DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 14: Batman & Spider-Man #1

Two years after their initial meeting in Spider-Man and Batman, the two heroes would re-team once again in an adventure from returning writer J.M. DeMatteis. While that first team-up was drawn by an artist primarily known as a Spider-Man artist (Mark Bagley), this second one would be drawn by an artist primarily known as a Batman artist, the great Graham Nolan, here inked by Karl Kesel. 

By 1997, Nolan had already had a healthy run on Detective Comics (a chunk of which was finally collected in 2020's Batman: Knight Out) and penciled the original graphic novel The Joker: Devil Advocate, working with writer Chuck Dixon on both. He had also, again with Dixon, co-created the villain Bane in the pages of 1993's one-shot special Batman: Vengeance of Bane. 

Teenage Caleb held great esteem for Nolan's work, particularly that during the Tec run, as Nolan's take on the Batman character and his world seemed to strike a precise, perfect balance between the sturdy realism of Jim Aparo and the dynamic, expressionism of Norm Breyfogle.

By the end of the decade, though, Nolan's work with DC, which included a Bane vs. Ra's al Ghul limited series and the extremely weird JLA Versus Predator, seemed to peter out. I had often wondered what had happened to him (it turns out he turned his attention to drawing a couple of legacy newspaper strips) and was quite happy to get new work from him when he and Dixon reunited for the 12-part series Bane: Conquest in 2017. 

A few years later, I looked him up on what was then still Twitter, found him and followed him...and then quickly realized one of the reasons he doesn't seem to be getting much high-profile work in the modern comics industry equivalent to his level of talent. In rapid succession he posted a couple of tweets that I found politically objectionable, including ones hash-tagging or seemingly speaking positively of Comicsgate, of all things. (Nolan is also on an "unofficial listing" of creators who support Comicsgate on comicsgate.org.)

And then I saw his name listed here among comics professionals who participated in a livestream reacting negatively to Superman's son Jonathan Kent coming out as bisexual and DC updating Superman's World War II-era slogan of "Truth, Justice and the American Way" to "Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow." (For what it's worth, I like the original just fine and always imagined it to refer to the ideals America as a nation supposedly represented and strove to embody, not an endorsement of the country's often reprehensible actions like, you know, invading Iraq or electing Donald Trump...twice). 

Now obviously Comicsgate is...not company a responsible professional should be keeping, regardless of their political views. But reprehensible views are, I guess, something else that Nolan has in common with his frequent collaborator Dixon, and so I suppose it's unsurprising we're not seeing him drawing Batman or Superman these days. (He seems to be keeping himself busy self-publishing crowd-funded books through his Compass Comics, which he claims are free of the "moralizing and political messages so prevalent at the 'big two' publishers.")

While it is understandable why publishers and other professionals wouldn't want to work with anyone in the Comicsgate orbit, and it is understandable why readers wouldn't want to support creators who hold intolerant beliefs (I know I wouldn't want to buy, say, a new Dixon/Nolan comic today), it doesn't change the fact that Graham Nolan is a hell of an artist, a fact attested to by this very story.

In it, he not only does his usual fine job of drawing Batman and the Dark Knight's perennial foes Ra's al Ghul and Talia, Nolan also gives us a great Spider-Man, one who looks and moves like a classic iteration, evoking the work of John Romita Sr, one of the probably two artists who defined the character's look (The other, of course, being his creator Steve Ditko).

Nolan also draws the Kingpin, who is the Spider-Man villain used in the story. And DeMatteis makes pretty great use out of him here, too. What seems to unite the villains in this particular crossover is their nature as master schemers and plotters, each seeming to exert an impressive degree of control over their particular kingdoms, only really differing in the scale of their ambitions. 

Kingpin, of course, wants to—and sometimes does—rule over all crime in New York City, if not the entire city itself. Ra's' criminal enterprise is global in scale, and he has his sights set on ruling the entire world.

