MAY 2025 - I DON'T WATCH TV ANYMORE

At least not like I used to. I grew up watching TV. As a child, I was enamored with my Saturday morning and weekday afternoon cartoons, as you might expect. Everything from HE-MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, THUNDERCATS, and TRANSFORMERS to SUPER FRIENDS to THE SMURFS and GARFIELD AND FRIENDS. I also followed the adventures of THE DUKES OF HAZZARD and THE A-TEAM in live action. I watched TV all the time through elementary school, high school, and college. I took in the TV shows my parents grew up with via "Nick at Nite" and weekday syndication (I have very specific memories of watching THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW anytime I was home sick during elementary school). There were the TGIF sitcoms on ABC (PERFECT STRANGERS was always my favorite). Must-See TV on NBC. STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and DEEP SPACE NINE during the nineties "Golden Age" of first-run syndication. In terms of animation, you had BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, X-MEN, and SPIDER-MAN on Fox Kids when I was in middle school and high school. Then DRAGON BALL Z and GUNDAM WING, among many others, on Toonami during college and beyond.

Then the early twenty-first century brought me THE OFFICE, PARKS AND RECREATION, 30 ROCK, MODERN FAMILY, and more in the comedy genre, as well as 24, PRISON BREAK, LOST, and a slew of other network dramas with a similar serialized feel. In a way, these were -- to me, at least, someone who didn't watch the pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime -- the precursors to "prestige" or "peak" television. Which I'm not sure why we call it that; it was never all good -- but by the later part of the 2000s, I was watching it. I was engrossed with MAD MEN, BREAKING BAD, and THE WALKING DEAD on AMC, and JUSTIFIED on FX, as well as -- having finally gotten an HBO subscription -- BOARDWALK EMPIRE and GAME OF THRONES.

I watched a lot of TV around that time, in the aughts and into the teens. And I liked most all of it. MAD MEN is one of my all-time favorite television experiences ever. I love that show; at the risk of a little hyperbole, I'd even say that I cherish it (or at least I do the first three seasons; I find that my interest plummets the further the narrative moves into the sixties). Likewise, JUSTIFIED, which I adored. GAME OF THRONES was great for the first several years. BREAKING BAD was amazing, but not something I'm particulary attached to; I can't really ever see myself watching it again. And I will never understand how THE WALKING DEAD became the cultural juggernaut that it remains to this day. I gave up on that one a few seasons in; it was too dark and depressing for me. The final scene I ever watched was when a certain baseball bat connected with a certain beloved character's face, and I never looked back (though I did often question why I had even stuck with it for that long, in hindsight).

MARCH 2025: I TAKE THINGS TOO LITERALLY

And we're back! So far, so good with this new format. And this month I even have something of interest (at least to me) to talk about!

Not too long ago on the Marvel Masterworks Message Board, in a discussion about X-Men Omnibuses, the dreaded Chuck Austen was name-dropped. I was there when Austin's run on UNCANNY X-MEN was published. I read it. I actually thought it started off okay, but it quickly went off the rails and ended as one of the most rightly reviled stretches in the title's history. However -- even when it was briefly good, it wasn't what I was expecting.

See, in advance of his run, Austen did an interview with WIZARD magazine where he said that to prepare, he had gone back and re-read the 1970s Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum issues. I'm assuming he was a kid when that material was published, because he seemed to consider it the X-Men's gold standard, even more than the subsequent Claremont/John Byrne run. So naturally when he said this, I figured, "Great! He'll probably bring back Banshee and redeem him from Joe Casey's character assassination. Maybe they'll even visit his castle! Maybe they'll fight Count Nefaria or something. I bet we'll get some good swashbuckling Nightcrawler action. Ooh, maybe he'll even bring back Eric the Red!!

None of that happened. In fact, Austen's run bore zero resemblance to the Claremont/Cockrum run I loved. Aside from Nightcrawler and Wolverine, it was a completely different cast. The stories did not in any way, shape, or form, call back to that classic run. It didn't "feel" like the run in terms of style, either.

