but it’s denser.

I’m getting back into Super Hero stuff a little but most of it is so bad!

I have read them, Nhex! What I meant was that they were self-contained stories, as opposed to extended runs.

Cow Art I recommend some Legends of the Dark Knight stories - Faces and Blades are my two favourites, and Prey is still one of the best year one era stories IMO. Morrison's Gothic is also worth a look, flawed though it is.

Aside from the books you listed, the other established "classic" is The Long Halloween. It's pretty good, but I think it has its status due to being a quick and accessible read with nice art and a whole bunch of well-known characters. The "mystery" is pretty superficial though, and I think Two-Face's origin has been done better elsewhere.

oh, i hated The Long Halloween! the halloween one-shots that proceeded it* were great but TLH itself felt drawn out (was also expensive because of the format (stiffer covers but fewer pages) and was probably more per issue than the digital version is now. so maybe that'll help)

(* Batman: Madness, Batman: Ghosts)

Legends of the Dark Knight might secretly be the best pound for pound bat book

I find it kinda hard to recommend extended Batman runs because they’ve been collected in odd ways sometimes (e.g. collections based on the artist) or are often interrupted by crossovers. For example the Rucka and Brubaker stories after No Man’s Land are really good, but then they get kinda waylaid by the whole Murderer/Fugitive thing.

My two personal favourites are Alan Grant with Norm Breyfogle in the late 80s and early 90s, and Paul Dini in the mid to late 00s. Steve Englehart, Mike W Barr (w/Alan Davis) and Peter Milligan all had great runs but they’re really short.

xpost Think you may be right! LOTDK had some great artist-writer teams.

I guess they've reused that title for various trade paperbacks? When I search for it I get all kinds of stuff that doesn't seem to relate to the original series. There's one out of print trade that I think collects some of the original stories but it has Bat-Mite on the cover so I'm dubious.

Yeah, LotDK was given as a title to some creator-themed collections, nothing to do with the series.

I think I know the old trade you’re referring to, that does have a silly Bat-mite story but it also has Blades, and a nicely rendered Poison Ivy story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_Legends_of_the_Dark_Knight

Can recommend:

Shaman (#1–5)
By Dennis O'Neil, Ed Hannigan, and John Beatty

Gothic (#6–10)
By Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson

Prey (#11–15)
By Doug Moench, Paul Gulacy, and Terry Austin

Venom (#16–20)
By Dennis O'Neil, Russell Braun, Trevor Von Eeden, and José Luis García-López

Flyer (#24–26)
By Howard Chaykin and Gil Kane

Destroyer (Part 2 of 3) (#27)
By Dennis O'Neil, Chris Sprouse, and Bruce Patterson

Faces (#28–30)
By Matt Wagner

Blades (#32–34)
By James Robinson and Tim Sale

Destiny (#35–36)
By Bo Hampton and Mark Kneece

Legend of the Dark Mite (#38)
By Alan Grant and Kevin O'Neill
This is okay!

Mask (#39–40)
By Bryan Talbot

Hothouse (#42–43)
By John Francis Moore and P. Craig Russell

Heat (#46–49)

Images (#50)
By Dennis O'Neil and Bret Blevins

Sanctum (#54)
By Dan Raspler and Mike Mignola

Engines (#74–75)
By Ted McKeever

Sleeping (#76–78)
By Scott Hampton

Infected (#83–84)
By Warren Ellis and John McCrea

Citadel (#85)
By James Robinson and Tony Salmons

Stories (#94)
By Michael T. Gilbert

Choices (#100)
By Dennis O'Neil and Dave Taylor

The Incredible Adventures of Batman (#101)
By John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

Spook (#102–104)
By James Robinson and Paul Johnson

Auteurism (#162–163)
By John Arcudi and Roger Langridge

Urban Legend (#168)
By Bill Willingham and Tom Fowler

Testament (#172–176)
By John Wagner and Chris Brunner

The Secret City (#180–181)
By Dylan Horrocks, Ramon Bachs, and Jon Holdredge

Snow (#192–196)
By J. H. Williams III, Dan Curtis Johnson, and Seth Fisher

Emergency (#200)
By Eddie Campbell, Daren White, and Bart Sears

there's a Chris bachalo issue as well (#64, £33!)

i have the first so many of those but i was buying them and not reading them. am missing the odd issue of later sets and then stopped completely. i should go back and read them all, fill in gaps with digital copies.

(£3 on eBay)

just found a pile of them. about 80 of them at a guess and nothing after 109 so unless there's another pile elsewhere i have a lot of holes

One or two forgettable stories aside, the first 50 issues of LotDK are pretty great the whole way through.

Any opinions on Going Sane by DeMattis and Staton? It’s a bit divisive but I really like it. I can understand why some people find the story a little hard to swallow though!

Talbot expanded Mask slightly for a best-of TPB — I wonder if the digital single issues include those revisions

Snow is great. Seth Fisher was gonna be a star.

I love those Mignola, Russell and Tony Salmons issues. Salmons was a beast.