This similarity, and this difference, is at the core of DeMatteis' story, which, more so than anything else, is a great character study of the Kingpin: The lengths he will go to save the woman he loves, the way his mind works and where he draws the line when it comes to his own super-villainy. 

You may remember—if you have a particularly good memory, anyway—that when I was writing about these two heroes during my discussion of their first pairing, I noted the similarity in the types of stories told about each, as they tended to spend the issues of their comic book series defending their home cities from the machinations of their big and colorful rogues galleries. 

I even explicitly said they don't generally engage in globe-trotting adventures, or those in which the fate of the whole world is at stake. 

Well, guess what? 

This story, entitled "New Age Dawning" is an exception. Parts of the story are set in Gotham, New York City, Paris and Tibet, our heroes ultimately travelling to the distant roof of the world just in time to stop Ra's and Kingpin from pressing the button on a doomsday machine that will wipe NYC off the map and ready the world for Ra's' assumption of its complete control.

As I said, while it reads like a character portrait of Kingpin Wilson Fisk, it also scans an awful lot like a Batman story, particularly one of the many in which he faces Ra's al Ghul and the villain's plans to save the world and its environment by drastically, violently reducing its population. 

Although instead of Robin and/or Nightwing around to give Batman someone to banter with, here it's Spidey.

The story opens with a narration-heavy sequence in which a wild-eyed, wild-haired television evangelist preaches about the sorry state of the world—earthquake, flood, a bombing in Jerusalem—as signs that we are entering the end times. And though he plays the role of a Christian evangelist, he doesn't really evoke Christianity, but an unnamed, secular savior of some sort. "There's only one hope for us," he says. "Only one man who can save us from the firestorm that's coming. Look up, children of sin! Look up-- --and see the savior." 

Jesus? 

No. 

The scene then shifts to that would-be savior, dwelling in a hidden, paradisical city nestled in the mountains of Tibet. He is shown praying before an altar filled with candles and the icons of several different religions (a crucifix among them), while his concerned daughter looks on, unseen.

This is, of course, Ra's al Ghul.

Meanwhile, our other villain, Wilson Fisk, is introduced in Paris, where he confronts his apparently estranged love, Vanessa, and embraces her in a kiss.

And as for our heroes? 

Well, Spidey is introduced suiting up and leaving his wife Mary Jane to study while he goes out crime-fighting. (Nolan somewhat surprisingly draws her remarkably less busty than the bombshell version of the character that was more prevalent in the '90s; here her design more closely resembles that of Mark Bagley's Ultimate Mary Jane). Spidey busts up an arms deal that he assumes must be Fisk's work, although readers will note the demon's head symbol tattooed on one of the gunmen's palms. 

And as for Batman, he swings through a rainy Gotham sky to meet his kinda sorta lover/mortal enemy Talia, who tells him she has business in America, but wanted to drop by and see him. Then she sics a bunch of ninjas on him. ("You knew those men would never stand a chance against me," Batman tells her. "I...had to at least go through the motions of an assassination attempt," she replies.)

With all of the players introduced, it is now time to commence with the crossing-over. Talia and Fisk talk business in his penthouse office. Apparently, Fisk has been working for her and her mysterious employer for some months now, and though he suspects them of being a terrorist organization, as long as they leave their "madness" out of his country and his city, he doesn't mind. Talia pointedly corrects him that the real aim of her organization is not terror, but "resurrection", a word that briefly stops Fisk and elicits a shocked expression from him, given what his wife is going through.

As will soon be revealed, Vanessa is apparently dying of cancer—I obviously have no idea how this squares with the events of the regular Spider-Man and Daredevil comics of the time. Fisk is uninterested in Ra's al Ghul's plans, laid out in a few pages of dialogue that jumps from a conversation between Talia and Fisk to another of Batman and Spider-Man. 

This time around those plans involve using special devices that control the weather and tectonic plates to sink the island of Manhattan and cause other such disasters until Ra's emerges from the apocalyptic chaos to "offer redemption to a sick and dying world." 

