Batman is the reason I read comics.
I’m from a fairly small island called Bute, just off the west coast of Scotland, and when I was a kid, there were no comic shops there (there still aren’t), just a few small newsagents that didn’t really carry many comics at all. 2000AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine were regularly available, but that only came to my awareness after Detective Comics.
In the spring of 1994, I was staying with my older sister for a couple of days, and to occupy myself I decided on a whim to pick up Detective Comics #674 from one of the local shops. I had no idea what was going on in comics. I didn’t know why Bruce Wayne wasn’t Batman anymore, or why Batman was wearing this awesome armour. It turned out that this was KnightQuest, and one of my sister’s friends, who just happened to be visiting that day, was clued up on current comic events and explained to me the whole Bane/broken bat/Jean Paul Valley situation.
I was hooked. I was able to get Batman comics from the same shop fairly regularly until I moved to Newcastle a few months later, at which point I was able to visit dedicated comics retailers on a pretty regular basis (pocket money allowing).
I was a DC kid. I started buying various titles such as The Ray, Anima, Superman, Huntress, and I got hooked on ‘Zero Hour’ and its tie-ins, but Batman was always the mainstay. I collected for a couple of years, but eventually we moved back to Bute, and by that time my interest had started to wane. Comics disappeared from my life, as I was spending more and more money on Warhammer gaming, and playing guitar and chasing girls were becoming a lot more interesting. When I was about 20 years old I sold all of my comics to pay some bills.
Flash forward to 2011. Again on a whim, I picked up a pre-owned copy of the Batman: Arkham Asylum videogame and as I was playing, I got really into not just the game itself, but the various character biographies that you unlock as you play. I started to get nostalgic for my comic-reading childhood, so on a trip to Waterstones, I decided to see how things had progressed. I bought the collected trade of ‘Batman: The Long Halloween’ by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale ‘Year One’ was next. The Dark Knight Returns/Strikes Again. Arkham Asylum. A Death In The Family. I was hooked again!
I’ve been collecting again ever since. I hunted down Contagion/Legacy/No Man’s Land in their entirety, and caught up on Scott Snyder’s New 52 Batman, as well a Grant Morrison’s epic run, and I look forward to many more years of tales of The Dark Knight.
I’m actually embarrassed to say that I got my dates confused, and I almost missed the fact that today was ‘Batman Day’, the official celebration of the Character’s 75th anniversary. But I know now, and I felt compelled to write a little something about The Bat.
He is the reason I started reading comics (twice).
He is the mainstay.
He is Vengeance.
He is The Night.
He is Batman.
#Batman75
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