Batman KnightFall

Apparently they never collected the issues that deal with those things, which it weren't proper Batman issues anyway. This should be informative.

thanks!
why the hell didn't they collect these? were they, y'know, really bad or something?

I have no idea. Maybe just not as exciting as the main story, or not about Batman proper? Considering the immense amount of other things they've collected though, it is weird. I guess I never noticed since I only read the first volume of Knightfall.

I actually read a novelization of pretty much the entire arc (from Bane to Azrael), and according to my memories as a ~14 year old, it was pretty good, though when I checked out one of the actual issues, BLARGH.

Vol. 1 goes directly into Vol. 2, but Vol. 2 ends with Bruce Wayne in a wheelchair off to some island to investigate the disappearance of Jack Drake and the doctor, and Azrael updating the batsuit and whooping Bane.
Vol. 3 picks up with Bruce walking, going to Lady Shiva for training, and Alfred has quit. Bane has started killing and Nightwing still has the worst hair in all comics. Even worse than when Superman had long hair.
I know that this era was notorious for really, really terrible stories in superhero comics (the early-90s heyday of multiple covers, foil covers and over-the-top "realism/grit"), so it wouldn't surprise me if those stories were ass. But cripes, a bit of synopsis to link up what transpired between vols. 2 and 3 woulda been the decent thing to do!

Anyway, thanks for your help.

The novelization: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553572601/104-3138305-9211960?v=glance

Check out the cust. review on the page, it seems like it offers a rundown of the issues that are part of the Knight Quest/Knight Fall arcs.

Here's Prodigal, the Dick-as-Batman storyline -- apparently it wasn't collected as part of the Knight* mega-arc proper, although I'm not sure why. (I read it in issues culled from the quarter bin, so maybe it didn't take place immediately after Knightfall/Knight's End/Knight Shift the way I thought it did?)

The nice bit of Prodigal: Gordon realizing that the guy in the suit is neither the original nor the asshole temporary replacement.

god, that fucking hair.

I remember thinking that Azrael's cybered-up/Predator batsuit was pretty cool when those issues came out. I was also, what, 12?

Anyone ever read the No Man's Land or the Bruce Wayne: Fugitive collections? I always see them (probably because there's like a million volumes), and if Rucka's involved it can't be that bad.

After feeling a little burned by the KnightFall series of trades, I'm a little hestitant to get into other multi-volume storylines.
THough there was some No Man's Land content in the Nightwing trade I got from the library last week.
I've also been thinking about the Superman: Our Worlds At World books.

I read a couple issues of the NML plot, and they weren't bad, but in general the mega-arc "five issues a month and here's an extra issue of Secret Origins while we're at it, and ugly trade dress, and the story will end up feeling disjointed because it was plotted by committee but written round-robin, and basically even though it'll take seven months and 40 issues to unfold, only a fourth of that at best will be any good and in the meantime there will be like this miniseries at Marvel you won't be able to afford to pick up, not to mention going to see that movie on Friday unless you want to skip the popcorn, and what, you're going to buy a special No Man's Land box to keep them in, or are you also going to buy the trades when they come out and end up with a Batman mega-arc shelf on the bookcase next to Cerebus and your old third edition Gamma World supplements" trend pissed me off.

yeah. I pretty much blew my monthly comics budget on the KnightFall trades, like $75 (canadian). And I still need to read more Daredevil. And it's only the 10th.

Bruce Wayne: Murderer (that sets up Fugitive) is probably the best out of the 3 volume set. Mostly top writers involved -- from what I can remember, the Fugitive-proper trades were anti-climactic.

NML starts HORRIBLY. The writers were simply terrible, I remember distinctly that one guy who tried to write this NRA-type wingnut cop and ended up having him emasculating/showing up Jim Gordon. But then people with half a brain stepped in, and there's one particularly cool Rucka moment. Not worth it though, in the end, to put up with all the ridiculousness, and I read library copies.

xpost

Haha...yeah, I think I'm glad that Marvel and DC don't bother with too much in the way of continuity/interconnectedness anymore.

I dropped $75 at the comic book store like it was nothin' over the weekend. A small handful of singles, the next Queen & Country trade and Top 10 vol. 1 were the main things, but a present for the girlfriend and an impulse dvd put it over the top.

(x-post! Sort of surreal to write that on ILC).

