And then, after Alfred fixes Bruce up a wee bit after Bane broke his back and bounced him off some ledges and some awnings, Knightfall veers off into two issues of Showcase '93 to tell us what happened to Two-Face between the big Arkham Asylum breakout and bad Bane breaking beaten Batman's back.

It's not bad. Two-Face sets up a trap for Batman and abducts him to put him on trial for ... It's a bit too complicated and too stupid to go into here. And there's a really dumb conflict going on between Bruce and Tim because ... This is also too dumb to spend a lot of time on.

It's not Doug Moench's best Two-Face story.

Very nice Klaus Janson art!

For anyone not aware, Dixon and Alcatena did a 10 page Leatherwing story in Batman Chronicles 11 a few years later.  "The Bride of Leatherwing" which introduced their version of The Penguin.

He did, that was when they made a new team of new characters.. Risk, who was a blonde football player musclehead type... Argent, who was an energy project girl, and a couple others that were so unremarkable I've completely forgotten them.  This was when Ray was de aged, so he was a teenager again.  It's not a great book.

I read the first three issues of Knight's End this morning. When this came out, I didn't like the way it meandered through SO MANY bat-titles, from Batman to Shadow of the Bat to Detective to Legends of the Dark Knight to Robin to Catwoman and even to an issue of Showcase '94!

Sheesh!

But I'm really enjoying it this time around. Bruce Wayne is out of his wheelchair and now he needs to get his fighting edge back … so he goes to Lady Shiva for help!

As I wasn't reading the issues about Bruce Wayne and Alfred and Dr. Kinsolving and Tim Drake's father, I have no idea what happened during that time. I still have never read any of those issues. Back in 1994, I picked up Batman #509 and there's Bruce running around and going to Shiva for help, and it was the first I knew that Bruce was walking again. I don't remember being curious about the exact details then and I'm not particularly curious about them now. It's very likely some dumb comic book stuff.

I ended up reading up to Detective Comics #694 and #695 yesterday. Yeah, that's a lot of Batman!



But there's a lot of good comics here! The return of the Penguin! Now he's a corrupt night-club owner instead of an out-and-out criminal adventurer. (As much as I love the old Penguin (who was pretty much the same guy from 1940 to 1985), I was OK with this revision of the character until the comics started making him deformed and vulgar, like he was was when Danny Devito played him in the movie.)

Aside from the new, there's also the return of the Firefly. The high-seas hijinks of Cap'n Fear. The Underworld cross-over issues, featuring the new Spellbinder. (THIS is how you use old characters. You revamp them. You don't have to kill them or relegate them solely to badly-done montages and group shots and so on.)

And this Poiosn Ivy storyline is pretty good. Another Gotham whacko is walking around the city and killing all the plants! So Ivy hears about it and must break out of Arkham to save the plants! And Batman (I think it's still Bruce at this point. Pretty sure.) and Robin (probably Tim) have both these lovable Gotham whackos to contend with.

Lots of great art! Nolan and Hanna are still (nominally) the official art team, but there's a lot of guest pencillers and guest inkers.

We're almost up to the point where the cross-overs got so out of control that I quit buying every chapter of every cross-over. Contagion starts in the next issue. It was eight chapters in four different series - and I only bought the chapters appearing in the series I was already reading regularly, which at that point was Detective and Robin. So I only have four of the eight shapters. (And I don't feel like I missed anything important.)

The next big cross-over event was Legacy, and I decided to buy all of those as they came out back in the 1990s. But my memory tells me it wasn't very good, just another rehash of the schemes of that unintersting would-be dominator who fails every time - Ra's al Ghul. Well, this time I'll go into it with an open mind and pretend i've never read it before. Maybe I'll like it this time.

And then, if I remember correctly, the Bat-books were all infested with Cataclysm and Aftershock and No Man's Land and such-like for years. I kept buying Detective, but I didn't buy the others. I can hardly tell you how happy I was when the Bat-books went off in a different direction. 

There was a night right before I started my 1990s Batman binge where I was more in the mood for some classic old Batman and I read "The Menace of the Moonman" from World's Finest #98.



I didn't read it in WF #98. I read it in Giant Super-Team Family #4, which I bought off a spinner rack in a grocery store in New Castle, Indiana, in 1976.



It's the exact same copy! I've been carrying it with me for years because I love the JSA story so much!



And I also read "How to Be the Batman!" from Detective Comics #190. It's one of my favorite old Batman stories.

I read it in the deluxe reprint of Batman Annual #1 that I've had for a while. The villain is great! Dr. Sampson. He's just an evil psychologist without a fancy name or a costume. He uses psychology in his crimes! And that includes a ray or a gas or something that causes amnesia! And he uses it on Batman! This story is so AWESOME! Robin keeps trying to tell Batman who he is. Amnesiac Batman sees the Bat-Cave and says: "So what am I? A crime fighter or a museum curator?" Amnesiac Batman asks LOTS of questions that any sane person would ask.

Great story. I would totally bring back Dr. Sampson if I was writing Batman. (But I would never call him "Doc.")

I forgot to mention Renee Montoya's boyfriend! During the Cap'n Fear storyline, she meets a handsome Coast Guard officer. They flirt and he later shows up at her apartment when he has shore leave and they go on a date.

Unless there is a major development in a Bat-book I wasn't reading, it doesn't go much beyond this. During Contagion, he is affected with the plague. As I didn't read all the chapters of Contagion, I don't know if he survived or not. He hasn't shown up since, so I'm guessing he died.