I just love posters like you who never bother to read other posters posts, but just barf out the same old thing repeatedly as if it's absolute truth.

Bane would not exist without the Venom story.

End of discussion.

I could give a fuck when Bane's first appearance was, like that proves anything.

But I did mis-write in my previous post a bit. The foundation for Bane was laid in the three part Blind Justice storyline written by Sam Hamm.

I also just love how you ignore my point that while the characterization and dialogue of the minorities in the Superman line of titles during the Death of Superman arc was horrible, the dialogue in Knightsend was quite good, thus totally and utterly P-p-p-p-pwning whatever point you were trying and failing to make.

But do good ahead and repeat the same barf about Vengeance of Bane for the fifth time.

Oh yes, as for your blubbing and whining about the Venom storyline being too many issues that proves beyond all doubt that you know nothing about the history of the various Batman titles.

Legends of The Dark Knight was specifically designed initially to consist of story arcs that covered five issues. Denny O'Neill went into much detail about this on the letters page of the debut issue, which you have quite obviously never even seen let alone ever even read. It was his contention that at that time in the history of comics, with the beginnings of decompression, you couldn't tell a decent self contained story in less than five issues.

And he was right.

Yep. The Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle run on Batman comics has never been collected, and that's absolutely criminal in my mind. Grant/Breyfogle was the absolute best era of Batman ever in my opinion.

Basically anything post-2000 has been collected in trade form, but pre-2000 comics have largely not been collected.

I'm not even sure why someone would have every issue of Knightfall spread out over a dozen boxes though. Why wouldn't you keep them together?

Yes, because obviously Dixon couldn't have made up a different backstory for Bane and still have it work. Venom was absolutely essential. Bane couldn't have possibly been addicted to another made-up drug to give him enhanced strength. [/sarcasm]

Knightfall would have happened even if the Venom storyarc had never been told.


I was just confused as to why you thought O'Neil saw potential in Bane's character when O'Neil didn't even create Bane and Bane never appeared in O'Neil's Venom storyarc. That's obviously why I mentioned Bane's first appearance...


I don't see any connection at all. Blind Justice is notable for having created Henri Ducard, and that's about it.


Pwn? I am on DVDTalk, right? Not GameFAQs? Obviously I was saying that times are always changing so what is socially acceptable in dialogue one day may not be the next day. You can't read a 90s comic in the context of a 2000s social climate.


But that time it was completely qualified because you absolutely can read Vengeance without reading the Venom storyarc as Vengeance provides all the backstory about Venom that is required.


What kind of logic is that? Whining about Venom shows I know nothing about Batman's history? You can't possibly be serious. First, I never whined about Venom at all. I have even said (three times now) that it was a decent story that started well but ended poorly. Second, I have been collecting Batman comics since the mid 80s when I was a kid. I own practically every single Batman and Batman spin-off comic from COIE to present day. My Batman comic collection numbers over 2,000 comics. Yeah, I obviously know nothing at all about Batman.


Yes, I know all about LOTDK's wanting to initially tell five-issue arcs. I was there...

And no, he certainly was not right at all. Venom certainly could have been done in two issues, and been a far better story. Heck, the five-issue arc plan pretty much fell apart after the Venom arc anyway, and LOTDK began to focus on smaller two and three-issue stories, which proves that O'Neil was wrong about the stories all needing five issues to tell.

P.S. I suggest you lay off the attitude. You will make more friends that way.

I agree that those were quite good, at least based on my recollection of them (I haven't managed to re-read them since they were published). I was fortunate to speak with Mr. Breyfogle a couple times online, and unfortunately he said that he was another artist who DC has no interest in working with anymore.

There are a few post 2000-titles that I can think of that haven't been collected, like all but the first trade's worth of Codename: Knockout, but for the most part I agree about those. Marvel's gotten better about reprints, and that's helped the pre-2000 numbers, but there's still definitely tons of pre-2000 stuff uncollected.

I wasn't the one who said this, but it could actually be the case with me. Up until a year and a half or so back I'd bought comics since the mid-80's and for nearly all of that time I was fortunate to have money to spend on them. They were my primary hobby and so I bought between 120 to almost 200 comics a month (which didn't include picking up back issues either). At that rate it was hard to box and store them, let alone organize them, so every two or three weeks I'd start another box. At various times I've been able to go back and do some organizing (20 boxes here, 30 boxes there), but for some titles it's entirely possible that they'd be spread out over many different boxes. You can't imagine the organizational nightmare, especially when there's no room to spread out.

I couldn't even imagine buying 200 comics a month. That's basically everything published by both DC and Marvel combined. At the current prices of $4 an issue, that would be $800 a month. My apartment rent is only $700.

Comics have always been my primary hobby as well, and I too have been collecting since the mid 80s, but I buy to read not merely to just collect them. The concept of having an "unwatched movie pile" or "unread book pile" just seems so strange to me. So I only buy 20-30 issues a month since that's all I really have any desire to read.

