 Breyfogle's psycho eye effect into a pair of weird sunglasses). Batman: Batgirl #1 is one of those "Girlfrenzy!" one-shots featuring female protagonists from 1998, but not one I read; it's written by Kelly Puckett and pencilled by Jim Balent, so I bet it's actually pretty good, though. I've never read any of the Batman: Streets of Gotham series, but that's a 2010 two-parter by Paul Dini, Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs from during the second time that Dick Grayson was Batman. I similarly skipped 'Tec #815-816; those are some 2006 issues written by Shane McCarthy and featuring Cliff Chiang art, so I imagine if nothing else, they look awfully nice. 'Tec #18 is from the New 52 series, and the 2013 John Layman/Jason Fabok issue has a "Requiem" on the cover, so I imagine it's from the month or two that Batman thought Damian Wayne was dead-dead, rather than just dead-ish. Unless I miss my guess, Rogues Gallery is just one of those gallery type books of pin-ups DC did in the late '90s, and so that means there should be a nice-looking Matt Wagner drawing of Zsasz included.
Finally, perhaps the most interesting of the lot will be the never-before-published story by the Gotham Knights creative team of writer Devin K. Grayson and artist Roger Robinson. That was a great team and a pretty great book, so I'm pretty curious to see this story; given the character, one can assume that perhaps it wasn't published due to how gruesome or disturbing the story might have been, but, on the other hand, it's jsut as plausible it wasn't published for some perfectly pedestrian reason. The story that did run in Gotham Knights #12 was a fill-in story featuring Oracle by Jen Van Meter and Coy Turnbull, with a gorgeous Darwyn Cooke cover. So that's why that comic was such a departure...!
Unusual for the Batman: Arkham line of villain spotlight collections, this one is full of more comics I haven't read than I comics I have. I'll definitely give this one a borrow when it's available.
Oh hey, and speaking of Gotham Knights...! Following the "No Man's Land" epic, the Batman line was in quite strong shape. Larry Hama and Scott McDaniel were on Batman, the book then devoted to Batman-as-superhero. Greg Rucka and were on Detective Comics, which was devoted to Batman-as-detective (obviously) and featured compelling coloring that evoked black-and-white art without actually being black-and-white. And Devin Grayson, then probably the strongest Batman writer and the one producing the most compelling character-focused comics in the line, got the brand-new tertiary title, Batman: Gotham Knights. The focus of this one was on Batman as the axis of the Batman family, and, during these early issues especially, the focus was on Batman's relationships with Robin Tim Drake, Batgirl Cassandra Cain, Nightwing, Alfred, Catwoman and so on.
Originally drawn by Dale Eaglesham and Paul Ryan, eventually Roger Robinson became the most regular of the artists. Robinson's art was quite strong, a mix of realistic and expressionistic that was similar in the balance it struck to Jim Aparo, despite the fact that their styles didn't look anything at all alike (and I'm just talking about their approach to realism vs. expression in their style; Robinson obviously didn't provide the sort of iconic Batman Aparo did. Years later, when I think of Robinson's art, the thing I most remember is the soles of Batman's boots).
The book was further distinguished by amazing Brian Bolland covers (although Dave Johnson provided the cover for #1, and Cooke, as noted above, drew the cover for #12), and the presence of the Batman: Black and White back-ups, which basically continued the types of stories that filled the pages of the anthology miniseries of that title. Often times, even if you had zero interest in the lead stories, the back-ups were worth the price of admission. The first issue, for example, was a then-rare Jim Lee-drawn Batman story written by Warren Ellis; I think that was the latter's very first Batman comic, but I could be wrong on that. Those back-ups have since been collected, while the lead stories have not until now. (In that respect, the singles are probably worth collecting if you can find them, as you'll get both the leads and the back-ups).
I have not re-read these issues in a long time, and am actually probably overdue to do so (I was actually considering it, too, as Meredith asked if I had them and borrowed them after there was some online discussion of how relatively rare women-writing-Batman has been in the character's 80-year-history. Almost, but not quite, as rare as women drawing Batman, it turns out!).
•A story featuring The Key, then recently re-invented by Grant Morrison in the pages of JLA, who ended up in Arkham Asylum, although this may be the only story referencing his time spent there. If not the only, it's one of the few.
•A four-part arc featuring Batman, Robin, Nightwing and Catwoman vs Hugo Strange. I remember this being a pretty bonkers story, in large part because I had no idea what was going on for much of it, as I had thought Hugo Strange was dead (Prior to this, the only Batman comic I had read featuring Hugo Strange not set in the past featured Strange as a ghost).
I hope it sells well enough that they keep collecting the series. Shortly after these issues and a Rucka-written fill-in comes these sexy covers...
And then there's maybe my favorite issue of the whole series, this one...
...wherein a lone Batman is faced with a slow night, and ends up thinking of an excuse to team-up with Aquaman.
Good God, look at this Nick Derrington cover for one of the Batman Universe reprints. It's a nice image in that if you're wondering what Derrington's version of basically any Batman villain looks like, well, you're in luck; there's a pretty good chance the villain you're wondering about appears on this particular cover.
So Tom King's long, sales-healthy (and creatively unsatisfying) run on Batman is entering it's twilight, with the writer moving the last chapter of his narrative from the pages of Batman into a new, probably temporary title, Batman/Catwoman. You know what that means, right? DC should be announcing a new Batman writer soon. I fully expect it to be Brian Michael Bendis, who I was actually quite shocked wasn't writing Batman immediately upon his move to DC Comics (I assumed writing Batman would be the thing that lured him to DC, as that's their greatest prize to offer, and Bendis' career-long interest in crime dramas, police and private eyes and Marvel's "street-level" heroes made the character seem a better fit for him than Superman; I'm glad my assumption was wrong, though, as I've been pretty impressed with all the Superman stuff of his I've read so far, and he and DC have used Bendis' creative weight to do things I don't think would have gone over as well had another writer attempted them, like a Young Justice revival or the impending Legion of Super-Heroes one).
If it's not going to be Bendis, I sure as hell wouldn't mind a Christopher Priest run (although I'd personally prefer him follow Snyder on Justice League, and be given more leeway to do whatever the hell he wanted than I'm assuming he had during his short, place-holder run on the franchise before Snyder and company launched the current Justice League title).
There's another round of bargain-priced giants this month, but this was the only new one. Batwoman is a curious co-lead to pair with Supergirl instead of Batgirl, although I suppose those are the two characters with CW TV shows. I'll be curious to see the contents, as the current Batwoman (and the one appearing on the TV show) is relatively new, as far as DC superheroes go, and I can't imagine there will be any stories featuring the original Batwoman. I'm also curious, as always, about the new content. Will it be a Batwoman/Supergirl team-up story, or a new story featuring both of them, or two new stories featuring each of them?
I might be in the minority here, but I have almost no interest in a third sequel to The Dark Knight Returns, the second of which to feature another artist drawing Miller's script. Given the diminishing returns on the third one and some of Miller's more recent comics, I don't exactly have high hopes for this. I am excited to get more Rafael Grampa comics in any form, and I'm actually pretty excited to see him do a whole Batman graphic novel, which will apparently be split into serially published chapters here.
I suppose pairing Grampa with Miller on Batman will help ensure more eyeballs and higher-sales among DC's extant reader base, but I also can't help but wonder if Miller's presence will be a drag on Grampa. I'm sure Grampa doing his own Batman thing, along the lines of what Sean Gordon Murphy's been doing with his weird White Knight comics, would be pretty phenomenal, and free of any of the baggage that comes with a modern Miller comic.
I usually edit out the variant cover listings in these solicits