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 You’ve seen The Dark Knight and now you’d like to see more of a wealthy playboy dressing up as a shadowy incarnation of justice, especially if that involves getting into fights with an evil clown? JODY MACGREGOR digs through BATMAN comics to help you find some of the best.
Batman has been around since 1939 and over the years he’s changed a lot. Different creators have made him a gun-toting pulp vigilante, a camp caricature, a high-tech gadgeteer, a master of deduction and a grim avenger. That means there’s not much consistency between stories, but it also means you can dive right in with any one of these very different portrayals.
 THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS – Frank Miller
Bruce Wayne, aged 50 and retired, puts the costume back on to clean up Gotham one last time. Frank Miller’s old-man Batman isn’t as fit as he used to be, but he’s still driven to the edge of madness. As well as aged versions of his villains (including a Joker who uses exploding children as weapons and calls Batman ‘darling’), old friend Superman appears, retired from crime-fighting and working as a secret weapon for the government. Miller, never one to let a good story get in the way of politics, turns it into an allegory of the Cold War, but his is still the definitive grim-and-gritty Batman and a perfect ending for the character’s saga. For that reason its sequel The Dark Knight Strikes Again, though kind of amusingly goofy, is probably best avoided.
 THE KILLING JOKE – Alan Moore, Brian Bolland
The balance between mad rants, genius plots and groan-worthy gags makes the Joker a hard character to write. In The Killing Joke, Alan Moore manages it better than anyone before or since. Like the Joker portrayed in The Dark Knight, he plans to prove that deep down everyone is as insane as he is and the thin veneer of society we use to cover up our true natures is the real crime. Best of all, he sings while he does it.
 PLANETARY/BATMAN: NIGHT ON EARTH – Warren Ellis, John Cassaday
The Planetary series is about super-archaeologists who uncover bizarre phenomenon; in this crossover they pursue one such phenomenon to Gotham City. Their target is able to travel between dimensions and, caught in his wake, they tumble through alternate universes – and in every one they meet a different Batman. Warren Ellis uses this as an opportunity to write every version of the character, including the ’60s TV version, who is memorably described by a horrified onlooker as a ‘transvestite hooker.’
Honourable Mentions: False Faces collects the better stories about Batman and his villains (including Ventriloquist, whose dummy commits all the crimes, Mad Hatter and his mind-control hats and Clayface, who actually is made of clay) by Brian K. Vaughan, writer of Y: The Last Man. Another well-written villain can be found in Catwoman: Defiant, which is thankfully nothing like the Halle Berry movie. Many of the comics take the familiar characters and put them in unfamiliar settings – Order Of The Bat throws Batman into 1920s’ England while I, Joker predicts what he and his villains might become in the far future. The collections of Grant Morrison’s run of JLA put Batman alongside Superman, Wonder Woman and the rest of DC Comics’ most powerful characters and prove why he’s cooler than all of them.
All of these volumes are published by DC Comics and should be available on the shelves of your local comic book shop.
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