BatChat With Matt & Will: A Batman Ranking Podcast

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...

Event comics are a weird thing. And those events that slip in and take over the monthly slots of other comics are even weirder. Could you imagine if Law & Order was cancelled for two weeks to be replaced by Anarchy & Chaos? People wouldn't know what to do with it. But we comics fans are made of sterner stuff. This week, Matt McThorn joins us to talk about three mini-series from DC's Future State e...

When I, Matt, came to Will in the waning days of pandemic lockdown with the idea to this podcast, legally completely unrelated to Battle of the Atom, a podcast I may or may not have mainlined 300-ish episodes of during the pandemic, I figured we'd goof around for a bit, and maybe get in about 50 episodes. That's a decent run, right? Well, looks like it got out of hand, because this week we're at e...

Bat-Mite is a silly character. He is this hopeless fanboy who just doesn't get what a pain in the tuchus he is. But he's not the only mite in the DC Universe, and the others aren't quite as benevolent, if hopelessly backwards. The most notable imp (sorry, Bat-Mite) is Mr. Mxyzptlk, Superman's nemesis who is just kind of an asshole who trolls Superman for LOLZ (The kids still say that, right?). Thi...

OK, so normally I would have something pithy to say about suffering through Will just picking random stuff of dubious quality that isn't available on-line and Batman '66 trades, which I just did. But what I really want to focus on are the vagaries of fate and coincidence. As you'll hear if you just start this episode, we recorded this on March 18th. And three days later, on March 21st, the news of...

I know there are a lot of superheroes who are orphans and would do anything to have their parents back. Maybe they should talk to Cassandra Cain. That particular Batgirl has a much more trying set of parental relationships. We've read a bunch of stories about her and her dad, the mast assassin David Cain. And while we have read only a couple stories about it, the more interesting relationship is b...

When she was created for Batman: The Animated Series, I can't imagine the series creators realized what a life Renee Montoya would have in the comics. Technically appearing in comics before B:TAS premiered because of the much longer lead time for animation, Montoya has gone from beat cop to detective to vigilante to police commissioner and back to vigilante. And most of these changes are thanks to...

The DC Universe has a lot of strange looking characters. King Shark is a bipedal shark man. G'Nort is a walking, talking dog alien. Animal-Vegetable Mineral Man is... well, look him up. Dude looks weird as all hell. But amongst the more macabre looking characters is super villain turned superhero turned super spy Mr. Bones, a guy whose soft tissue, from skin to organs, is invisible, so he's basica...

BatChat has been running now for 4 and a half years, which is pretty unbelievable to me. That is not quite as long as Grant Morrison's 7 year run on the Bat titles. or as tempestuous as the last period if that run. This week, we do indeed arrive at the grand finale of that epic, the final arc of Morrison's Batman Inc., as well as the next arcs of No Man's Land and Knightquest: The Crusade. Expect...

Catwoman has been around for over 80 years, and like all good Bat villains, she has changed with the times. But it's amazing how much of the character has been there through the ages. Patreon backer and friend of the show Sam Hopper joins us to look at the evolution of Catwoman, what has stayed the same and what has changed, in three stories from three different eras. In a Golden Age story, Selina...

We've read plenty of his stories, and if you are a long time listener to the podcast, I'm sure you realize that Tom King is a writer who has some serious variety of placements on the big board. He has multiple stories in the top 10, plus a number of stories lingering near the bottom. Tonight, friend of the show and Patreon backer John Wickham returns, and he's picked some more Tom King, including...

Love is in the air. It's nearly Valentine's Day, and for the past couple of his appearances, Patreon backer and friend of the show Josh Weil has mentioned that he's been considering selecting one of the few truly whimsical and just plane fun stories Tom King has written: "Date Night," where Batman an Catwoman go on a double date with Superman and Lois Lane. And since this week his appearance lined...

Superheroes were an American invention, at least the modern conception of them. But they have spread across the globe and taken on many forms. We've done an episode about Batman stories across the world before, but this weeks we're focusing specifically on Batman stories from Japan. We're reading the first collection of stories that spun out of the 60s Batman TV craze, a more serious tale of a kil...

This week, BatChat is once more joined by Patreon backer and friend of the show Matt McThorn. This time, Matt wanted to talk about times Batman and his allies and enemies crossed over with properties from Dark Horse Comics. So we have Batman meeting Hellboy (and Starman, but that's less of a jump), The Joker trying on The Mask and the Justice League winding up on the farm that serves as the settin...

We read three stories an episode. So with that math, episode 222 means we are ranking story 666, which is certainly a portentous number. It's a number that screams horror. And it's not like we haven't covered plenty of Batman horror on this show. But as we get to that number here, we figured there's no better time to get back to it. So this week, we're reading the first appearance of the most horr...