Again, Fisk is uninterested, but Talia has a very strong closing offer for tailored to him.

"My father has the power to cure your wife's cancer," she tells him. 

During their meetings, Batman has been spying on the pair, and he is eventually interrupted by the arrival of Spider-Man ("I wondered when you'd show up," he says to Spidey over his shoulder without looking at him.) 

Batman is just as reluctant to work with Spider-Man this time as he was last time, and when the web-slinger puts his hand on Batman's shoulder while talking to him, the Dark Knight snatches him by the wrist and twists it. Spidey throws him across the rooftop, Batman landing on his feet and striking a cool, Mazzucchelli-inspired pose in the mist.

This is the only real fighting the two do, ultimately shaking hands again and deciding to work together. Nolan does a particularly good job of contrasting the two heroes, two characters whose basic designs are so far apart from one another, with the sleek, colorful Spider-Man a head or so shorter than the big, black triangularly shaped Batman. 

Faced with the inevitability of Vanessa's death, Fisk eventually makes a deal with Ra's, and Talia delivers he and his ailing wife to the Tibetan stronghold. There, Ra's makes clear his plans for the world and Fisk's place in them, holding the cure for Vanessa's cancer—in actuality, a cancer-like disease that Ra's engineered in his laboratories specifically to infect her—over him as irresistible leverage.

In order to make him prove his loyalty, Ra's insists that Fisk be the one to push the button that will destroy New York.

That is, of course, where Spider-Man and Batman come in. They have chased the villains to Tibet in some rather charmingly silly disguises and, after they are waylaid by Ra's forces along the way, they must travel the snowy wastes with parkas over their costumes, with Batman at one point riding piggy-back as Spidey climbs the sheer face of a mountain cliff.

To say much at all about the ending would risk spoiling a clever and effective twist, but it's safe to say that New York City is not destroyed and Ra's does not take over the world. Even Vanessa's life is saved. 

DeMatteis does a fine job of portraying all of the various and varied characters, including their at-times complex roles, like Spider-Man working to save Vanessa even if it means helping the Kingpin, and Talia's moral ambiguity, as she vacillates between working for and against her father...and against but sometimes with Batman.

The last panel, a half-page splash of the two heroes in a moon-filled big city night sky together, is the very stuff these crossovers are made for, as both look perfectly like themselves and perfectly strange appearing side by side like this, but also, under Nolan and Kesel's pens and Gloria Vasquez's colors, also seeming to belong together.

This would be the final crossover in which this particular pair would appear together, and, in fact, this was Spidey's last standalone DC/Marvel crossover. Both Batman and Kingpin would appear one more time in the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus collection though, in 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1, by Alan Grant and Eduardo Barreto.

Next: 1999's Superman/Fantastic Four #1

Review: Robin Rises: Omega #1

The opening page of Robin Rises: Omegan #1, a one-shot special kicking off the next storyline in the Peter Tomasi-written, Batman and Robin series, recaps the events of Mike Barr and Jerry Bingham's 1987 graphic novel, Batman: Son of The Demon, as narrated by Batman and drawn by the art team of pencil artist Andy Kubert, inker Jonathan Glapion and colorist Brad Anderson.

The next seven pages recap events from Batman and his dead son Damian's life. It's a very thorough recap, basically brining any new readers attracted by the #1 or the promise of an "event" (the dead Robin Damian returning to life, as the title all but promises) up to speed, but it covers a good eight years worth of storylines. While meant to be a recap, it reads more like a required reading list.

Following the quick recap of Son of The Demon, it then references the events of various comic books collected in Batman and Son, Final Crisis*, the pre-New 52 Batman and Robin Vols. 1-3, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne (all written by Grant Morrison), the post-New 52 Batman and Robin Vols. 1-4 (written by Tomasi), Batman Vol. 2: Death of The Family (Snyder) and Batman, Incorporated Vol . 2: Demon Star (Morrison again).

