Tales of the Batman: Steve Englehart

Tales of the Batman: Steve Englehart by Steve Englehart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tales of The Batman: Steve Englehart collects Detective Comics #439, #469-476; Batman #311; Legends of the Dark Knight #109-111; Batman Chronicles #19; Legends of the DC Universe #26-27; and Dark Detective #1-6.

I didn't really notice the creative teams on comics until I was older but I really liked Steve Englehart's Fantastic Four run. Since then, I've read his Doctor Strange run and enjoyed it quite a bit but his Batman runs were hard to come by until now.

This book should be divided into sections: Englehart's Detective Comics run of the late 1970s, his late 1990s/early 2000s run, and the reunion with Rogers and Austin on Dark Detective. I guess that's how I'll review it.

Steve Englehart's Batman is all detective, all the time. The books starts with a very human tale, scripted by Englehart with plot and pencils by Vin and Sal Amendola and inks by Dick Giordano. Batman witnesses a boy lose his parents in a way very similar to the way Bruce Wayne lost his. From there, Englehart and Walt Simonson introduce Doctor Phosphorus before Englehart teams with Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin for a six issue run.

The Rogers and Austin run is one of those legendary runs and deserves its reputation. Batman takes on Hugo Strange, The Penguin, Deadshot, and the Joker, but his realy enemies are corruption in the form of Rupert Thorne and his heart by way of Silver St. Cloud. Rogers and Austin tear it up on art with their lithe, athletic Batman and moody as hell inks and lighting. Englehart does a great job resurrecting Hugo Strange from limbo and making him a headliner and also goes a long way toward reving Deadshot. One more Dr. Phosphorus appearance with Irv Novick and Frank McLaughlin on art and Englehart leaves the Batcave behind for 20 years.

Englehart wrote five Batman comics in late 1999, early 2000. The Riddler three-parter had a weird tone with Batman losing his soul. Dusty Abell and Drew Geraci did a good job on the art but the story wasn't my cup of tea, a little too metaphysical for Batman. The two-parter featuring Joker and Aquaman was too wordy and the art was garish as hell. I found myself skimming it just to get through it. It wasn't good if I'm not getting my point across. There was one bright spot in Englehart's 2000 Batman output, though. Got A Date With an Angle was great. Javier Pulido's moodly, retro art depicted a tale four days into Bruce Wayne's career as Batman. Bruce thinks he can juggle Batman and a love life but we all know how that works out.

The reunion with Rogers and Austin is a nice ending for the book. The dream team reunites thirty years later and picks up where they left off with Silver St. Cloud returning to Gotham with a fiance in tow and the Joker running for governor. It's interesting to see how Rogers and Austin's art has changed over thirty years, it's a little lighter in tone, maybe not quite as in synch, but still pretty good.

I don't know why Englehart's '70s run hasn't been an evergreen book for DC over the past thirty years or so. Maybe because it depicts the Batman as a much more fallible, human character than the verison they've been pushing for the past twenty years or so. Englehart's 1970s run is without peer. I'd give it a five if the book was solely those issues. His middle era of Batman is mediocre apart from Got a Date with an Angle. Dark Detective only suffered from unrealistic expectations.

The way Englehart writes the villains and Silver St. Clouid is the big attraction for me. He makes Hugo Strange, Doctor Phosphorus, and Deadshot seem like credible foes for Batman and his Joker is psychotic criminal to the bone, not the anti-hero some people try to cast him as. Silver St. Cloud goes a long way toward making it seems like Batman has sex, is actually interested in women, and isn't fighting crime all the time.

4.5 out of 5 Bat Signals.


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