The Murderer/Fugitive stuff comes out of NML though, right?

You know why I haven't spent anything like $75 on comics lately? Cause I had to buy a bunch of White Wolf stuff before the World of Darkness shut down on April 30th, that's why. I'm a geek with fingers in many pies.

Then again, somewhere in the NML mess is some nice Sienkiewicz art.

On the DD thing, I just read vol. 4 (the first arc that has the Bendis/Maleev team) and I was, yet again, underwhelmed -- a lot of confusing chronology play. Vols. 6 and 7 were hot stuff though.

xpost madness!

I've only read the Vol. 4 and didn't find the chronology too confusing, then again, I don't think I was paying that much attention to it, being glassy-eyed over the art.

The art gets better, mang! Maleev's doesn't use as thick a line to ink, but keeps up with the Mignola-esque blacks, to completely MAD and sexy results.

I have never been a Marvel Comics reader, but I have fallen for this Daredevil shiznit.

I have never read a single issue of Daredevil. I can sense the critical mass building though, I'll probably break down and buy one of those Bendis trades in a matter of months. In fact, y'all might as well get it out of the way and tell me which one to start with.

I started with Vol. 4 and knowing the basics about the character, didn't feel too far behind or anything.

Vol 1 = Kevin Smith penned. It's awful, unabashedly rips off Frank Miller's stories. Doesn't figure in to later arcs.
Vol 2 = writ and drawn by Mack, explains why Kingpin is in a certain way, but beyond that, it's mostly self-confined.
Vol 3 = drawn by Mack, writ by Bendis. One of those "personal" stories. Again, not anything to do with sustained arcs.
Vol. 4 = beginning of current team of Bendis and Maleev -- I actually read the 6th and 7th first and felt well brought up to speed, and I prefer the later ones by a lot. (Helps that there's a synopsis of prior arcs in the beginning of the trades.)

I liked the Kevin Smith one! His Green Arrow was better, as is Bendis's Daredevil, but still.

I'm overreacting to what I felt was a copout/ripoff ending re: K. Smith, but the setup was pretty gravy, I'll admit.

Okay, I can't argue that -- the setup's better than the ending with GA, too (and possibly everything else he's done...)

And I have to say, that if you can't already tell, I'm an unrepentant fan of Frank Miller.

As you should be! Miller is everything to Daredevil that diehard PAD fans say PAD is to Hulk: the guy who didn't create the character, but came along and defined him without redefining him the way an Ultimate or Elseworlds or Alex Ross Earth X thing might, making the best of what was there and finding the best stories to tell with it.

I hate the Kevin Smith stuff - its incredibly overwritten, almost Claremont-esque in that regard. And the final twist is terrible and has been used in a dozen Spiderman stories. But the art is nice enough...
The David Mack stuff is just self-indulgent drivel.
The Bendis/Maleev stuff, though, is great. I think when their entire run is complete people will look back on it as the equal of Miller's run. With Nocenti/Romits Jr just behind those two.

As for Knightfall - it was just a marketing ploy & an excuse to sell more comics to us dumb fans who actually love the characters, wasn't it?
Just like the Death of Superman, the Spider-Clone saga, the DD new costume etc etc etc at the same period.

God, don't bring up the Spider-Clone saga.

You know, reading the early issues of that -- I only bought and read it after the fact, to see what rac* was bitching about, such was my mentalism -- as well as the Death of Superman TPB (which I found the other day when my bookcase fell on me, and decided to flip through), reminded me of just how lame things had gotten in the respective books before those gimmicky plots. I mean, they were both lame stories, without a doubt (and both of them could have been done well), but I almost can't blame the editors for trying to stir up some attention.

I actually feel embarrassed for DC when I read the Death of Supes tpb and see long-haired Lex II, Maxima, Earthwynd&fyre or whatever the Martian Manhunter's fake name alter ego bullshit thing was, etc. It's like a tour of What The Fuck Were We Thinking land.

BLOODWYND!

Holy hell I actually read those JL stories (written by Superman writer / artiste dude Dan Jurgens) when I snagged a JL lot from eBay (for the Giffen / DeMatteis / Maguire stuff, natch), and they were 304 types of AWFUL, especially the big reveal re: Bloodwynd. And, um, everything else.

Dark days. Very dark days. Stuff's a LITTLE better nowadays. I think. Hope. Pray.

