Batman Day: The Five Most Important Bat-Stories of the Post-Crisis Era

It's Batman Day!

That is, it's the day DC Entertainment has chosen to be the centerpiece of their Batman 75th anniversary celebration. Last year, it felt more tied into Man of Steel when they did it for Superman, but this time around the Caped Crusader has no feature film and instead they've built it around Comic Con International: San Diego.

DC has another key anniversary coming up soon, as well -- thirty years since their seminal event series Crisis on Infinite Earths. And that means it seemed like as good a time as any to take stock in just how Batman has been doing since then.

What are Batman's biggest moments since the Crisis? Read on, with the caveat that we're really only going to look at canonical stories, not Elseworlds or other imaginary stories.

Knightfall

After the Death of Superman event, the Batman office rolled out something nearly as jarring: Bruce Wayne finally lost a fight, and in doing so, was paralyzed from the waist down, seemingly permanently.

What separated Bane from the average Batman villain is that he was both a physical and a mental threat, rather than one or the other. Deducing Bruce Wayne's identity, he defeated him by freeing all of Arkham's most dangerous criminals and then attacking Batman at Wayne Manor after he'd gone days without rest or food rounding everybody up.

Ultimately, Bruce would obviously come back (he always does), but not until after they'd had a good chunk of time with another man -- the more "extreme" Jean-Paul Valley/Azrael -- in the suit and spent some time navel-gazing about what makes Bruce Wayne special and what Batman "means."

Hush

Following years of high-profile creative teams trading off numerous Bat titles to more or less craft a single, weekly narrative a la 52 or the '90s Superman titles, DC brought Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee to the book and changed things up in a big way. Suddenly, there was a superstar tream and then everyone else, fundamentally altering the dynamic of the Batman titles in a way that has more or less been in place ever since.

Working relatively free of the restrictions of a weekly continuity, they crafted a controversial but wildly popular storyline that has since been mined by both its own creators and others to make lesser follow-up stories.

The Court of Owls

While the entire Snyder/Capullo run has been critically-acclaimed and best-selling, it's the first arc that seemed to really blindside people with exactly how good it was, thrilling fans and setting the standard that Batman was the New 52's book to beat.

Besides being just a great story, it infused Batman with a whole new mythology to explore for the New 52, not entirely unlike the whole "Rainbow Corps" thing that Geoff Johns installed in Green Lantern back when he was on those titles. And, as suggested above, it took Snyder and Capullo from fan-favorites to absolute superstars, especially as it pertains to Batman.

Grant Morrison's run

This is kind of a cheat, but...well, you can't really piecemeal up Morrison's run. It's all part of one cohesive whole and it's neither as important nor as impressive if it's broken up into bits.

That may actually be a liability in some ways, since comics are a serialized medium, but the good outweighs the bad in this case.

From the introduction to Damian to Dick's turn as Batman and the insane mythology of The Return of Bruce Wayne, Morrison has done more than almost any other contemporary writer to put more toys back into the box than he ever used.

Batman: Year One

This remains, in spite of the fact that it's not even in continuity anymore, the definitive take on Batman's origin and early years. Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli put together a masterpiece so influential that it was loosely adapted as one movie after the prospect of directing it more closely was proposed by another director for an unrelated film.

It was also so revered by the current creative team that when the New 52 rebooted the DC Universe, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo didn't even want to make Batman: Zero Year, the epic storyline that just wrapped up and serves a similar editorial purpose to Year One for the New 52. They convinced Editorial to just work on the asusmption that Year One was still canon until enough New 52 changes made it clear that couldn't work that they absolutely had to retool -- and even then, they opted to retain as much of the story as possible.

Eventually, it was adapted more directly -- as an animated, direct-to-DVD feature which starred Gotham's Jim Gordon, Ben McKenzie, as Batman.