That sure seems like a lot of reading to have to be familiar with before the story of this particular comic even really gets going, and more are referenced during the comic, with Batman touching a magical gem that allows him to remember the events of Batman/Superman Vol. 1: Crossworld and the new Justice League that was formed during the aftermath of Forever Evil mentioning the events of Justice League Vol. 1: Origin.

Now, because the eight-page review of the entire history of Damian Wayne was so damn throrough, one really need not have read or be super-familiar with all of those storylines to read this comic to understand and even enjoy this comic. After the recap, it is really nothing more than a big fight scene, given import by its players and the way it is explicitly linked to the previous eight years worth of Batman comics—or at least a single thread of those comics.

But I'm having a hard time recalling a comic book that made so many references to so many other particular trades before.

After all of that summary, which Andreson colors in a slightly gauzier manner, to give the scenes a fuzzier, dream-like quality designating them as flashbacks, pages 10 and 11 of the 40-page comic shows a two-page spread, in which Batman offers his final sentence of narration for the book—"Which brings us here, to the Himalayas...where it seems fitting that this all end in the snow"—and a character soon identified as New God Glorious Godfrey and the forces of Apokalips (identifiable as such by the presence of the Jim Lee-redesigned Parademons of Justice League amid the guys in battle armor) face off against a small army consisting of Batman, Ra's al Ghul, Frankenstein, Damian's great dane Titus and Ra's al Ghul's Man-Bats and ninja warriors. Two weird, black vaguely ancient Egyptian hover-coffins float at the feet of Ra's; these are the coffins of Damian and Talia al Ghul.

After four pages of parley, in which Godfrey informs them that he's come for "the original chaos shard" which can "amplify energy like nothing else in the universe and defy physics," and concludes that Ra's has hidden the shard inside Damian's coffin, the two forces fight.

For the rest of the issue.

Normally, that would seem pretty dull and excessive, but American superhero comics so rarely show action of any kind lasting longer than a few panels or a splash page, it's actually sort of refreshing seeing a battle scene given a few dozen pages to breathe, even if the number of participants means the set-piece is still a little too heavy on the posing, and a little too light on the panel-to-panel sequential action. Still, nice to see Kubert get a chance to draw so many characters and so damn much fighting.

The battle is particularly brutal, with Batman being the only really good guy in it, and even he chops the arms off of Parademons and repeatedly stabs them in the eyes with the pointy wing of a Batarang.

The cannon fodder characters are dispatched with haste left and right, and Frankenstein has his arm ripped off, because of course he does (I'm not trying to be funny here, but I have honestly lost count of how many times Frankenstein has lost his arm this summer).

During the course of the battle, Ra's gets blasted with a laser weapon and he and Talia's coffin both fall into a deep crevasse, and are seemingly lost. Batman grabs ahold of the disputed crystal, just long enough to recover his memories of the events of Crossworld, and, well, read the last panel:

Godfrey takes the crystal and the coffin, and is about to pop a cap in Batman's cowl when the Justice League shows up to join the fray.

Wonder Woman, Captain Cold, Lex Luthor, Cyborg, Aquaman and Captain Marvel Shazam wade into the battle, and all proceed to start murdering the forces of Apokolips like it was five years ago all over again:

Worst of all is Aquaman, who reprises his sharks-eating-Parademons trick with killer whales here, but adding a terrible joke: "You obviously don't come in peace-- --but feel free to leave in pieces!"

Shut up, Aquaman.

Oh, and if you're wondering what a pod of orcas is doing anywhere near the land-locked Himalayas, well, join the club.

Maybe there's a secret Sea World run by Yeti beneath the ice in somewhere around there...?

I suppose it's kind of silly to question such things in a book like this, where Frankenstein is teaming up with Batman and an immortal warlord to fight extra-dimensional invaders over a power crystal, but, well, when there's this much fantastic going on, you want the real-world stuff to be, you know, real. I'd say this is almost as bad as Wolverine finding a polar bear in Antarctica to kill and skin just so he could wear a polar bear skin for a few panels of Avengers Vs. X-Men, but then, that was a Marvel event comic, and this is a minor, book-specific storyline, so it won't be read and therefore noticed as much.