FEBRUARY 2025

Happy belated New Year, everyone! Today is the first day of the rest of this blog's life. I'm still trying to figure out the new format, but at present I think I'm going to go with sort of an "Items of Interest" approach with little mini-headlines. For example...

A BOLD NEW ERA CALLS FOR A BOLD NEW BANNER!
Which is what I'm working on my spare time at the moment. I've been using those ol' John Byrne corner box heads from the late seventies/early eighties for quite a few years now, but I feel like it's time to retire them and sort of... personalize things a bit more. See, I don't talk about it all that much around here, but I like to draw. And so I figured maybe the banner should reflect that. To that end, I'm doing brand-new corner box heads in my own style, which will adorn the new banner once they're finished. Here's a sneak peek at the penciled versions of some of them:

(You'll note that I've started with the "unafilliated" characters and the Fantastic Four plus FF-adjacent characters. But there are more coming! I'm working on the Avengers right now.)

Now when I say "my style," I should clarify what I mean. I generally draw more cartoony than this, but I want to keep with the general aesthetic I've had here since the beginning. So cartoony is out, at least for this project, as I utilize my seldom-employed "super-hero" style -- which looks vastly different from my "everyday" drawings, and which takes about three times longer to boot! You may be able to tell that I'm obviously heavily influenced by Byrne (as well as some of my other favorites; Alan Davis and Mark Bagley top of the list), so ultimately what you see up top will not look all that drastically different from what you're used to. The main difference will be that I drew it myself!

But the other difference is that I'm changing up some of the looks and characters you'll see up there. I thought, after so long with the Bronze Age dominating the banner, that perhaps it's time I presented this blog adorned with the stars of "my" Marvel -- which is sort of a mix of eras. So you'll see the X-Men of the nineties, Avengers of various eras, some characters (chiefly Power Man, Iron Fist, and Moon Knight) who had their heydays in the seventies and early eighties, and some characters very much of the period when I read Marvel religiously in my teens, such as the Scarlet Spider, "Professor" Hulk, and the Thunderbolts. It'll be eclectic, but I think it will nicely represent my ideal or "iconic" Marvel Universe. I'll go into more detail when the banner is finished and published.

In other news...

WHAT HAVE I BEEN READING LATELY?
This site was always, first and foremost, about examining comics, graphic novels, and the like. And just because I've decided to retire from writing long-term in-depth posts about same, doesn't mean that I've stopped reading them! So as I put up these monthly-ish posts, I'm going to try to mention things I've read lately. We'll start with a tome I finished a while back: FLASH GORDON VOLUME 4: THE STORM QUEEN OF VALKIR from Titan Books. This installment picks up where my Flash Gordon review of a number of years past ended. Creator Alex Raymond has left the strip, turning artistic duties over to his former assistant, Austin Briggs. Scripter Don Moore remains aboard.

This was an odd one. For those who read along with my Flash posts way back when, you might recall that when Raymond departed, all seemed well for our hero and his friends. Ming the Merciless had been vanquished some time earlier, and more recently, Flash had also defeated a new warlord named Brazor to restore peace yet again to Mongo. Thus the next volume, which collects all of Briggs' run on the Sunday strips, begins with a bit of a clean slate, and an odd status quo -- Flash is the president of Mongo.

You may be wondering, isn't there someone more qualified to be president, like maybe Prince Barin and/or his wife, the reformed daughter of Ming, Princess Aura? When we last saw them, they were indeed leading a council that ruled over Mongo following Ming's overthrow. But Barin and Aura are nowhere to be seen in these stories. At all. They were regular recurring cast members for years while Raymond was on the strip. True, they'd drop out of sight for (sometimes very long) stretches at at a time while Flash went off his various expeditions, but they always came back. Yet here, in a run of four years, we never see or even hear of them once. It's bizarre, especially considering the original scripter is still on board!

