NYCC’13: Batman Goes Weekly

There have been a few characters that have been strong enough to carry a weekly book – even if that characters appears in four regular monthly titles. Wolverine, Superman, and Spider-Man are all over the place, but apparently DC Comics thinks there’s not enough Batman in our lives, because the company announced a new weekly Batman series that arrives in the Spring.

BATMAN ETERNAL will “set the stage for a new Gotham and new characters and a new set of stories that will take Batman into 2015,” said Scott Snyder in an interview with USA Today. “We want this to be a place where you get to tell a story about anything you want in Gotham, so long as we’re also moving this big story forward in the background. You’ll see bombastic arcs as well but there’ll be plenty of room for Ray to explore some of the darker, more mystical aspects of Gotham that he loves or Tim to explore some of the crime we haven’t seen before.”

With the next big DC event just around the corner, and even though we’ve basically seen a retelling of Batman’s origins in the pages of Batman, it looks like 2014 will see yet another retelling in Detective Comics #27 – an oversized issue that takes the character back to his roots as a street level hero. Yeah… good luck with that…

In stores January 8, DETECTIVE COMICS #27 includes a modern-day retelling of the Dark Knight’s origin by the incredible team of writer Brad Meltzer and artist Bryan Hitch! Plus, all-new stories by Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy, Peter J. Tomasi and Guillem March, Paul Dini and Dustin Nguyen, Gregg Hurwitz and Neal Adams, new art by legendary Batman writer/artist Frank Miller, and more! This issue – which will include variant covers by Neal Adams, Jim Lee, Greg Capullo, Chris Burnham, Kelley Jones, Patrick Gleason and Mike Allred – also includes John Layman and Jason Fabok’s final storyline, “Gothtopia,” before the new creative team of Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato take over writing duties for the series in the spring.

Not counting the team books like Justice League, that brings the total number of Bat-Family books to eight, or depending on how DC releases the titles, two Batman related books a week. Does that seem like too much, or too little? Over saturation typically leads to a reduction of story quality, as well as convoluted character development across the many books. If this is going to be a success, the Batman Editorial Group will need to make sure they are all on the same page, which means stop trying to outdo each other and focus on telling quality stories.

via DC Comics