BatChat With Matt & Will: A Batman Ranking Podcast

Matt & Will approach comics in very different ways. Matt, who has been reading comics regularly since he was 9, loves comics of all varieties, sometimes the weirder the better. Will has more than once proclaimed that he could go on forever with just Year One era, street level Batman comics with no superpowers. Well, Patreon backer John Wickham took up that challenge with three stories that feature...

We've covered a lot of Elseworlds stories. Those are stories set on a different universe and featuring a different universe's version of Batman. But there are times when the Batman of the main DC Universe, whether that's Earth-0 or Prime Earth or New Earth or whatever you want to call it, travels to some of these other worlds. Patreon backer Matt McThorn is joining us for three of those stories. O...

He's a figure of vengeance. He wears a long cloak. He strikes fear into the hearts of criminals. He's... The Spectre. God's wrath made manifest, The Spectre is the angel of vengeance bonded to the ghost of a dead New York cop, Jim Corrigan. Unsurprisingly, a spirit of vengeance is a character who has teamed up with Batman on more than one occasion. First, we get some of that joyous Bob Haney madne...

Aside from Batman himself, and maybe Dick Grayson, no other character from the world of Gotham has appeared more than the Joker. And in his 85 plus years, he has had some weird adventures. And some that are so damn weird that they wind up in their own episode here. The most normal is the one where Joker inherits a bunch of money and retires from crime for, like, five minutes. From there, the Joker...

Hey, sometimes you go with an easy one. Coming up with episode themes isn't an easy thing, so these episodes where we continue on in runs we've been reading in order allow me to turn off my brain for a week. We're back in Batman Confidential, with three more shorts set in No Man's Land, AzBats has a Christmas season throwdown with a... chilling foe and Catwoman breaks into, out of, and (almost) ba...

Gotham City is in New Jersey, so most of the stories that we cover take place in Matt's beloved home state. Not many stories take place in Will's home state of Alabama. As a matter of fact, we could really only find one. So we're doing that story, as well as two stories from creators who are native to Alabama. This is not at all because Will really wanted to cover Batman: Off-World from Alabama na...

Friend of the show and fellow ComicsXF staffer Tony Thornley is back to talk about one of his favorite types of comic: the intercompany crossover. We read the Marvel half of the recent return to co-publication with Batman and Deadpool, the completely non-sensical most recent Batman/Spawn crossover and the second Batman/TMNT mini-series. The Dead of Knight (Marvel/DC: Deadpool/Batman # 1) Batman/Sp...

Patreon backer Jordan Jennings requested that we read the recent Batman/Green Arrow/Question team-up mini-series, Arcadia, so that makes for an easy theme, right? That mini, plus a story where a Bat characters meets Green Arrow, and one where a Bat character meets Question. Simple. But boy, could we not have gotten three more different stories! Arcadia is a recent, deeply involved in social issues...

The release of new DC media properties makes for some easy episode theme selection! This week, we're tying in to the new HBO Max series from BatChat favorite Tom King, Lanterns, with three stories of Batman teaming up with Green Lanterns. It's surprising how , with all these GLs, there aren't more of them who have teamed up with Batman, so we've got two featuring Hal Jordan and one with Simon Baz...

It's amazing how much Harley Quinn has grown and changed since her first appearance on Batman: The Animated Series. And the biggest and most important change is in her relationship with the Joker. First appearing as a simple henchwoman, then as a regularly abused partner, Harley has grown into an independent characters separate, and possible as popular, as Joker. But that wasn't an easy process. T...

These milestone episode numbers are getting surreal. 250 episodes. Yikes. For this anniversary, we're looking at stories where Bruce Wayne was suspected of murder. Now, if this was the real world, a lazy billionaire would be prime suspect #1 and I wouldn't be surprised. But we are looking at a fictional world that actually has good billionaires, so guess what? Bruce Wayne is innocent of each of th...

If you've listened to this show for any amount of time, you have probably heard Matt talk about his least favorite major DC characters: Deathstroke and Lobo. Deathstroke has a lot of cross over with Batman over the years, being he is one of Nightwing's most significant rogues, and various creators have drawn parallels between them. But how many times can Batman have met Lobo? He's a space bounty h...

Some writers just get a lot of work. Joshua Williamson is one of those guys who has written in a lot of corners of the DC Universe. He had a long run on Flash, wrote the Dark Crisis event, is the current writer on Superman, and is soon taking over Legion of Super-Heroes. He also has spent quite a bit of time in the Batman corner of the DC Universe, with a caretaker run on the main book in between...