So instead we have President Flash ruling Mongo and battling the latest warlord to challenge the peace: this time, it's Ming's heretofore unknown son, Kang the Cruel. Kang is the regular antagonist through Briggs' full run, though there are many stories interspersed between his run-ins with Flash. Stories in which Flash and Dale find themselves in strange lands, where strange princesses fall immediately in love with the dashing Flash. I guess even with a new artist, some things never change!

In the end, Flash defeats Kang and once again restores peace to Mongo, and continues on as president. Oh, and Professor Zarkov, as always, drops in and out of the story, frequently disappearing just long enough that you think the creators might have forgotten his existence, until suddenly reappearing.

Like I said, it's kind of odd, and it's just a long rehash; four more years repeating everything Alex Raymond did during his decade on the strip. I get that newspaper strips were disposable entertainment; you read your daily paper and threw it away, and I get that there would always be new readers who might have missed all this stuff the first time around. And further, I get that Raymond's run was a full ten years long, and Moore's is four or so. But nonetheless, the blatant reptition is kind of crazy! You'd think they'd at least try to do something different now and then.

ANYTHING ELSE?
For now, I don't think so. I'm easing into the new format here, so I'm going to keep this post fairly brief. (This was brief?!) Next month, I think I'll have more to talk about, so I hope you'll join me!

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO MY FINAL POST...

...I couldn't pull it together! I started writing it, more than once. I had the thoughts in my head, but I couldn't get them out in a coherent fashion. I think partly it was simply because I didn't want to admit to myself that I was bringing this thing to an end. But also, I think on some level it was because I really and truly wasn't ready to stop. Like I said last month, I still have the desire and interest to do this. It's just been hard to find the will to do it.

Which got me thinking: maybe it's not that I'm burnt out on blogging. I absolutely still want to blog. Maybe I'm just burnt out on the grind of writing about long runs, one issue at a time. In fact, I think I'm burnt out on writing about short runs too, in the more freewheeling format I have employed on occasion for mini-series, one shots, etc.

So maybe what I really need is not to retire from blogging entirely, but rather to change my format and schedule. To that end, I've been thinking. When I first started this site, it was absolutely primarily intended to discuss comic books. But there was also other stuff. Occasional posts about Marvel movies or various TV shows or even once or twice, a novel. All that stuff fell by the wayside pretty quickly as I decided to focus entirely on comics, but it was there originally.

So now I'm thinking that maybe I get back to posting about whatever. An occasional comic, something I've watched, something else I've read, and so forth. And on a less demanding schedule than once a week. Right now, I'm imagining something like once a month or every few weeks. Heck, I don't even think the schedule would be set in stone. The posts would likely be longer, and in more of a "catch-all" vein -- rather than each post being about a single subject, it would be a number of things on my mind at that particular moment.

Now -- I think (or perhaps I should say that I know) a lot of people came here for the comic book stuff. After all, that was, as I said, this site's ultimate raison d'etre once I settled into my groove. So to those who aren't interested in sticking around to see where we go from here, I understand completely. But if you've come to like my writing over these past twelve or so years, then I hope you'll at least stick around to give the new format a chance.

And to be sure, there will always be comic book (or comic book adjacent) content here. Just not the way it used to be. So let's give it a try, shall we? A bold new era for "Not A Hoax" begins next week, and I hope you'll join me for it!

THE UNBOXING: 2024

One more bit of business before we wrap things up. Back when I had the time and motivation*, I used to do a regular monthly feature here where I went through the assorted trade paperbacks and hardcovers (and later, digital comics as well) that I acquired. Then I stopped, in large part because Marvel and DC drastically scaled back releasing things I was interested in, but also because I essentially ceased buying trades, preferring hardcovers whenever possible. However, I did start working The Unboxing into my annual "Happy New Year!" posts, going through notable items I had picked up over the prior year. But since next week's "Happy New Year!" will also double as my farewell, I don't really want to clog up the proceedings shilling a bunch of books. However, I did pick up some great things over the past year and would like to share them here for those interested. So, let's go for it right now, shall we?

(Note: The following will include, in addition to the afore-mentioned books I own, books I have pre-ordered for the coming months as well, given it's unlikely I'll be doing another of these posts next year!)

