Question Time

Ryan Howard asks: "Based on the recommendation of Comic Books Are Burning in Hell, I picked up the two-part LOTDK story Masks out of a quarter bin. What are some other underappreciated LOTDK issues to buy this way? My annual con retailers have that series in droves. Alternatively, what are some other ridiculously cheap and easy to find comics issues that have been unjustly forgotten?"

Ah, an easy one!

The simple answer is that there was a lot of good stuff published in Legends of the Dark Knight over the book's almost-two-decades of existence. Even poor storylines still held some interest by virtue of the fact that most of the run had decent-to-great art. Even a terrible story like "Venom" still had Trevor Von Eeden on it, and that's more than enough reason to give it a recommendation. (It's still bad, though.)

Truth be told, I was never a regular reader of the book. I checked in periodically if something looked good - or, just as often, surreptitiously read it off the shelf. But there are still a few highlights I can recommend.

Kevin O'Neill appeared in the book a couple times, accompanied by Bat-Mite. Long before Morrison reintroduced the guy during R.I.P., Alan Grant and O'Neill were the first to smuggle the Silver Age imp into the post-Crisis universe, in LOTDK #38, and later in a stand alone one-shot called Mitefall, a pseudo-parody of the "Knightfall" storyline. Both of these were also recently reprinted in a thick paperback alongside the World's Funnest one-shot and a handful of other Bat-Mite (and Mxyzptlk) tales, and which is definitely worth buying

With issue #50 the series dropped its "Year One" conceit entirely by allowing the book to use Batman's real rogue's gallery. Issue #50 is a Joker story - and you guys know how I feel about Joker stories - but it's actually really good, one of my favorite featuring the character. It's another Dennis O'Neil joint, but this time with Bret Blevins, easily one of the most underrated artists of the last thirty years. I'm going to totally surprise you and recommend another Joker story, from a little over a year later - "Going Sane" by J.M. DeMatteis and Joe Staton, beginning in #65 and running for four issues. This one usually makes an appearance on any list of the best Joker stories, and it's also one of the few times to my knowledge that DeMatteis has written Batman. DeMatteis is underrated like Blevins, although in DeMatteis' case it's even more unforgivable as he has maintained a reasonably high profile in the industry throughout his entire career.

Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy later returned to the book with a direct sequel to their earlier "Prey," which just beats out the uneven "Gothic" as the best story in the book's early run; "Terror" ran for five issues beginning with #137. I'm going to completely ruin any credibility I have by finishing up by recommending yet another Joker story, "The Demon Laughs," which ran from #142-145. It's not a classic for the ages but it does have the Joker vs. R'as al Ghul, with art by Jim Aparo, and a story by Chuck Dixon. Dixon is a guilty pleasure, I suppose you'd say, and he wrote a lot of Batman in the 90s.

As for the rest of the run, at this point my sketchy knowledge runs out entirely. I know the book was published until 2007, but i don't even remember seeing it on the shelves. It looks like they were still publishing good stuff right up until the end - Seth Fisher had an arc in the book's second-to-last year, I see, and even up to the very last issue they had the likes of Christos Gage and Phil Winslade teaming up on a Deadshot story. And oh yeah, issue #200 had Eddie Campbell writing a Joker story for Bart Sears.

While it may not always have worked, LOTDK is still the gold-standard for these kinds of rotating-creator anthologies. No other character has ever been able to sustain this kind of book for long periods of time. Certainly, much of that has to do with the fact that Batman is Batman - but still, the attempt was made for a surprisingly long time to keep the book special. This was slowly eroded later on in the series' run when it began to tie-in with the Bat-books frequent crossovers throughout the 90s and early 00s - kind of hard to sell a book as an exclusive monthly event when you're selling part 178 of "Knightsend." But the commercial license afforded by putting Batman's name on the cover did allow creators to do some interesting stories which would otherwise never have had a home. It's a rare issue of the series that doesn't have something to offer.

As to the implied question of whether I'll ever return to write more about the series? We'll see. Long-time readers know that old features have a habit of resurfacing at the oddest times. I admit that I got bogged down in Mike W. Barr and Bart Sears' "Faith," wherein Batman enlists a street gang to help beat people up. I could have told you that was a bad idea, Batman, but you didn't listen.