Wait, what the hell was I talking about before I started google the range of orcas and maps of the Himalayas...?

Oh yeah, so then Cyborg is able to Boom Tube away all of the Apokaliptian soldiers who weren't killed already, but Godfrey has Damian's coffin and the crystal when he steps through one of the portals.. Batman's set to pursue, but Shazam pulls him away from the closing Boom Tube, and then Batman proceeds to yell at him while punching him in the face for three panels, and then, when Luthor says something, Batman punches him too.

The guy just lost the body of his son, but even still, Batman seems a little high-strung. I kind of wish Cap would have flicked him and sent him reeling a few feet back into a snowbank or something. Instead, Cyborg breaks it up with an "enough."

The book ends with Batman pointing at the Justice League and screaming at them in a red-ringed dialogue bubble.

The story then continues in Batman and Robin, where Tomasi will be joined by his regular artistic collaborator, Patrick Gleason.

Kill-happy Justice League, punch-happy Batman and the out-of-place killer whales aside, it's pretty nice, big, stupid, melodramatic stuff, provided you know enough to follow along.

And, if not, well, the first eight pages or so sure gives you plenty of homework you need to do to catch up. Then you can come back and read this issue in context.


*The panel referencing Final Crisis simply has Batman narrating "I died" with an image of an Omega Beam—not in a pair, but just a single one—angling around the panel before striking Batman in the temple. The next two panels summarize the events of Morrison's Batman and Robin and Return of Bruce Wayne, which, frankly, is awfully odd. Final Crisis isn't, or at least shouldn't be, continuity after the events of Flashpoint.

Or, to use the in-story rationale for the New 52 reboot, it still happened, but after Reverse-Flash, Flash and Pandora messed with the time-stream, with Pandora merging "New Earth" with the WildStorm Universe and some version of a Vertigo Universe into a new, altered timeline, no one should remember the events of Final Crisis. As far as we know, Batman and the heroes of Earth have encountered Darkseid exactly once, in the pages of the first story arc of Justice League.

Also unexplained? Damian's age. It doesn't seem to matter too much here, as there's no explicit reference to how long Batman has been active. In the New 52, he's been around about seven years or so now—The Zero Year, the five years between the first Justice League arc and Batman #1 and 'TEC #1 and so on, plus the one year between 'TEC #1 and Death of the Family—whereas Damian was conceived at some point during that time, and would now be about 11 years old if he were still alive.

I think we're supposed to assume Talia used some kind of super-science to accelerate his aging, even if that makes no sense at all, because otherwise, the Batman with a seven-year-career having an 11-year-old son breaks the very, very fragile and hard to take seriously New 52 timeline. But, like I said, there's no explanation here, despite all the explanations given in the first chunk of the book, and, read without thinking about the reboot at all, it doesn't really affect this particular comic book.

Review: Batman Vs. Bane

Well this is a pretty strange packaging of some 1990s comics, recently assembled and published to appeal to readers who might understandably want to learn more about Bane and his dealing with the Ra’s al Ghul in the wake of July’s Dark Knight Rises movie.

The five comic books in here all had “Batman” in the title—this collects the 1998 miniseries Batman: Bane of the Demon the with 1993 special Batman: Vengeance of Bane #1 that first introduced the villain—but Batman himself just barely appears, and never actually fights Bane.

Batman appears in the last 14 pages of the Vengeance story, following clues laid out by Bane and his henchmen Bird, Zombie and Trogg, allowing the freshly-arrived-in-town Bane to stalk Batman and make the plans to break him that he would engage in during the “Knightfall” storyline.

He doesn’t appear at all in Bane of the Demon, save for a one-panel flashback and a one-panel prelude to the next story (the “Legacy” crossover story/event, which I’m not even sure is available in trade any more).

