Is there any character that has changed looks more than Catwoman?
The collection of Catwoman stories was pretty solid. My favorites were:
Helena: it’s a sweet story that shows a side of Catwoman (and Batman) that I feel we don’t see much
Catwoman of Earth: it’s colorful, fun, and has space invaders
Conventional Wisdom: it’s a weird story that’s really quite fun (in a what’s going on sort of way)
Hmm…well, Supergirl went through A LOT of costume changes in the 70s…
And that’s just some of the costumes she wore at that time.
I forgot how many different looks Supergirl has had. I wonder why pantsuit Supergirl didn’t stick 
Because it wasn’t the 80s? 
Design was ahead of its time!
Detective #1027 thoughts!
Blowback
The story from the at the time series creative team Peter Tomasi and Brad Walker is less of a full narrative and more of an art and to a certain extent character showcase. It’s basically an excuse to not just draw Batman escaping a death trap, but to have a bunch of cool splash pages featuring some of the most popular rogues. I will say that it kind of ends with a bit of a stumble. I’m not quite sure I understood exactly who put him in the deathtrap and why. That said, the whole “The End (for this guy)” bit did give me a chuckle.
The Master Class
This is a great little mystery story by Brian Michael Bendis and David Maquez. For me, while I’m not one of those guys you see online who blasts Bendis for everything under the sun (shun me for it, but I kinda liked his take on Jon better than Tomasi’s), I do sometimes feel like he hasn’t put out his best work in recent years. But I think this and the recent Batman Universe are an exception – not because of Batman, but because of the format. Bendis had 12 pages to tell his story, and I think that helped him cut some of the filler that is sometimes prevalent in his full sized issues. And of course the art by Maquez is simply amazing.
Many Happy Returns
When I first heard that this issue was going to feature a story by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, the creators of the famed Image book Sex Criminals, I figured that it would be something mostly funny with maybe some drama mixed in. Oh man was I wrong. While the idea of Joker playing head games with Batman and waxing poetic about their relationship isn’t exactly new or anything, I thought it was very well executed, and I enjoyed some of the crazy stories we see as part of all the “birthday parties,” and I especially loved the Batman ‘89 reference.
Rookie
So far each story has featured Batman at the forefront, or at least as an important character, but this is the first to really explore the world of Gotham, specifically the story of a young woman who goes through the training to be a police officer and how she struggles with the innate corruption within. Eduardo Risso is a master of grit and mood, and Greg Rucka is a master of telling cop stories in Gotham City. In a way it feels like a continuation of Gotham Central, which is a kind of Batman series I think is missing. Overall excellent story.
Ghost Story
James Tynion IV and Riley Rossmo do a cool team-up story between Batman, Dick Grayson as Robin, and Deadman as they face a weird new villain called the Specter Collector, who I kind of love for the lame name alone. It’s also interspersed with a nice little scene of a young Bruce talking to his mother about ghosts. It’s a decent team-up that’s really amped up by Riley Rossmo’s excellent and dynamic art. The only thing that kind of felt off for me was Dick’s characterization. I mean, I totally buy him being freaked out by ghosts, but I would think he would try to hide it a lot more than he does.
Fore
I remember hearing an interesting story about this, erm, story. Kelly Sue Deconnick has talked about how she isn’t really the biggest fan of Batman, just a character that’s never really appealed to her. But, when she was given the offer to not just do a story for such a big issue like Detective Comics #1027, but with John Romita Jr. as her artist, she accepted and figured out a way to do a Batman story that appealed to her. So we get a story that’s focused on Bruce Wayne as an industrialist having to deal with a fellow One Percenter with no moral integrity and Bruce taking him down as both personas.
It’s an interesting story – Bruce as the billionaire is a part of him that doesn’t really get as much play as it probably should. Romita is an artist that can be 50/50 with fans, especially if he’s on a tight deadline, but I think he works pretty well here.
Odyssey
One aspect of Bruce Wayne that I think gets glossed over in recent years is the billionaire playboy persona. With that kind of lifestyle, you can honestly do just as interesting Bruce Wayne stories as you can Batman. So it was cool to see Bruce mostly take center stage for this story of helping a group of intrepid adventurers finds a sunken ship linked to the Wayne family.
