A Batman ranking podcast, hosted by Matt Lazorwitz and Will Nevin.
And we have reached the end of October, the spookiest of months, and this the end of villains month. And to wrap it up, we’re getting one of the spookiest of Batman villains: Man-Bat. Dr. Kirk Langstrom has an origin really out of the pages of Spider-Man, but someone has wound up a fixture in…
Black Mask was Hush before Hush: a villains obsessed not with Batman but with Bruce Wayne, seeking to bring down Bruce for childhood grudges. But over the years he has evolved into a more sadistic figure. As villains month nears its end, we read three stories featuring Roman Sionis: his first appearance, his return in…
Killer Croc is a character who has evolved a great deal over his time, and that pun is only half unintended. He has been a mobster, a monster and an anti-hero. This week, for Villains Month, we look at three different interpretations of Croc. In one, he’s a barely human monster running from humanity. In…
The second week of villains month, and we love a theme, so why not use this week to have our second Two-Face episode? We’ve covered a lot of Two-Face stories both for the podcast and the column, and we’re swinging back to some classics. We have the first appearance of Two-Face (a two-parter, of course),…
It’s October, the spookiest month of the year. So what better time to focus on the villains of the Batman universe? There are five Thursdays, and we’ll be focusing on five villains, all but one we haven’t had a spotlight on before. The first villain is a favorite of Matt’s, one who has appeared in…
Our very first Dick Grayson backer, Josh Weil, makes his return to the podcast this week, but he’s not It’s strange to think that Jason Todd has been back from the dead longer than he was actually dead now. For those of us who read Batman comics in the 90s, the death of Jason was…
Our very first Dick Grayson backer, Josh Weil, makes his return to the podcast this week, but he’s not picking the stories. Instead, he has gifted his picks this month to our youngest backers, his sons, David and Alexander. They give us stories that show they love sidekicks, young butlers, and giant monsters. In this week’s BatChat…
Batman is a loner. Except for Alfred, the Robins, the Batgirls, Signal, Batwoman and the Justice League. But before many of those characters, there was Ace the Bathound, the first of numerous Bat pets, mostly brought into the cave by Damian, another noted loner , and that club now includes Titus, Alfred the tuxedo cat…
We’ve talked about it for a while, and here it is. This week, Matt and Will each picked three stories that they felt were too low on the Big Board, and they discussed them again and moved them to spots they felt more appropriate. It’s a lot of the creators we talk about regularly, and…
It’s a celebration over here as we hit episode 150! We started out with a theme of anniversary issues, ones that were numbers leading up to 150, so a 50, a 100 and a 150. And we did do that. But somehow, we wound up with a second theme: stories where Batman trips balls. Sometimes…
Welcome to the world of tomorrow! Like, way tomorrow. Matt McThorn is back, and we are talking about the 853rd century and Grant Morrison’s first DC crossover, DC One Million. It’s a wild, sci-fi epic, which we all know if completely Will’s jam. But you might be surprised as we talk about the core mini-series,…
I have heard it said that every writer has a Batman story they want to tell. Only a few get to tell them. And sadly not all of them are great. This week we’re reading three stories from writers not usually associated with Batman, Harlan Ellison, Eddie Campbell and David Lapham. And, well, none of…
For the first time in a very long time, this week was supposed to see the publication of a collection of Marvel and DC collaborations, so Will and I decided this would be a good time to read some of that. But these are big omnibuses, so as is often the case, they have been…
Gotham is a city of shadows. A city where good and evil blend together. It’s a city made for Noir storytelling. And while some Batman stories have some elements of a Noir, most are very much superhero stories. But to tie-in with the 40s themed animated series, Batman: The Caped Crusader, debuting this week, and…
Over his thirty plus year career in comics, Archie Goodwin racked up a lot of accomplishments. He wrote horror stories for lots of Warren Publishing’s anthologies. At DC, he wrote Detective Comics, “Manhunter” (more on both of those later), and was the editor behind Batman: Black and White, the early issues of Legends of the…