Yeah, but while I bought a lot from the Big 2, I was always buying other stuff through the years. Crossgen, Ultraverse, Star Wars, Conan, Walking Dead, and on and on. I know that I own over 10,000 non Marvel or DC books.

I started in the mid-80's, but then started working at a comic wholesaler when I was 12 (under the table). So I had money to spend, no responsibilities and a 40% discount off cover price. A lot of that went to comics (and Laser Discs).

Then I just got in the habit, and I liked trying a lot of stuff, and then I liked having really long runs and it just kept going. At the end I was getting 20% off, before I pretty much left monthly comics and switched to trades on certain books and creators.

I understand where you're coming from, and if I did it again then I'd definitely have scaled back, but at least I enjoyed a lot of them, and still have stuff to read and re-read. And I figure that it's better than having blown the money on girls or drugs or whatnot. Not nearly as good as smartly investing it, but at least I have something to show for it.

Spoken like a true nerd.

I'm actually the one who said this. I honestly can't remember if Knightfall ran exclusively in Batman and Detective, but I have both titles spread over two boxes each and I keep one-shots by company in a separate box altogether. My point was I'd have to dig into more than one box to pull them all out.

I remember buying literally every book that Marvel and DC published in the late 80s. At 75 cents a pop, I would spend less than $60 a month to get them all. It became too much to read them and keep up with school work. Today, I spend about that much using DSCB and buying about 25 books.

Other than a two-part story in Showcase, yeah, Knightfall ran in just Batman and Detective. KnightsEnd started branching out into the other titles like Shadow of the Bat and the Catwoman and Robin solo series.

I can understand keeping books alphabetical so having Batman and Detective and all the other Bat-books categorized differently. Personally, I categorize my comics alphabetically by character and then chronologically under the character. So basically I would alternate the stories between Batman and Detective. Superman in the 90s with the triangle numbering made this especially easy since I could just categorize it by the triangle number.


I didn't buy everything they published, but I did buy a lot because I followed characters and had to have every spin-off book of that character. So when Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man all had four books each in the 90s, I was buying them all. So that was 12 books just for 3 characters. Then there were the related spin-offs like Catwoman, Robin, and Nightwing solo series, and Superboy and Steel solo series, and I just had to buy them all too. So in the end I was buying like 20 books just for 3 main characters. Then there were the others that I bought like Flash, Green Lantern, and Daredevil. So all in all I was buying about 25-30 books a month. I mainly just was interested in solo hero books and didn't buy the team books like Justice League, Avengers, and Teen Titans.

Hey, if Marvel is willing to collect Fatal Attractions and Avengers: the Crossing (teen Tony! but early Jim Cheung art), they'll collect anything.

I agree that there are some gems that have never been and may never be collected: Peter David's Young Justice and Supergirl, the pre-Zero Hour Legion of Superheroes/Legionnaires books, Thunderbolts, etc. In fact, for a long time I was collecting only DC monthlies because they were pretty bad about collecting anything, whereas I could always count on Marvel collecting everything. The problem with Marvel now is that they're treating their collections like monthlies; they don't keep them all in print at the same time, and sometimes the print run is tiny; plus the prices are going up. Heck, while at one point in my collecting years I was astonished at how many long boxes were cluttering my living room, I'm at the point where tpbs and hardcovers are taking over and I have to start to be more discerning on what I pick up (or move to digital)...

Anyway, back to Batman. So how can I pick up Vengeance of Bane? Is it collected anywhere?

I was really surprised to find that Vengeance of Bane was collected in my Knightfall volume. No wonder the book is so massive.

But they didn't put Venom into the Knightfall trade although according to Pajiba it is absolutely critical to understanding Bane.

No Venom = No sale!!

Thunderbolts is finally being collected under the title Thunderbolts Classic. Two volumes have been published recently, and a third is available for pre-order. They may be gone quickly, but at least they're being made available afaic.

I'm probably the most outspoken LOTDK fan on this forum (I'm surprised no one has told me to shut up about it yet!) and I concur with the reason for its appeal. Its anthology structure, rotating creative teams and editorial freedom allowed me to enjoy that one series without worrying about any other Bat-book. It was also (at least, initially) very light on supervillains and much heavier on psychological stories. "Prey" and "Venom" were both of that variety.

LOTDK stories, especially the earlier arcs, had a very different storytelling aesthetic from a lot of their contemporaries. If you're accustomed to the more mainstream, action-heavy style, they can initially read as kind of stuffy and dry. Are they mandatory reading? Not really. They're certainly interesting, though, at the very least. Plus, you get to see Batman fight a shark. I'm not kidding.

There was a booth at C2E2 selling all five parts of "Prey" bundled together for $25, with a tag declaring it a "MOVIE TIE-IN." I just rolled my eyes at that. Still, they've probably been holding onto those back issues for about 20 years now. I suppose they're entitled to try to actually move them at some kind of profit after all this time.