I think I stopped reading after Mask — does anyone have a “if you had to choose one or two” pick from the stories that came after that?

It’s a shame they ditched the initial idea of every story being five issues long as it made some of the subsequent stories seem less special, like filler issues from the other titles (which they probably were).

My initial memory was feeling quite adult for enjoying the initial artybats stories, Shaman and Gothic. And then I have a specific memory of someone in my school snatching an issue of Prey from me, then passing it around to the other kids who made “phwooor” type noises at Gulacy’s drawings of Catwoman (fair enough when you’re twelve I guess).

What a weird writer Doug Moench was at the time: Prey and Red Rain were excellent and thoughtful, while at the same time he was doing strained DeMatteis parodies in Mister Miracle… and Knightfall was total bollocks.

Matt Wagner's re-imaging of couple early Batman stories collected as "Batman and the Mad Monk" and "Batman and the Monster Men" are good reads.

Batman "Year 100" by Paul Pope is a good read.

There are a bunch of Legends of the Dark Knight worth reading. That last issue one shot about Deadshot I always really liked.

You could look at Going Sane by DeMatteis and Joe Staton. Good read, though it's a bit divisive as some find the central idea ridiculous. Hothouse and Sanctum are really good.

Moench must have written more Batman issues than just about anyone. Prey is great. I haven't read enough of his 80s run to judge. Some of Knightfall, and the stuff leading up to it, was OK. I like his 90s run with Kelley Jones - the stories aren't always necessarily great, but it has a consistent solo-dark knight focus and stands apart from the other books of the time, with their shocking big event crossovers and ever-expanding Batfamily (and, you know, Chuck Dixon).

It’s a shame they ditched the initial idea of every story being five issues long as it made some of the subsequent stories seem less special, like filler issues from the other titles (which they probably were).

Absolutely not. Letting the stories be the length that suited them, instead of drawn out for three issues of filler, made them far more worthwhile.

(Was Goodwin the editor of the whole bat-line? Even if so, the set-in-the-past nature of most of the material was a boon to standaloneitude, and probably not imposed after the fact on inventory.)

I think I stopped reading after Mask — does anyone have a “if you had to choose one or two” pick from the stories that came after that?

forks' list is a good guide if you're interested in one or two of the creators on it imo! esp his specific recommendation for Snow.

Was Goodwin the editor of the whole bat-line?

No, just Legends. Denny O’Neil was editor of the Bat books post-crisis up to the early 00s.

Ta, thought so. Any inventory / filler would have a tell-tale co-editor credit, then.

not really been keeping up with this since they broke comixology, but there's a huge sale on DC at amazon at the moment

and google play books generally echoes amazon sales and, lo, the thing that caught my eye (2021 swamp thing) was indeed cheap there too. not as cheap (about 20% more than the £1.99). turns out they are adobe-protected pdfs and the usual methods will also remove the drm from those.

(although if amz thinks i'm going to look through 1200+ books on a single infinite scrolling page, loading 16 at a time, they can jog on)

Google Play sometimes makes comics not downloadable, can only read from the cloud, but doesn't let you know beforehand that this is what they're doing with certain books. Very fucking irritating.

useful to know, thanks. i did screencap and then stitch together an entire issue of something (loeg?) when amz did the same but it's a pain with long books

i notice they have the two books that make up the whole of the tefe-led series (vol 3?) which I've never read so i might buy some more.

oh, 'about book' does list exportability towards the bottom, and for those two it is 'not available'

Ah, never spotted that

it does raise the question of what you're meant to do with unexportable books. is it only app / web viewer? is the app a replacement for comixology or does it struggle with, say, double page spreads (the ST i bought has a bunch)

audiobooks, bubble zoom, google assistant, google drive... i need none of these things

Tempted by swamp thing but whenever I try to read Volume 1 I get stuck on the verbose captions. It’s worse than Claremont! Is there a better story I can skip forward to? I know the basic character setup.

the classic alan moore run is volume 2 issue 21*-64. there are collections that cover this. but he does kinda emulate the verbosity, at least at first.

(* technically he starts at issue 20, but it's really just wrapping up the existing storyline ad typically)

the short len wein series from 2016 also a highpoint. he's the original writer, the one you didn't like, but the kelley jones pencils are great.

so
Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book One - Book Six collects moore's run and the first 5 are in the sale. (this does actually include #20)

and
Swamp Thing (2016) (subtitled "The Dead Don't Sleep") currently £3.60

Alan Moore ST is wordy but good wordy. I like the Len stuff but it does blabber a lot. For a while he makes a point of writing “A MONSTROUS MAN OF MUCK!” in every issue.

another comixology DC sale (halloween this time), another swamp thing volume purchased.

hard keeping these straight, not least because all the collected editions are volume n, when the various different reboots are all themselves mostly volume n ('72- was vol 1, '82-'96 is vol 2, 2000-1 is vol 3...). today's purchases were 28-40 of volume 5, 2011 onwards, but volumes 6 and 7 of that run. and £4 for the two.