OK, so I’m giving myself headaches trying to figure out the timeline of various bat-related books circa 1999. Specifically, the early parts of Birds of Prey do not seem to line up with Batman: No Man’s Land, which is a very obvious issue since both were (partially, in NML’s case) written by Chuck Dixon and prominently involve Oracle. So, here’s the logic.
1: I read the 36 issues of Dixon’s Birds of Prey that were on here before, running from sometime in '98 to sometime in '02.
2: That means the entirety of No Man’s Land (early '99 to early '00) happened during those issues.
3: However, at no point do Oracle or the comic itself indicate that she’s operating out of an earthquake-ravaged wasteland (which has no contact with the outside, by the way). Also, later in the series, Black Canary also seems to be operating out of Gotham, which would’ve put her on the scene during at least some of No Man’s Land (and unable to go have globetrotting adventures working with Oracle).
4: In the crossover “The Hunt for Oracle” that ran through Birds of Prey (#18-19) and Nightwing (#45-46), Gotham is readily accessible and not apparently quake damaged.
5: The “Escape from Blackgate” and “Ballistic Romance” story arcs of Nightwing came before “The Hunt for Oracle,” and were directly part of the No Man’s Land storyline.
6: In the Nightwing books, “The Hunt for Oracle” is only six issues after “Ballistic Romance.” (Six issues which I haven’t gotten around to reading since they’re not on the app - is the explanation in there somewhere?)
7: So, either the first seventeen issues of Birds of Prey (probably along with the oneshots and miniseries that came before) somehow squeezed into the same post-NML timeframe as those six Nightwing issues (which seems unlikely, especially since Birds of Prey started being published well before the No Man’s Land arc kicked off), or there was a year-long timeskip in the middle of Birds of Prey that no one acknowledged (which also seems unlikely due to the complete lack of reference to such a timeskip).
As such, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, now that we’ve eliminated the impossible (i.e. at least some of the seventeen issues happened during NML), whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. But the question is, which improbable possibility is the true one? The bizarrely compact time frame, or the unacknowledged time skip?
I also haven’t finished reading No Man’s Land, so I’ll probably come back here feeling very embarrassed when I find the explanation over there somewhere, but this has been driving me crazy ever since I noticed it, and I wanted to see if anybody knew the answer.