That's what I was expecting from the KnightFall stuff, but I think a lot of it is actually a reaction to that 90s bunk. We have this ultra-violent, hi-tech body-armour replacement-Batman, going off about how he reflects the modern era, and old-school Batman has to bring him down.
Of course, whenever Nightwing shows up with his ridiculous lion's mane, I just wanna puke. The ponytail isn't much better, except that sometimes it's hidden behind his head.

Both Lex II and Maxima were good ideas who outstayed their welcome, viz. i) 'son' of Lex who may be a good guy; ii) alien female Superman equivalent w/o the morality.

Bloodwynd was atrocious I'll grant you but that was a JL thing not a Superman thing - the Superman books before Death were feeling the strain from going weekly but basically still doing the same soapy stuff they'd been doing to excellent effect for the last 3 years since Byrne left. That run of Superman stories (Superman in Space / Intergang / Krisis Of The Krimson Kryptonite / Daily Planet layoffs / Eradicator / there was a good Braniac one in there somewhere / plus the whole romance-identity reveal thing) I remember with total fondness and would defend entirely.

Some of the Superman title stuff there is great, yeah -- Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite and Superman in Space especially. Lex II and Maxima only worked on paper, I think; the ideas themselves are not bad, but I don't think I ever saw them written well, and Lex II suffered additionally from his terrible hair and often terrible art.

But it's true, the Superman titles pre-Death were probably not as bad as the Death tpb makes them seem.

Do superheroes really need a party in the back?

More importantly, is anyone fooled by the business in the front?

One of the Eradicator storylines was really cool, where it started giving Supes a more Kryptonian mindframe and changed his costume to this awesome red and black jumpsuit and he was all hardass and Prof. Hamilton teleported him and the top of the Statue of Liberty to the moon.
And there was the great running gag about taxi fares in Metropolis. Okay, it wasn't great, but it at least sort of rewarded you for paying attention.

God, no, all those gimmick attention-grabbing stories make me feel ill just to recall them. They might have had some nice moments (but then they were all sprawling multi-parters, so the law of averages comes into play there) but taken as stories, they are all pretty uniformly bad. They made me give up on comics for a few years (in combination with Image, Valiant etc).

The strange thing is, I work with some comics fans a few years younger than me, and for them, the Image era is the golden age of comics. I am not joking. They think Spawn is a good character, think Mr Sinister is a great X-Men villain and Age of Apocalypse is the best X-Men story. they do not quite see what was so wrong about the clone saga. To them, it was just another Spiderman story. All this leaves me unspeakably depressed, obviously...

I think it's heartening though David - at the time, well just after the Image boom turned to bust, I thought that a generation of 'new fans' would have pretty much been turned off and it would only be old farts who thought Mark Waid/Grant Morrison (delete according to taste) was the shit that stuck around. Comics are kind of like pop music, i.e. "the golden age is when you were 12" and all that stuff, except the weight of the Unsurpassable Past has never QUITE managed to get as heavy as with pop (good thing) but the periodic reinventions are much rarer (bad thing).

That's slightly more moral relativism than I feel like applying to Rob Liefeld.

Comics were different from pop back then in that they could have died. Pop has a support structure: they're always playing it on the radio/in films/etc. Nothing really keeps comics in the public eye like that.

Now that I've typed that, I'm not certain I believe it. Marvel Comics was is astonishingly dire financial circumstances for years, but people kept buying the company on the grounds that hey, it's Marvel, how hard can it be to make a profit off Xmen/Avengers/FF etc?

I don't know what my point is.

Maybe your point is that as comic fans, we sort of take for granted that the big two will ALWAYS be there.

At this point, that's probably true -- but I used to take for granted that I could buy comics without going to a store dedicated to them, too.

(I don't know about in the UK -- or Canada -- but this hasn't been true in the States since the direct market boom; you can find some comics at the local drug store, grocery store, bookstore, newsstand, but not many, not everywhere, and not consistently.)

Yeah, all I ever see at the type of stores I started buying comics at nowadays are kiddie comics like Scooby-Doo and Archie.

Yeah, Archie has a deal with distributors, I forget all the details. Dan probably knows, it used to be brought up on rac* every other week.