What’s cool about this story is that it not just celebrates Batman’s history, but the history of the Detective Comics book as a whole. This story also features a tribute to the “Impossible – But True!” backup stories that started back in Detective Comics #153, updating the cast from creators of a radio/TV series to a podcast. It’s cool to see reminders that Detective Comics was home to more than just Batman. Speaking of…
Detective #26
Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham take on most of what came before not just in Detective Comics, but the non-super-powered heroes around during the period before Batman’s introduction. I’m not sure if The Silver Ghost was a character during that time, but I wouldn’t be shocked, and we see characters that have stuck around today, like The Crimson Avenger and Slam Bradley.
It’s a fun enough story but seems oddly mean-spirited about these other characters. I mean, many of them were essentially clones of The Shadow or Green Hornet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re bad characters or had bad stories.
Legacy
This was an interesting story – not just because of how this related to Tom King’s overall run on Batman and specifically the continuity he’s created for Batman/Catwoman, but for what it says about the character. I like the idea that it’s not one of Batman’s most notorious nemeses that “takes down” the Bat, but it’s the kind that allows him to live to old age and among his family. It’s a really beautiful, bittersweet way for him to go. But I also liked what it says about the character: even when he’s being delivered a “death blow” by someone, Batman’s final choice is to save them, because that’s who he is in the end under all the bluster about fear and vengeance.
As Always
Scott Snyder and Ivan Reis deliver two interesting viewpoints we don’t get to see much of in this issue: one being Batman’s involvement in the Justice League, and the other being his relationship with Jim Gordon. It was cool to see the two viewpoints combined, with seeing the everyman perspective of these massive, universe-ending Justice League threats. Part of me wishes we could have had more scenes of Gordon dealing with these issues, but I can totally understand why we get so many double-page spreads by Reis of Batman and the League taking out some of the biggest villains in the DCU instead. Cool stuff.
Generations: Fractured
This was a nice set-up story. Seeing Batman fight the Universal Movie Monsters was a fun action sequence, which then quickly sets up this interesting time travel deal between the Golden Age Batman and Kamandi. Definitely makes one want to find out more. I wonder if this would work for a WOB entry in the future…
Also, I want to shout out Dan Jurgens, Kevin Nowlan and perhaps most importantly colorist Hi-Fi for the way they effortlessly change from a modern looking comic to something closer to the golden age with the coloring techniques and shadowing. It just works so well.
A Gift
Perhaps the story that most relates to where Detective Comics was at the time of publication and where it is now – makes sense, since creative team Mariko Tanaki and Dan Mora are currently doing the book (and pretty damn well, I might add). It not only helps set up the more low-tech and thoughtful approach that Batman has after having the bulk of his wealth taken away, but sets up the character of Nakano and why he would end up being a foil for Batman in the current books.
Overall, I think this was a good one-shot – while some are more compelling than others, they all at least had some cool thing to it. I think with this being such a big anniversary issue, everyone involved brought their A game.
For Joker, I didn’t love any of the stories but they were all entertaining to one degree or another. I’ll quickly shout out the stories I most enjoyed:
Dove Corps: it was a fun twist to take Joker out of Gotham, though the ending didn’t quite work for me
Birthday Bugs: it was kind of cute, in a twisted way, seeing Joker connect with a child like that
Kill the Batman: the joke at the end made me chuckle. I wonder if they thought of the joke first and worked backwards from there. The idea of who is Joker without a Batman is fairly interesting, though.
Probably the best part of the issue was seeing all those great covers.
Time for some Catwoman thoughts - final issue before I tackle Robin, my favorite! 
1 - Skin the Cat - Dini and Lupacchino - a somewhat darker story, setting the tone for this collection, which generally does skew darker than a lot of the more “heroic” anthologies. Gorgeous art by Lupacchino, tight puzzle plotting by Dini, and it’s clever enough, but doesn’t really strike home.
