Post-Crisis, Pre-52 Appreciation 2020

[David Walton]

I've been putting together a modern era reading order based on multiple reading order lists I've found throughout my research in the last 6 months or so. Seeing this list, I have a hard time, chronologically speaking, putting Four of a Kind on a list that contais The Long Halloween, or not placing The Man Who Laughs right after Mad Monk, I'll explain, Four of a Kind, they mention two-face before the appearance of Poison Ivy for example, when in the Long Halloween story she is in it even before Harvey Dent gets his face destroyed by Maroni, seeing that, I've scratched Four of a Kind from my list.

About the Mad Monk story, it clearly ends right before The Man Who Laughs, Batman mentions a warehouse full of bodies with a smile on their faces, and then that's the beginning of The Man who Laughs.

Ah, thanks for this. I wasn't aware and I haven't read through the entire list yet as I've just been putting mine together based on it.

Some of the stuff in the list just doesn't fit entirely because of the nature of different writers telling their own 'year one' and 'year two' tales. I think Batman has, like, four or five Halloweens in that first year!

I'm really impressed with the creator's choices, though. I like how he places pre-Crisis issues that are still relevant post-Crisis (like the Ra's al Ghul stuff).

Something interesting about Batman's history (at least in my opinion): there's a 'lost era' in between year three and I don't know, year nine or ten? Mostly because the pre-Crisis stuff still kinda sorta happened but the tone of those stories doesn't fit post-Crisis continuity. So you've got that big stretch of stories between Dick Grayson becoming Robin and Nightwing. It's like you jump almost immediately from year three to the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans stuff and Nightwing: Year One because everyone wants to either write stories about those first three years or the later stuff.