So Batman: Bane of the Demon might have been a more sensible title for the trade.

Both are by the same creative team of Bane co-creators Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan, the latter inked by three different inkers throughout the collected comics, each of ‘em dynamite at their craft (Tom Palmer, Eduardo Barreto and Bill Sieknkiewicz).

The origin story in Vengeance is a solid one that aged pretty well. I remember being extremely impressed by it and by Bane when I first read it as a teenager—Dixon sure put in the work to thoroughly introduce Bane as a credible figure of menace, a feat that seems even more impressive when one compares it to more recently-arrived Batman villains like, say, Hush, or any of the many new characters created by Grant Morrison during his run.

By spending the first half of the book showing us the doomed Bane growing up in one of the world’s worst prisons, it also goes a way toward making the villain seem sympathetic. Even once he crosses the line and starts killing dudes by the dozen, one can still appreciate the up-by-the-bootstraps nature of his origin story, which included millions of push-ups and sit-ups, daily underwater fights with fish (his prison cell was under sea level), and a lot of reading.

They take Bane-as-sympathetic figure even further in Bane of the Demon, as he is essentially the hero of the piece—he’s still pretty monstrous, and continues to kill his opponents by the roomful, but Dixon plays him as extremely cunning and ruthless, a brainier villain than a brawny one, and the entire story offers an interesting exploration of the character by contrasting him to Ra’s al Ghul, who bests him in some ways and is bested by him in others, and Batman, who is barely present, but whose boots Bane finds himself in when Talia takes a (verytemporary) sexual interest in him and Ra’s considers him as a potential heir.

The book concludes with three of the two-page origins that ran at the end of 52 and Countdown (Say, did DC ever collect all of these from both weeklies into a trade? It’s kind of too bad they went to all that trouble and then rebooted, negating all of the relevant information in these; they oughta do ‘em again for the New 52 continuity, but then, DC obviously doesn’t actually know it’s own phantom five-year continuity at this point).

There’s two from Countdown, both written by Scott Beatty.

The one for Bane is drawn by Graham Nolan, which sees the artist basically redrawing the same scenes from his Vengeance, only inking himself and given better, more modern coloring.

The Ra’s al Ghul one is drawn and colored by Cliff Chiang, and it’s kind of a mess, using the first five panels to retell Birth of the Demon, one panel to retell the original Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams Ra's storyline and then closing with three panels covering Batman: Death and the Maidens and “The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul” storyline. It’s a lot of story, and Beatty has to over-stuff the pages with narration boxes to get it all in. Revealing a weakness in the Grant Morrison spearheaded “Resurrection” storyline, I’d read it as it was published, and had no idea that much of what Beatty says happened in his summary actually happened in that mess of a storyline.

From 52, there’s the Mark Waid-written, Andy Kubert-drawn two-page, six-panel origin of Batman. It’s notable, perhaps, for its variance from “Year One,” at least in the staging and dressing of the bat-through-the-window scene, which isn’t the fevered, semi-religious event it is in Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s telling, but a more calm and casual one in which Bruce Wayne is writing a letter rather than bleeding to death after wounds sustained while trying to fight crime not dressed up as a creature of the night.

Despite the questionable decisions of titling and packaging the trade, these are fine stories from Batman’s fruitful 1990s, featuring superior art from one of the better of his artists of that era. Personally, I had a blast re-reading Vengeance and reading Bane of the Demon for the first time. I picked this up after Dark Knight Rises, so I read all of Bane’s dialogue in Tom Hardy’s voice, which…oh man, I want to go reread “Knightfall” and Secret Six in Hardy’s Bane voice now…

Reveiw: Batman: Birth of The Demon

I can’t tell you exactly why I didn’t read original graphic novel Batman: Birth of the Demon in 1992, or at any point during the next two decades.