We'll start off, as always, with the most prolific publisher on my bookshelves, Marvel. From January through to today, I've grabbed the following volumes from the House of Ideas:

• AMAZING SPIDER-MAN OMNIBUS Vol. 6: I'll keep buying these numbered AMAZING SPIDER-MAN OMNIBUS volumes for at least one more installment. This book collects Marv Wolfman's run on Marvel's flagship here from the late seventies, and so the next book should cover Denny O'Neil's run, and will hopefully line up with the SPIDER-MAN BY ROGER STERN OMNIBUS Marvel published many years ago.
• CAPTAIN AMERICA BY MARK GRUENWALD OMNIBUS Vol. 1
• CAPTAIN AMERICA BY MARK GRUENWALD OMNIBUS Vol. 2: After years of publishing Mark Gruenwald's long CAP run via the Epic Collection trade paperbacks, Marvel has finally seen fit to give this material the Omnibus treatment. Gruenwald is the definitive CAP for me, so I'm in for all the books in this series, which should be three in total (though I will admit that I would've preferred it be split into a set of four, as the first book, which I already have, is extremely thick, and I so I expect the second, coming this summer to be equally cumbersome.
• IRON FIST: DANNY RAND: THE EARLY YEARS OMNIBUS: I have no idea why it took Marvel so long to get this material into an Omnibus! They published it in an ESSENTIAL volume many years ago, and then in two MARVEL MASTERWORKS well over a decade ago at this point. After that came an Epic Collection in 2016 -- but finally, in 2024, we have received a proper oversized hardcover collecting this classic material by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, among others.
• NEW WARRIORS CLASSIC OMNIBUS Vol. 3: Not a lot to say about this one, other than that it's nice to see the series finally finished! Marvel published volume 1 some time back, then... nothing. Until they reprinted it in 2023, then published volume 2 this year, followed by the final installment in the coming year.
• SPIDER-MAN BY DAVID MICHELINIE AND MARK BAGLEY OMNIBUS Vol. 1
• SPIDER-MAN BY DAVID MICHELINIE AND MARK BAGLEY OMNIBUS Vol. 2: I love Spider-Man by Stan Lee and John Romita. I love Spider-Man by Roger Stern and his various collaborators, chiefly John Romita, Jr. But Spider-Man by David Michelinie and Mark Bagley -- this is my Spider-Man. This was the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN I read every month in middle school and early high school, my "Personal Golden Age". So when Marvel announced this two-volume series, there was no doubt I was going to pick them up. Volume 1 came out this year, and volume 2 is coming in 2025.
• WOLVERINE/GAMBIT: VICTIMS GALLERY EDITION: Last year I noted that I had picked up (or was planning to pick up) the Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale Gallery Editions of SPIDER-MAN: BLUE and DAREDEVIL: YELLOW. I passed on HULK: GRAY and DAREDEVIL: YELLOW, because I'm not as big a fan of those two. But WOLVERINE/GAMBIT: VICTIMS, the duo's very first work at Marvel from the mid-90s, has been a favorite of mine since it was published when I was in high school, and I'll be very happy to own it in this gigantic format when it releases in 2025.
• X-MEN 2099 OMNIBUS: I read three series in Marvel's 2099 universe in the nineties -- SPIDER-MAN, DOOM, and X-MEN. Marvel published the first of those in Omnibus format a couple years ago, and now we have the third. My recollection is that X-MEN 2099 was my favorite of the three series, so this is one I'm quite happy to own and look forward to reading. (As for DOOM; that's getting an Omnibus release as well, in 2025! I just haven't decided if I want it. While I liked the early issues by John Francis Moore and Pat Broderick, eventually Moore left the series and Warren Ellis took over, and I strongly disliked his run -- so I'm not certain I want to bother with this one.)
• X-MEN: MUTANT MASSACRE PRELUDE OMNIBUS: This book, reprinting a bunch of UNCANNY X-MEN, NEW MUTANTS, and X-FACTOR issues, among varius mini-series, annuals, etc. from the mid eighties. is ginormous. Like, way, way, too big. But it fills an important hole in the X-Men Omnibus collection, so I had to get it. I may sprain a wrist whenever I finally read it, but at least I have it.
• X-MEN: ROAD TO ONSLAUGHT OMNIBUS Vol. 1: Years ago, I opined that the year between "Age of Apocalypse" and "Onslaught" was one of my favorite periods for the X-Men. I can't quite explain it; I just really enjoyed that period. I bought the three ROAD TO ONSLAUGHT trade paperbacks Marvel published around that time, but we've now reached a point where they're upgrading the material to an Omnibus, so yes, I'm buying it. It'll take two hardcovers to encompass the contents of those three trades (with a few things added that the trades skipped), and I'll be extremely pleased when I have them both on my X-shelf!
• X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS OMNIBUS: I loved John Byrne's HIDDEN YEARS series. I know it has its detractors, but for my money, it was the best X-title coming out at the time. Certainly it was the one I looked forward to reading most every month, So, even though I owned this series in two trade paperbacks, I was more than happy to "double-dip" on the Omnibus this year.
• X-MEN: X-TINCTION AGENDA OMNIBUS: A long time ago, Marvel released an X-TINCTION AGENDA hardcover. It collected that event, and nothing else, and it fit neatly between the two X-MEN BY CHRIS CLAREMONT AND JIM LEE Omnibuses. But now, Marvel has expanded the contents of that book to include several odds and ends from that era, including some annuals and limited series, so naturally, in order to ensure my hardcover X-Collection is as complete as possible, I had to pick this up.