2 - Now you See Me - Nocenti and Rocha (RIP 
) - gorgeous art by Rocha, but a story that is more a bundle of stereotypes and gags rather than a real story. Does not inspire me to check out Nocenti’s n52 run. Really bummed they didn’t replace this story with one by Valentine, as her run is one of my all time favorites.
3 - Helena - King and Janin - partly because of King’s controversial reputation, particularly surrounding the Bat/Cat wedding, this story got a LOT of pushback online, but I love it. It’s not realistic, of course, but I view a lot of what King does with Batman and Catwoman as extremely symbolic, so I didn’t really read it that way. It was about the emotions evoked, and I really loved the emotions it evoked - and like the Annual #2, this story really sets up a future for Batman and Catwoman I really like (also seen in Batman/Catwoman ongoing, and possibly in the Tec 1027 story, but I still don’t really see how that one fits).
4 - The Catwoman of Earth - Parker and Case - a Batman 66 story, and it’s…a bit goofy. I’ve loved stuff by Parker before (particularly his Aquaman run, and his Shazam two parter in Convergence), but this just felt over the edge without a grounding emotion. Very nicely crafted, though, in art and writing.
5 - A Cat of Nine Tales - Sharp - this one felt a bit like Sharp had a bigger idea, but ran out of time. I’m excited to see him take on Batman/Catwoman to spell Clay Mann, though! Especially as I just want to get into that story, and the breaks are killing me!
6 - Little Bird - Newell and Garbett - Garbett drew Stephanie Brown’s first year as Batgirl, and his art here is even better, so I love that - but the story feels very dated and trying to “shock” without really justifying it. Not horrible, but like Nocenti, I feel no need to check out the original, infamous miniseries by Newell after this story.
7 - Born to Kiln - Dixon and Jones - like many stories in this one, it’s not particularly spectacular, but it is a fun story, and I appreciate that it doesn’t try to go too “dark”, but shows Selina’s more playful side. And it’s very fitting that Jones’s Catwoman comes after the Balent pinup. Some very awkward panels, but ultimately, a fun, if a bit forgettable, story.
8 - Conventional Wisdom - Pfeifer and Guerra - this story tried to be funny and meta, but it’s…just kinda unfinished feeling and doesn’t really offer that much to me in the way of insight or amusement.
9 - Addicted to Trouble - V and Blanco - technically the start of Ram V’s run - I wish that V had taken up the challenge of figuring out how Joelle Jones’s run and Tom King’s Batman run fit togehter in terms of when Selina did what, but his run has been really solid, and Blanco draws a stunning and very noir Selina, so I don’t mind too much.
10 - The Art of Picking a Lock - Brubaker and Stewart - probably (and hopefully) the last work at DC by Stewart unless there are major changes, this story feels fun, though the large lettering kind of throws me. It does make me miss Darwyn Cooke a lot, though.
Next time: ROBIN! Finally!
At long last: ROBIN 80TH! Woohoo! I rarely buy multiple copies of the same comic, but I bought the Steph variant, the All Robins variant, and the main cover, I loved it so much (and also the two variant covers had bad printing )
1 - Dick - A Little Nudge - Wolfman and Grummett - this was a very cute story, and feels very Wolfman with the plots behind the plots. Grummett, of course, is a master, and so glad seeing him getting work like this. Some people got mad about this as a retcon, but as someone who didn’t really love a lot of the Dick becomes Nightwing stuff in the original Titans, this was a bit more palatable to me. Though I will say that Dick is not anywhere close to my favorite of the Robins, and I know he’s the longest running and most beloved, but there’s a whole lot of him.
2 - Dick - Aftershocks - Dixon and McDaniel - this was basically a “missing scene” from Cataclysm - one of my favorite mini-events between Knightfall and No Man’s Land. I love the way McDaniel and Dixon wrote Dick’s heart and action. Not profound, but really fun.
3 - Dick - Team Building - Grayson and Jurgens - this one, on the other hand, felt odd. There was some fun and clever stuff about leadership, but the action in the final pages made no sense - how did Dick escape? Love seeing Grayson and Jurgens do work on the character, but some have theorized this was originally commissioned for the Walmart Giants, and I could really see it, because it doesn’t really have the same feeling of trying to honor the history that a lot of the other stories do.