I recall seeing a full-page house ad for it in Batman comics of the time, featuring a rather shocking image from the climax of the book that, at the time, I didn’t really process as representational, given its content. And it featured fully painted art by Norm Breyfogle, who was then one of my favorite comics artists (and he remains the definitive Batman artist for me).

I suppose it might have had something to do with the villain, Ra’s al Ghul, who I never really cared for, or the fact that it was presented as the concluding part of a trilogy of …Of The Demon books I hadn’t read or been at all interested in (1987’s Son of The Demon and 1990’s Bride of The Demon, if you’re curious; Mike Barr wrote both, while Jerry Bingham provided art for the first and Tom Grindberg for the other).

I suspect a lot of it had to do with the simple fact that graphic novels of any kind seemed rare, strange, even alien in 1992, certainly to Teenage Caleb, who could regularly find 22-pages of Batman in any number of places—book stores, drug stores, grocery stores, comic shop—for around two bucks then.

I saw Breyfogle’s name on the spine in the library a few weeks ago though, and picked it up. I’ve missed Breyfogle’s art a lot since he sort of drifted out of the Bat-books during the early bits of the “Knightfall” storyline, and I’ve missed his work even more in the last few years, when DC started handing plum art assignments like Grant Morrison’s Batman run or relaunching Detective Comics to fairly terrible artists. (And the recent-ish DC Retroactive: Batman—The ‘90s #1 made me feel all the more nostalgic for it).

Birth of The Demon seems to be only nominally part of the …Of The Demon books; it’s not by Barr, but by Denny O’Neil, who created the Ra’s al Ghul family of characters and was then editor of the Batman line. Additionally, it’s Ra’s origin story, so much of it is set well before Batman was even born, and thus well before the events of the other two graphic novels, although Batman does appear in the framing sequences that do seem like they are climactic of an ongoing conflict between Batman and Ra’s.

It’s a hardcover, and an over-sized one, eight inches wide and eleven inches high. Breyfogle’s art is fully painted, which, along with the hardcover, high quality of paper and dust jacket, contributes to the special-ness of the book’s presentation. While trade collections and even original graphic novels weren’t unheard of during 1992, the were still awfully rare compared to today, and DC seemed to approach this as something special.

I was such a fan of Breyfogle’s pencil work, that I was unsure if what I liked about it would necessarily translate to painted comics work (note that, other than the basic figure in the pool in the immediate foreground, the cover doesn’t really look like a Breyfogle image).

It looks amazing. The figures, the faces, the action, it all looks, moves and flows like Brefygole’s comics, the main difference being a softer, rounder look that moves the needle ever so slightly toward representational, and the coloring is just lovely. It’s neither the flat, bright “comic book-y” coloring that can be found on the bulk of Breyfogle’s pencil work from that decade, nor is it that sickly, computer effect-driving faux video game or airbrushing look of most modern super-comics.

The palette is often quite limited—the pages not set at night or in a desert really jump out because of the amount of different colors in them.

The panels are essentially border-less, with thick white gutters separating them from one another. The format of the pages then doesn’t really look like anything of Breyfogle’s I’ve seen before, or anything from the monthly super-comics of the time. I’m trying to think of other painted-projects that used this technique, but I’m coming up empty—it seems usually the gutters are black in painted projects.Of course, the way in which this is painted is itself kind of unique, I think. Unlike, say, the work of Alex Ross or Daniel Brereton, it looks more like Breyfogle penciled a Batman comic as he normally would, but colored it himself using paint, rather than having constructed the panels as individual paintings. Does that make sense? If not, the point is this: It’s a really beautiful-looking comic, and unlike anything else that I can think of off the top of my head, at least in terms of superhero comics.

The story is this: Ra’s al Ghul is elderly, ill and near death, and his followers are trying to prepare a Lazarus Pit in which, will restore him to youth and health. Batman is stopping them.

At one, he meets Talia al Ghul and they discuss Ra’s’s before-this secret origin, which occurred in ancient times in a Middle Eastern locale that Ra’s had obliterated from human history.

