don’t tell that to @MatthewHecht
OOC: Then you heard wrong. It is the first time I could actually finish a DC Comic. No long set up needed by other issues or storylines. All that is needed is to have seen anything with Batman in it (ideally Adam West, but anything works).
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Funnily enough, Dark Knight Returns was actually the first comic I ever read. But I don’t know if it would be my first go-to recommendation to get someone into comics. It depends on your audience, I guess.
Okay, I’ll add a fairly new unpopular opinion here:
The new World’s Finest comic? Honestly, I find it rather mid. It’s bland and formulaic, with nothing new other than a bland demon villain and the idea of Dick and Supergirl dating, which…no. No. We don’t need to add another ship with Nightwing, the war is already bad enough. The only thing I like about it is the god-tier Dan Mora art and that it’s the first time Doom Patrol’s been visible in the comics for a couple years now.
While I’m at it, I think Mark Waid is an overrated writer. The last genuinely compelling work he did was Kingdom Come, and he’s been kind of riding on the coattails of amazing artists ever since.
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I agree that Steph is the best Batgirl. 
I love her equally as Robin and Spoiler and Batgirl.
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This but for Jeph Loeb
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Court of Owls, Killing Joke, The Man Who Laughs and Arkham Asylum could work for that kind of list
I agree that I wouldn’t want to see them dating, but I haven’t gotten the impression from the book that they are or could be. I feel like they have more of a sibling dynamic there, arguing over stupid stuff in a funny way but still having each other’s backs when it counts
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That reminds me of another probably unpopular opinion that I believe was shaped by @AlexanderKnox: Tim should have stayed retired as Robin, and Steph should have stayed as Robin until RIP. She is a far more compelling character than Tim has ever been.
While I’m at it, with all the cries of “what are they doing with Tim, they can’t get Tim right”…if they can’t figure out a proper place for him, maybe he should retire. I mean, the entire reason he became Robin was because Batman needed a partner to keep him from falling into darkness, and now Bruce has like a dozen people that can do that. In the early days he talked about not wanting to be in the superhero game forever so…let him retire and go to college, be an inventor. You could even keep him around by having him be the tech guy for the Batfamily, creating new gadgets and stuff.
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And I think The Batman made it so that more people add Batman: Ego to the list, so that’s pretty cool.
I’d like to think that, but the way they’re introduced just screamed “we got in a bad argument and now we’re on a break.”
And the argument while flying felt more like a bickering couple. And if they weren’t a couple, why would Robin care if Kara was flirting with the waiter? Why would Kara care that Dick thought that?
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I definitely agree and did think this when I first saw that, but their exchange afterward actually made me think otherwise. They’re mostly bickering about platonic stuff, and Kara’s line about not flirting w/ a waiter could’ve been because Dick was teasing her about it. This just reminded me of a lot of sibling or sibling-esque arguments I’ve seen, so I’m sticking to that interpretation for now, though I realize I could be proven wrong in a future issue
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I agree, except I feel that Long Halloween is a perfect “Baby’s first Batman comic”.
Some other great “Baby’s first Batman comics” are:
- The Batman Adventures vol. 1
- Knightfall
- Strange Apparitions
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I think Tim should have become Blue Beetle Inc. 
I love Steph a lot more than Tim, but I think Tim is great. I do think that DC has zero clues what to do with Tim, sadly.
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All right I will get into this baby’s first Batman debate.
There is no answer. There never will be an answer. The closest it to just grab something that sounds cool and read. If it is not working then grab something else.
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I’d agree with this, although there are a ton of great Batman comics out there, thus fans are likely to throw out suggestions, and while there are no right or wrong ones to choose to read, I also feel like it’s nice to have recommendations.
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Blind self discovery is fun. There really is nothing like watching/reading something with no idea what it is about except for the title and cover.
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Power Girl should never have been made.
I don’t like Wonder Woman, after watching WW1984, Learning her people are misandrists butts and finding out her creator was Like really weird And put a bunch of bondage stuff in her earlier books WW Has been kind of ruined for me.
After Jason Todd dies Batman doesn’t need a Robin until he gets old, then he needs Carrie Kelly.
I’m perfectly fine with Batman easing up on his no gun rule as long as he doesn’t kill people. (I.e. using guns that fire tranq rounds or less lethal ammo)
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Wh-what? Power girl is awesome how did you get to this conclusion?
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I’m glad that you said this, and used that exact phrase, as that’s precisely how I’ve come to think of “Long Halloween”. It gets pushed so often in that way that, having never read it and now being so deep into my comic reading, I now have no interest in going back and reading it. (Well, I had no interest in reading it in the first place, but now that I’ve come to think of it as “Batman for babies” I have even less interest; “It’s so good, you have to read it!” is not enough to get me to read something.)
By the way, I wanted to clarify my initial point: I’m not trying to rag on the perceived merits of those three titles. My point was merely that there’s so much out there, over 80 years of Batman, hundreds of titles and thousands of issues, that we should all try to be a little more creative and look farther afield when recommending Batman comics to newcomers, rather than pushing the same few titles over and over again.
Yep. This is how I do it, basically. I am much more interested in reading things that I’m personally interested in, especially obscurities that hardly anyone ever talks about in the hopes of discovering a hidden gem, rather than something that gets recommended ad nauseam and everyone already agrees is good. In fact, the more that something is recommended, the less I want to read it. There’s more fun for me in discovering something good on my own, than just going along with the crowd. But certainly, if my own personal interests happen to align with a recommended title, I’m not going to not read it because it’s been recommended. There are many commonly recommended titles that I have read. But there are just as many that I haven’t and never will.
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