4 - Dick - The Lesson Plan - Seeley, King, Janin, and Cox - now this is a contender for one of my favorite stories of the bunch. I loved the Grayson series (though it had some rough spots), and this combines Seeley’s heart and sense of humor with King’s wistful tragedy and formalism, and has many connections to the original series, like Paris being Dick’s trainee, that enrich without being necessary. And the final page makes me tear up, because it’s such a beautiful reversal. Janin and Cox are really one of the best teams - wish Cox would color Janin more, I don’t think he’s been bettered. The page to page time skips are beautifully handled, and the storytelling is inventive and clear. A tiny masterwork.
5 - Jason - More Time - Winick and Nguyen - really cute, but ultimately, not really a story. Fitting team, and love how emotional Nguyen is able to get, but it feels a bit hollow. But Jason fans were really happy, and that, I think, is what really matters in this kind of thing.
6 - Tim - Extra Credit - Beechen and Williams - now here, I don’t understand why they went with Beechen instead of Willingham or Dixon or Lewis or Nicieza. This is a perfectly fine gag comic, but it goes on way too long, and I don’t really like Beechen’s period of Tim’s run, so it does very little for me. Bigger Tim fans than I did seem to like it, though, so…again. That’s what really counts, I think.
7 - Tim - Boy Wonders - Tynion and Fernandez - this is almost literally a prologue to Tynion’s Tec run, and as a huge, massive fan of that Tec run, I loved it. It’s also one of the few stories that actually has the Robins interact with each other - such a huge missed opportunity - and I love the way each one plays off each other. Fernandez took me a while to get used to, but I really like his action and panelling a lot now. And tons of great references and nod, like of course the train jumping.
8 - Steph - Fitting In - Wolfram and Scott - I am a HUGE Stephanie Brown fan, so I was very nervous about this story, and very excited that she got one. And this story got a very mixed, sometimes intensely negative reaction in the Steph fan community, which really bummed me out. I, however, adore it. I love that Damion Scott came back to do Steph’s story, since he designed and drew the majority of her appearances as Robin, and I love that his style hasn’t remained static - you can see the Steph of 2004 here, but also some shots that are entirely new. Brad Anderson’s coloring is so vibrant and gorgeous, and really highlight Steph’s excitement about being Robin. A lot of people derisively or angrily say this story is just about Steph’s clothes, but to me, the clothes are 1) a realistic issue (for clueless Batman, especially clueless at this time of War Games), and 2) a really good symbol for Steph’s struggles to “fit in” to the role that’s always been a boy before (and after) her. And there’s a really classic, Virginia Woolf type of “room of her own” at the ending, which also comes after Steph finds herself in the most stereotypical “damsel in distress” (which is also what all of the Robins before her ended up as many times), but gets herself out of the trap and manages to defeat a fairly major villain (Firefly) as well. This is a complete story, with a major feat for Steph (even keeping with her fighting bug-themed villains as Robin!), and I love how it fits into her training history. 12 out of 10 stars, would recommend, and want more!
9 - Damian - Tomasi and Jimenez - I’m not a huge fan of Tomasi, and I especially don’t like his short stories, which tend to be abstract mood pieces, and this is no exception. There’s some good dialogue between Lois and Jon, but…this should be a Damian story. Jimenez draws an amazing set of pages, but it’s not a story at all. But, as I said, I’m somewhat biased against the writing, and most Damian fans liked it, so that’s excellent.
10 - Damian - Bat and Mouse - Thompson and Villalobos - this tied into the then current Teen Titans run, which I wasn’t reading, and I didn’t really enjoy the art that much. I thought it was nice to see Batman reaching out to his son, but it really felt like DC was dragging out this particular plotline for Damian forever, and losing so many fans in the process.
Pinups - Rocafort, Scott, Kubert, and Miller - didn’t really love any of these, but I did enjoy the Kubert spread of all of the Robins together. A great energy, even with Kubert’s odd distorted style.
There you have it - my favorite of these anniversary issues, and one of my most cherished comics. I’d love to hear what others think of any of these!