I suck, AMA

It's been busy and I've been lazy, but rather than just allow this blog to go gentle into that good night, it's time to shake things up. After consulting with Mike Sterling, he got through - is getting through - some similar blog-related blahs recently by opening up the comments section for Qs for him to A. That seems like a good idea to get the "juices" "flowing" again. So pop into the comments and ask away. Just don't ask about the return of X old feature - it'll either come back or it won't, depending on the whims of Zephyrus, as with all things.

BATMAN . . . AND HIS FRIEND

BATMAN . . . FOREVER

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Punctuate (Unhinged, 2004)



One interesting aspect of Magic is that the game's immense success has allowed it a great deal of freedom to do weird and interesting things. This is arguably less true now, at a moment when the game is experiencing record-breaking sales and popularity, than it was in the game's first decade. Magic is selling now better than it has ever sold, and if part of that comes from what feels - occasionally, to long-time players like myself - like an increasingly conservative bent in the game's R&D, well, one simply cannot argue with results. (Also, keep in mind that even if I keep my hand in, I'm far from the most enfranchised, or typical, player. My perception of a creeping sameness in the product over the last few years is solely my own dissatisfaction, no different from, say, what you might expect from any kind of pop culture franchise whose fanbase is old enough to measure its history in decades.)

Something Magic used to do that they haven't done in quite some time is go full-in for laughs. In 1998 and again in 2004 Wizards of the Coast released two wholly comedic sets - Unglued and Unhinged. These sets were printed with silver borders, which you can see above. Normal sets are printed with black borders. Early sets also came with white borders, for various reasons, which were eventually mooted once it was decided that black borders looked better. (There have also been, briefly, gold bordered cards, used I believe for non-tournament legal reprints of championship decks. Pokemon does something similar, but Magic's tournament product sold poorly and was discontinued.) People don't like buying cards they can't legally play, which has also been a problem with the silver bordered sets: for obvious reasons they aren't legal in normal tournament formats like Standard, Modern, or Legacy. They're a niche product, then, constructed for kitchen-table players. Now, if that sounds dismissive - it's not. "Kitchen-table" - or lunchroom table, or game-store casual, or whatever you want to call it - is by far the largest "format" in the game.

A "problem" Magic suffers that its cousins in the world of kitchentop RPGs do not have is the existence of the tournament scene. The world of ultra-competitive players and wannabe grinders can act like a vacuum, squeezing a lot of the air out of the discussion of the game - this despite the relatively small percentage of players who will ever achieve success on the tournament circuit. A lot of writing about Magic online takes it as a given that the main audience for Magic is people who fancy themselves buddings pros, and therefore examine every new development with a ruthlessness that, supposedly, speaks to their experience and expertise as competitive players. Players like that have no use for a silver border set like Unhinged. There are a lot more people who play the game infrequently and casually than seriously and competitively - as with any long-running game, I believe - but the people who play it intensely, frequently, and with possible professional aspirations set the tone for much of the discourse.

Still, the Un-sets sold well enough. The problem, according to Mark Rosewater - the man responsible for both Un-sets - wasn't popularity but overprinting. In the decade-plus since Unhinged the game has had a lot of success targeting niche products for audiences outside the normal crowd who buy each regular Standard-legal expansion. The success of alternate formats like Commander, and Wizards' success in selling speciality product directly to that audience, speaks to the company's ability to identify and target multiple demographic niches within the larger demographic of Magic players. Lots of people buy Magic cards. Enough so that there are products aimed specifically at high-ticket collectors who will pay for exclusive reprints, and products aimed at people who exclusively play the Commander format, and oddball releases for unique formats like Planechase, Archenemy, and Conspiracy. The conservatism that occasionally appears in regular Standard-legal expansions does not extend to alternate formats which Wizards of the Coast has invested heavily in supporting.

Rosewater, despite the game's current success, has been trying unsuccessfully to get another Un-set off the ground pretty much since the last once was printed. Even given his track record - and if you look at the history of the sets he has personally spearheaded, he is responsible for a huge part of the game's current prominence - he hasn't succeeded yet. Although I personally am not playing much Magic now - due a combination of time factors and the fact that the Windows emulator on my Mac laptop went on the fritz and I haven't had the wherewithal to devote the afternoon to fixing it* - a new Un-set might actually get me to go back to a gaming store, even if just for an afternoon. Stranger things have happened.

*Magic: The Gathering Online is still only available for Windows. The reason why this is so in the year 2016 is apparently due to bad decisions made when they first began coding the game a decade and a half ago. They have repeatedly maintained that it is basically impossible that the game could ever come to Mac. Which is . . . what it is. Nerds, being nerds, have written a lot about the problem, if you care to look for it.