The problem with any “best of” or “greatest stories ever told” collection is that nobody will ever agree on the contents. So, to get the quibbling out of the way right up front, how can you have a book called BATMAN: THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD and not include Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ “Night of the Reaper”, my favorite Batman story ever? Not to mention the classic Batman/Enemy Ace story, “Death Stalks the Skies”, also by O’Neil and Adams?
With that out of the way, let me say that this is a very good collection indeed if you’re a Batman fan. I include myself among that number and have for more than forty years. I had already read some of the stories in this volume, but I enjoyed reading them again. And the ones that were new to me were all very entertaining. I consider the Sixties and Seventies to be the best era of the Batman’s long run, and most of the selections here come from those decades. Thankfully, the Fifties are ignored for the most part. The stories during that period tended to put the Batman in silly, science-fictional situations for which he wasn’t suited at all, and even though they were the first Batman stories I ever read, ’way back when, I don’t care for them now. The O’Neil/Adams team, in my opinion the best to ever produce Batman stories, is represented here by “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge”, an excellent story from an era that returned the Batman to his urban noir roots. There are several stories written by Bill Finger, who was underrated and almost unknown for a long time because the Batman’s appearances were always by-lined Bob Kane, who co-created the character with Finger and did the art in the early years before a long series of ghosts took over that chore. The always dependable and entertaining Mike W. Barr contributes a fine story from the Eighties, and the most recent story, by Devin Grayson, is also good and shows a nice appreciation for the character’s history.
So while these aren’t necessarily “the greatest stories ever told” when it comes to the Batman, they’re very good and make up a very entertaining and highly recommended collection.
3 comments:
It sounds like they took "The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told," which came out around 1989 or 1990 (along with a companion volume of Joker stories), and updated it a little. There was a "Batman in the '70s" collection available at one time, but it might be out of print now.
Yep, I have THE GREATEST BATMAN STORIES EVER TOLD but hadn't compared the two volumes until now. There's some overlap, but not much. THE GREATEST BATMAN STORIES EVER TOLD has more stories and includes "Ghost of the Killer Skies" (I misrembered the title in my original post.) There are a lot of great stories in this book, too, with an emphasis on the Sixties and Seventies.
I know that when reading the comics as a kid in the early '70s, I certainly preferred Batman (and, when I could find them, Spectre) comics to nearly everything Marvel was issuing in continuing characters, with the exception of WEREWOLF-BY-NIGHT. I was surely more focused on horror comics than hero comics (DC's WEIRD WAR TALES and Marvel's Atlas & Timely reprint magazine TOMB OF HORROR were my favorites), but I was certainly willing to shell out a pair of dimes, then a quarter, for DETECTIVE COMICS (and ADVENTURE COMICS) as well...
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