Death of the Family question

[Wilby65]

Okay so I am new to DC comics and since I did love Batman as a kid I decided this would be the first new comic for me and I decided to start from #1 of the New 52. I am now on issue 13 where Death of the Family starts. I looked up the reading order and found the arc is like 25 issues. So my question is do I need to read each of these other books to get the story or if I just read the chapters in Batman will I know what's going on?

[Don C]

You can just read the Batman issues. The other stuff is side stories with the Batman Family.

[brucekent12]

The book you have is a collection of the Bat family's dealings with the Joker from Scott Snyder's arc. You can definitely get the whole story just from reading Batman,If youre a Joker fan or a fan of the other family members then read that.

[SpOck]

If you're going to read tie-ins, I suggest Batman and Robin.

[PyroSikTh]

Batman #13-#17 is the complete story - 5 issues.

The other 20 are tie-ins in Detective Comics, Suicide Squad, Catwoman, Batgirl, Nightwing, Batman and Robin, Teen Titans, and Red Hood and the Outlaws. As a whole I thoroughly enjoyed them. I thought they added quite a lot to the story seeing as it's about the Bat-family as much as it's about Joker, but they all deal with personal issues. Suicide Squad was probably my favourite tie-in, the Teen Titans and Red Hood crossover tie-ins were half good, half bad (Tim and Jason parts were pretty cool, their ancillary team members teaming up was...not that great), Catwoman was the only awful tie-in if only for the fact that it was pointless, Nightwing was entirely forgettable, but not that bad, Detective Comics is the only one I have trouble fitting into the timeline, but again fairly enjoyable, and Batgirl and Batman and Robin were pretty good.