Then, from the Distinguished Competition, a smaller handful of books:

• DC/MARVEL: THE AMALGAM AGE OMNIBUS
• DC VS. MARVEL OMNIBUS: I don't think anyone imagined these two books would ever happen. When George Pérez was dying and Marvel and DC wanted to honor him by rereleasing JLA/AVENGERS, it took small armies of lawyers on both side to make it happen; and even then the result was a simple trade paperback with a microscopic print run. But something obviously changed, because here we are in the year 2024 (soon to be 2025), with nearly all of the Marvel/DC crossovers issued or about to be issued in Omnibus format!
• SPY VS. SPY OMNIBUS: I read MAD magazine sporadically as a child, and my favorite feature was always the Spy vs. Spy strip by Antonio Prohías (though I didn't know his name back then). So, on a lark when DC reissued this Omnibus recently, I picked it up.
• SUPERMAN: THE TRIANGLE ERA OMNIBUS Vol. 1: Having read the initial Post-CRISIS Superman material some years ago, I've had an interest in continuing with it. At one point, DC had released a hardcover called THE EXILE, which picked up immediately after John Byrne's run ended, but I passed on that volume (though it did get a reissue this year). But recently, DC released this ostenisble first book in a series collecting the so-called "Triangle" period of Superman (called such due to the fact that every issue of the Super-titles featured a little triangle on its cover telling readers where it fit into the year's reading order). At some point, I will read this and decide if I want to keep going with it.

And as always, I have a few titles from a couple of indepenent publishers, Clover Press and Fantagraphics, respectively:

• TERRY AND THE PIRATES MASTER COLLECTION Vol. 7
• TERRY AND THE PIRATES MASTER COLLECTION Vol. 8
• TERRY AND THE PIRATES MASTER COLLECTION Vol. 9
• TERRY AND THE PIRATES MASTER COLLECTION Vol. 10: I mentioned last year that I'd started grabbing these books reprinting Milton Caniff's magnum opus newspaper strip, TERRY AND THE PIRATES. Throughout the past year, I've acquired (or will be acquiring in coming months) four more volumes in the series. I believe after volume 10, which is due out in March, there will be only two more books to finish the series.
• CARL BARKS DISNEY LIBRARY Vol. 1: PIRATE GOLD
• CARL BARKS DISNEY LIBRARY Vol. 2: FROZEN GOLD
• CARL BARKS DISNEY LIBRARY Vol. 3: MYSTERY OF THE SWAMP: As always, I continue to pick up Fantagraphics' Carl Barks books, which have finally, thirteen years after the series started, moved backward to collect Barks' earliest Duck stories!