Re: "Venom" and Bane

It was heavily emphasized during "Knightfall" that "Venom" was sort of ground zero for the genesis of Bane, though I suspect that was played up more to sell "Venom" TPBs than anything else. No one needs to read "Venom" to get the complete story on Bane. It does, however, give us an insight into Batman that makes reading his relationship with Bane more interesting. There again, though, this was never explored in the actual "Knightfall" story itself, so it's something that you just have to sort of consider on your own.

Is "A Lonely Place of Dying" really in the "Death in the Family" trade now? I used to own both trades and somewhere along the line, I guess I sold them or loaned them out and never got them back or whatever. That's handy to know.

My favorite Batman book was always LOTDK, with The Batman Adventures (and its various incarnations) running second. But by far my favorite mainstream creative pairing was Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle. They were still working on Detective Comics when I first started reading Batman in 1989, and I loved their work together on Shadow of the Bat. Breyfogle's Batmobile is still my favorite from the comics. Clearly, DC got over whatever prejudice they had against working with Breyfogle because last year, he and Grant collaborated on DC Retroactive: Batman - The 90s (which, sadly, I still haven't gotten around to buying).

And seriously, Pajiba: Tone it down. We come here to relax, not to shout. God knows there are plenty of forums out there where that kind of short fuse is acceptable. Despite what your experience to date may be, it really is possible to disagree with people civilly and still get your point across. It's not about censorship, being thin skinned or trying to make anyone look weaker than they are. It's merely about manners. We has them here, as the kids today might say.

I enjoyed those first few years of LOTDK. I remember it was touted as a showcase for creators who didn't normally do "monthly" books. The stories were out of continuity, but were supposed to be integral to the Batman mythos. I think the first few stories certainly fit the bill, but the "specialness" of the book didn't last very long in my opinion.

That series went through the following basic stages:

1-20 - the first four arcs, each 5 issues; kind of a lengthy investment for reading

24-59 - Archie Goodwin began editing with #24; several 1 and 2-issue stories

60-63 - tie in with "KnightQuest" and "KnightEnd" - the bubble fully burst, now just another Bat-book

64-100 - more of the kind of content from 24-59, but by now it wasn't drawing noteworthy writers anymore

I bailed on Batman comics after "Zero Hour," and kept going with LOTDK until shortly after #100. By then it really had come to feel less prestigious than its early years. I've been snagging those post-100 issues out of quarter bins in the last year or so, though, and I've begun re-reading the whole series from the beginning. I'm interested to see what I think of the stuff that came out after I bailed.

The August 2012 solicitations are out.

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/dc-c...citations.html

The KnightsEnd solicit also lists the following Prodigal storyarc. So apparently the new edition includes both KnightsEnd and Prodigal in one trade.

*sigh* I miss Pajiba...

Sweet! The Prodigal trade has been OOP forever, and is pretty expensive.

Knightfall Volume 2 Knightquest came in the mail today. It too, is pretty huge.

People over on the CBR forums are complaining about it. Knightquest had two storylines: "The Crusade" and "The Search" and the tpb only collects The Crusade.

The Crusade is AzBats' story, and The Search is Bruce's journey of healing. One of the biggest complaints about the original tpbs is that at the end of Knightfall Bruce is broken and at the beginning of KnightsEnd he is healed, so the original tpbs were pretty disjointed because of that. Well, the same problem still exists with the new tpbs since they didn't bother to collect The Search...

DC always makes befuddling decisions when collecting stuff. They almost never release complete collections of entire storylines and when they do, will often forget to include something.

Incidentally, I was at Barnes and Noble recently and thumbed through the current Venom collected edition. Sure enough, at the very end is an ad touting the Knightfall collected editions with a prominent blurb about how "The story of venom continues" or some such (I didn't think to write it down). DC was emphatic in the 90s and are emphatic today about connecting those stories, regardless of how tangential they may be.

I'm not surprised they omitted "The Search" from the KnightQuest trade, but do we know that it won't be included in the forthcoming new KnightsEnd? "The Search" was only 8 issues, and KnightsEnd was 12. Given how massive the other two volumes are, I have a hard time believing DC would outright omit an entire arc of that saga, especially since the remainder would be a much thinner volume than its companions (not, of course, that DC is or should be thinking of size symmetry).

Robin #7 was an epilogue to "The Search" which actually was included in the new Knightquest trade. As people on the CBR forums said, it wouldn't make sense to include the epilogue in this trade if they planned to include the rest of it in the next trade.

I gave a link to the KnightsEnd solicit in an earlier post.

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/dc-c...citations.html

It doesn't list the other "The Search" issues, but as I pointed out in the earlier post, the solicit does however list the issues of the Prodigal story arc so I assume that is how they are going to pad out the last trade to make it as thick as the first two.

On one hand, its nice to see Prodigal back in print since the original out-of-print trade sells for crazy high prices, but on the other hand we still don't have the complete Knightquest story which was really the purpose of re-collecting these trades in the first place...