Ra's al Ghul and the members of his family are important figures in the Bat mythos, whether they are related just to Ra's or to Batman himself. This week, Matt McThorn is back to talk about some stories involving the House of al Ghul. We start with Greg Rucka's tale of a post No Man's Land Gotham where Ra's makes a play to (once again) bring the city down, follow it up with a story of a Dark Multi...

Welcome to the streets of Gotham. While Batman is a "street level" character, he still is usually fighting with killer clowns, obnoxious geniuses and crocodile men. So who handles all the day to day crime? Well, the Gotham City Police Department of course. And while it is a legendarily corrupt force, there are still cops who do their best (yes, we understand the copaganda of it all, but it's ficti...

We're back to the runs that we're covering in order, with a twist. We've reached the next chapter of Knightquest: The Crusade, where AzBats fights a super assassin with psychological conditioning, and No Man's Land, where we see what the Justice League is doing to help Gotham. But with the Morrison run done, we're filling in some of the side No Man's Land stories we skipped. This time out, we're h...

So, as I (Matt) work my way through my 365 movies in 365 days project, last week I watched the Supergirl movie from the 80s. What a weird, wild movie. I bet some of you didn't even know that this week's Supergirl movie isn't even the first one. Well, it's not, and as good as this may be, it won't have Faye Dunaway as a witch chewing the scenery. What does this have to do with this week's podcast?...

A few weeks ago, comics lost one of the legends of the late Silver and Bronze Age. While Gerry Conway is probably best known for his work on Spider-Man at Marvel, where he killed Gwen Stacy and creating the Punisher, and to a somewhat lesser extent creating Firestorm at DC, Conway had a solid run on both Batman and Detective Comics, as well as writing other Batman stories. In memory of Conway, thi...

It amazes me sometimes that, 242 episodes into this whole thing. how many stories we still haven't read. When Jason Todd tier backer Kyle Still came to me with his options for this week's episode, and one of them included the Batman and Robin tie-in to the Joker-centric event "Death of the Family" I realized that we had never actually done the main arc from Scott Snyder's run on Batman. So, well,...

It's our annual Pride episode of BatChat. It's nice to see that we have plenty of stories we can cover about queer, out Bat characters, you know? We're covering the first of DC's big Pride anthologies, which features stories including Batwoman, The Question (Renee Montoya), Harley and Ivy and Alan Scott Green Lantern, who might not be a Bat character but is certainly connected to Gotham. Then we r...

Of all of DC's obscure characters outside the Bat family, two of Matt's absolute favorites are the Elongated Man, Ralph Dibny, and his wife, Sue. Inspired by Nick and Nora Charles from Dashiell Hammett's novel, The Thin Man, Ralph and Sue are a bantering, loving couple who solve mysteries. They are, as the kids at one point or another said, couple goals. And ignoring the ignominy of Identity Crisi...

There are plenty of legacy characters in the Bat universe; how many Robins are there now? But there are far fewer legacy villains than there are heroes. But before Flashpoint and the New 52 scrambled things, or repositioned them anyway, one of Batman's solid B-tier villains was replaced. Black Mask, a character introduced in the mid-80s, was replaced in the mid-00s. Sam Hopper, Patreon backer and...

The last time we were joined by Patreon backer John Wickham, he played a little game with Will, channeling his inner Edward Nygma, and got Will to select the theme for this episode. The theme we wound up getting were three stories with art by Irish born artist Liam Sharp. And so we have a mini-series written and drawn by Sharp teaming up Batman and Wonder Woman, a Catwoman anthology that has all o...

When a writer works on a character for an extended period of time, it's fascinating to watch how their interpretation of that character evolves. When Patreon backer Josh Weil came to us and wanted to cover the Robins mini-series that won DC's fan voted Round Robin competition, the natural stories to pair with it were other stories written by Tim Seeley that featured Dick Grayson; Seeley had quite...

Not long ago, we did an episode entirely dedicated to Batman stories that originated in Japan. Amongst those stories was a collection of creator Jiro Kuwata's 60s Batman manga, that were adaptations of earlier American Batman stories. This week, we dive into those stories, reading three of them and seeing not just how they rank, but how the compare to Kuwata's versions. The Man Who Quit the Human...