But that's not all! After all the above, I've saved possibly the best for last: from IDW, we have a doozy: the JOHN ROMITA'S AMAZING SPIDER-MAN DAILY STRIPS ARTISTS'S EDITION. I found about this volume under some sad circumstances; in 2023, the day John Romita Jr. announced his father had passed away, I was reading tributes to the senior Romita online and stumbled across the fact that this book was forthcoming, and I immediately pre-ordered it. I've mentioned more than once on this blog that John Romita is by far my absolute favorite of all the Silver Age Marvel artists. Above Kirby, above Ditko, above Buscema, in my pantheon, there sits Romita. (And Romita's inks made all his peers in the 60s Bullpen look a million times better, too!) I wanted to publish a post here when Romita died, but I had already praised him at length in my look back at the Spider-Man newspaper strip, among other posts here, and frankly, I was too dismayed by his death to prepare any sort of coherent post about it.

But the fact remains that I have long considered the Spider-Man newspaper strip to be the pinnacle of Romita's work with the character. It's breathtakingly beautiful, and to own so much of the "original art" in a massive tome liked this is something I had dreamed of but was never sure could actually happen. The fact that it did, and that I own it, is still a little hard to believe. This volume is one of the crown jewels of my comic collection.

And that's it; the final Unboxing is in the bag. Come back next week for my final Hail and Farewell post.

---

*That's "motivation", not "interest". I have always had interest in doing The Unboxing. I just never actually feel like doing it.

THE END...?

I think I've known this day was coming for a while now, but I had trouble admitting it to myself. However, I've reached a point where I havd no choice but to "rip off the Band-Aid" and just come out and say it -- "Not A Hoax!" is coming to end.

I suggested things were going this way in a comment on BATMAN #357 a couple weeks ago, and today I'm confirming it. But for those who are curious as to how and why, I figured I might as well throw a few more words out there onto the web before I call it a day (or a decade, as the case may be).

For many years, whenever time permitted, I have worked pretty far ahead of schedule on this blog. There was a period, shortly after the birth of my son, where that wasn't possible, and I was stringing together posts basically the night before they were to be published for a while. But eventually I corrected course (partly due to scaling back my output from two days a week to one; a schedule which had itself been reduced from a whopping three days a week when the blog first started), and got back to a point where I was way ahead of schedule again. All those posts on AVENGERS by Bob Harras and Steve Epting? Every single one was written before the first one even went up here. And the same held true for Gerry Conway's Batman. I had all the posts written somewhere around the fall of 2023 -- and as such, I decided, as I often did when I found myself with a large enough cushion, to take a brief break before moving on.

The problem is, the break never ended! I was going to get back in the saddle at the beginning of 2024 to start whatever my next project might be, but when January rolled around, I wasn't ready yet. But I figured it was no biggie; I was still a full year ahead of schedule, so I'd take a few more months off. Then before I knew it, it was spring and then summer, and I still wasn't ready to start! But again, I knew I still had half a year left, plenty of time. Yet I still just never did anything.

And so, as of last week, I exhausted my full cushion and have nothing to follow it. And while the above may sound like procrastination, I don't think that's the right word to describe it. I still want to do this. I have any number of series and runs that I would love to read and write about! I spent much of the past year thinking about what to do next, bouncing around between two or three ideas, and fully intending to commit to and start one of them. But the issue is less that I've been putting the work off and more that I just don't have, I dunno, the will to do it. I absolutely and unequivocally want to do one of those handul of ideas I was bandying about -- I just don't feel like doing it.

I think maybe I'm just burnt out on the whole process... the reading, the writing, and the work that goes into gathering and uploading screencaps. (And yes, I'm saying this with a straight face after mocking up that fake Spider-Man cover you see above. If nothing else, I do want to go out with a bang -- and doing that took far less time than it might have taken to read and prepare a full post about the same issue!)