Even at Borders here (chain bookstore), they have the Batman titles, the Superman titles, the Archies, and some X-Men sometimes, and that's it; that's not none, but it's sort of just perfunctory, and it's a rack by the roleplaying games instead of the magazine section -- and the Archies aren't anywhere near the kids' section, so it's not like this contributes much to new reader recruitment, I wouldn't think.

Yeah, I was actually wondering how the top-selling comics store titles you think of (Superman, Batman, X-Men, et al) compare saleswise to the ones you see on grocery store and book store racks: The Simpsons, Scooby-Doo, Archie, more I can't think of. I also see the Dark Horse Star Wars books everywhere too.

I was looking at my pretty cool comic collection (not really a collection in the trad sense, since it's mostly trades) last night and thinking how cool are my kids gonna think I am? Probably not very.

I think the biggest difference is probably the (apparent, anyway) lack of prestige format stuff and original graphic novels (some of those trickle down eventually) -- which is always weird, when the movie adaptations come out in their little squarebound dealies, but they're only carried in the comics stores. Those are the things you'd expect to be aimed at grabbing new folks.

(I'm not sure how universal my experiences in Indiana and New Orleans are, though.)

(I like how ILC is small enough that every thread can go off on tangents without it being that big a deal, but big enough for the tangents to happen.)

Cool. A tangent about tangents. Or a tangent about how cool ILC tangents are. Lets go!

Remember Tangent, with the female Joker and female Flash? ... uh, and female Green Lantern ... holy crap, we're back on board the S.S. Superia!

I SO want Superia to have an extra S, and imagine she was named after the Argento flick, and imagine that the entire "Some Like It Hot, Cap'n" enterprise isn't as woefully cheesy as it seems.

THis is probably as good a place as any to bring this up:

Is anybody following Batman: War Games?
I bought the War Drums trade a few weeks ago, and it's really good, but everytime I see all the titles I'd have to buy to follow the War Games story I just get tired.
Is Gotham Central the only Batbook being read by ILC?

I read (and enjoy) Birds of Prey, Catwoman, and GC. And might pick up Batman again once War Games loses at tic tac toe. The 12 Cent Adventure, though, didn't do anything to really pull me into what, at first blush promised to be an unnecessarily tedious cross-over event. The fact that the first Catwoman WG issue (Stage I, Part 7, or however they're doing the ordering) laid out the case that the 12 Cent Adventure should have tells me this event is going to pffffffffft in the end.

I'm told I would enjoy BoP, and am planning on picking it up once War Games simmers down. These giant arcs seem to do nothing but make me wait for the trades, and geez, I have $125 credit at my comic shop!

I am not reading any Batman comics.

In fact I think the bat-family is probably the biggest comics franchise I have never regularly bought anything from.

I read the 12 Cent Adventure, which was only worth 12 cents, and the first issue that Bill Willingham did on the main title, only because I like him. However, he wasn't even trying and it sucked ass. It feels kind of nice to be able to sit out this whole War Games thing and not wonder if I'm missing anything.

OMG War Drums/Games/Crimes is what got me into comics. litterally now I'm a 26 year old man witha savere comic addiction.

I totally didn't realize that Willingham wrote 12 cent adventure. (I'm a big fan of Shadow Pact/Day of Vengeance.

Best part of War Games, not that it wasn't good, was the mini's at the end of Batman that showed Poisen Ivy punishing Nigma fro his crimes in Hush. One of the best verbal beat downs you will ever see.

As for Dare Devil. I haven't made it through Guardian Devil and I have been told to avoid Mack's stories like the plague. But Bendis is the Shit. When I was first getting into comics I read an article in wizard commenting on Bendis's last three story lines. Golden Age, Decalogue, and The Murdock Papers. I was intrigued because I was not a reader and had no clue that Bendis had outed Daredevil, made him King Pin, and so forth. So I proceded to buy every Bendis Back issue I could find. I'd say i have the majority of them. And while the ending to decalogue was a little lame. The rest of the stories were great.

As for Peter David. Who knew he wrote comics. I sure didn't. Not until my buddy gave me the first two issues of Madrox. Meh I said to him. How good can a story be when the title character's super power is that he can make duplicates of him self.

OMG Peter David is my master now. Any one not reading The NEw X-factor series do so now or be prepared to misss out. Madrox was phenominal. X-Factor is awsome and Peter David's return to the Hulk is so good i own two complete sets, one of which is autographed by the author him self. Thats all

Oh, don't worry, I'm fully prepared.