Broadly, the man who would become Ra’s al Ghul was a physician who had discovered a secret power within the earth, accessible via certain points (which would become known eventually as “Lazarus Pits”), that can heal the sick, and restore even the dying and dead, with the unfortunate side effect of the person emerging being temporarily insane with rage.

Ra’s is caused to suffer greatly because of his discovery and the wicked rulers he serves, so he rebels, destroys them and their city and then embarks on his centuries as an immortal.

Back in the present, Ra’s arrives, and he and Batman take off their capes and shirts for a shirtless fistfight to the death.

It’s pretty brutal. Both Batman and Ra’s al Ghul are kinda crazy and desperate by the climax of the story, and Batman takes probably the most brutal beating of his life, up to and including that one time Bane broke his back.

Ra’s pushes him into a fire, which they role around in, and then Ra’s hits him in the face with a torch, setting his hair on fire. Then a sandstorm kicks up, and while Bruce Wayne is clearing the sand out of his eyes, Ra’s hits him across the face with a shovel and then stands above the prone Wayne and then, pausing only long enough to look at Talia as she begs him not to, he does this:Holy shit, Ra’s al Ghul just totally killed the hell out of Batman!

And, as you can see in that last panel, Ra’s hears someone say his name in a small, rough voice and he turns around, shocked to see:Batman got back up. With a shovel still in his chest!

And then he stalks over to Ra’s, grabs him by the throat and they both plunge into the Lazarus Pit and are restored to life (Ra’s and Talia have disappeared by the time Batman wakes up, his skin and hair re-grown).

That’s a pretty big, intense moment in Batman history, and I felt weird reading it for the first time so many years after the fact. I didn’t realize Darkseid wasn’t the first person to “kill” Batman…

O’Neil’s Batman is a pretty idiosyncratic one, although it was a lot of fun to revisit his take on the character after being so far removed from the O’Neil-written and/or O’Neil-edited Batman.

For example, the book opens with some hired thugs trying to uncover a pit, only to be interrupted by a very dramatic appearance by Batman, first as a voice from nowhere saying “Go Home,” then as a weird shape silhouetted against the night sky. He warns them to leave, he lets a few bullets bounce off of his bulletproof cape to scare them, and warns them again.

O’Neil’s Batman is obviously capable of sustaining and dishing out a lot of violence, but he’s very slow to do so, only fighting when he’s attacked, at which point he quickly and efficiently dispatches his enemies, and he is, in fact, so eager not to hurt them that he leaves himself open to an attack, getting hit with a shovel and knocked down a hill.

In addition to being a kind of scary Zen-like reluctant warrior, O’Neil’s Batman is also fallible and vulnerable, which makes the climactic battle so believable, even if the injuries get so unbelievable the reader knows Batman will be in a Lazarus Pit before it’s over.

O’Neil also goes to the trouble of characterizing the bit parts of the Guys Who Fight Batman in the opening scene. Thugs for hire, they’re in no hurry to fight Batman either, and only decide to do so for desperate, financial reasons.Sure, they’re only given a character trait or two, but man, that’s a hell of a lot more than characters like that tend to get in scenes like that in stories like this.

The bits in the distant past are pretty far-removed from what we normally see from O’Neil, but because he goes so far as to make Ra’s a character from a fantasy culture, it doesn’t have to read like anything more than a broad, melodrama, which is easy enough for O’Neil to accomplish.

All in all, it’s pretty great stuff and, surprisingly so, given how far from the creators’ respective comfort zones so much of the book is, and how little one seems to hear about it these days. I’m still not terribly interested in tracking down Barr’s two …Of The Demons graphic novels—although DC will be making it awfully easy to do so, packaging the them along with Birth in a huge, 300-page collection due out in March—but I’m now kind of curious to see the goofily titled 2005 series Year One: Batman/Ra's al Ghul by Devin Grayson, Paul Gulacy and Jimmy Palmiotti, which presumably told some form of parts of this story.

It's just not the same when they leave their shirts on