But -- I did stick that question mark in my post title up top. Is this really the end? I don't know. Maybe it's just an extended hiatus. Maybe I'll find that motivation I've been missing, and want to get back into this in another six months or a year or whatever. Or maybe I retool my format and do something else with this blog. But if it is over, eleven-plus years, looking at many long runs and countless short ones, across multiple titles and publishers, seems like a pretty good body of work. I've never considered myself a particularly scholarly or professional reviewer, and I have always worn my heart on my sleeve with regards to the stuff I love (and for that matter, the stuff I hate), so there is absolutely bias of some sort in nearly every post you'll find here. But people seemed to like what I did, and I had a lot of fun doing it (until I finally ran out of steam).

All that said, I've got one post left. I have always begun each year with a "Happy New Year!" post that functioned as sort of a combination year in review and look forward, and I see no reason not to do the same this year, as a way to cap things off. So I'll be back in two weeks, on December 30th, to do just that. Let's save our tearful goodbyes until then, okay?!

DETECTIVE COMICS #526

Presenting: the 500th appearance of the Batman in the pages of DETECTIVE COMICS.

"ALL MY ENEMIES AGAINST ME!"
An ending -- and a beginning, presented by:
Writer Gerry Conway | Artists: Don Newton & Alfredo Alcala
Letterer: Ben Oda | Colorist: Adrienne Roy | Editor: Len Wein

The Plot: Penguin arrives at a meeting of Batman's enemies called by the Joker. Joker explains that Killer Croc is out to kill Batman, and wants to beat him to it. Catwoman, present but hiding, leaves to warn Batman. Talia, in attendance, voices her objection and the villains turn on her, but she escapes by using Captain Stingaree as a shield when Mister Freeze tries to blast her. Talia and Catwoman both soon show up at the Batcave to warn Batman, though the Caped Crusader needs to separate them from fighting each other first.

Meanwile, Dick Grayson is on his way home from the Circus when Waldo the Clown and Jason Todd catch up with him. Waldo tells Dick he has the license plate of Croc's right-hand man, Slick, so Dick has Waldo and Jason come back to Wayne Manor with him. Meanwhile, Commissioner Gordon arrives at the theater where Joker's meeting was held, with his daughter, Barbara, tagging along. They're shocked to find Captain Stingaree frozen inside. Barbara finds a cigarette on the ground and leaves to change into Batgirl. Dick, Waldo, and Jason arrive at Wayne Manor, where Alfred tells Dick that Batman just left with Talia and Catwoman. Batgirl then appears and shows Dick the cigarette, which she believes belongs to the Pengin. Robin and Batgirl head out on their motorcycles, asking Commissioner Gordon to put out an APB on Slick's car.

Batman, Catwoman, and Talia arrive at an abandoned train station leased by the Riddler, and find him inside along with the Cavalier, the Mad Hatter, and the Scarcrow. The heroes defeat the four villains easily, though the Hatter vanishes. Meanwhile, Jason Todd finds the entrance to the Batcave and figures out that Bruce Wayne is Batman. Out in the city, a mocked-up Bat-Signal summons Batman, Catwoman, and Talia to Gotham Park, where Signalman, the Spook, Mister Freeze, and Black Spider are waiting for them. The trio makes quick work of the villains, and Batman finds a piece of a city map in Signalman's pouch.

The police have found Slick's car at the Gotham Zoo, where Robin and Batgirl arrive to join them. Gordon leads them into the reptile house, revealing that Croc has fed Joe and Trina Todd to the crocodiles. Robin leaps into the pen and swats the reptiles away, dragging the Todds' bodies away from them. Meanwhile, Joker visits Croc at the Gotham Men's Club and tells him that the other villains are trying to kill Batman before he can. In the Batcave, Jason finds an old Robin-esque costume and puts it on. Just then, Batman, Talia, and Catwoman return to analyze the map. Jason sneaks into the Batmobile's trunk while the Batcomputer informs Batman and friends what part of Gotham the map depicts. The trio heads out again.