Your Batman Reading Order: How to Catch Up on The Dark Knight

No, you don’t need to start with Detective Comics #27 to understand the modern Batman. DC Comics published Year One in 1987, and it’s the definitive origin story for Batman. This book is so important, its influences are obvious in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and the pilot for Batman: The Animated Series. This is where every Batman reading order begins.

As much as I love Batman and his colorful rogues gallery, my favorite stories are ones like The Long Halloween, focusing more on realistic criminals and personal dilemmas. This book centers heavily on Harvey Dent and his fall from heroic prosecutor to Two-Face. It also deals with a serial killer, organized crime, and the relationship between Batman and Alfred Pennyworth, his long-time butler and father figure.

As a kid who came into comics in the early 1990s, Knightfall was all anyone was talking about. The story crossed through all the Batman titles, bringing their collective writers and artists into the same narrative for a full year. In Knightfall, a new villain named Bane arrives, who terrorizes Gotham and eventually breaks Batman’s back. Bruce then appoints Jean-Paul Valley, formerly known as Azrael, to take up the cape and cowl as the new Batman.

Because you can never have enough Robins, DC Comics brought in Grant Morrison to introduce Damian Wayne, the son of Bruce Wayne and Talia al Ghul (that Bruce totally didn’t know about). The dynamic between Damian and Bruce is unlike any other Batman/Robin dynamic, with Bruce having to train the homicidal assassin tendencies out of his only child.

DC Comics likes its reboots. They like to toss aside the trappings and blessings of continuity to start fresh. The New 52 was one of these reboots, and it included a prolific run on Batman from Snyder and Capullo. The Court of Owls is introduced here as an old shadow organization pulling the strings of Gotham City, and Batman is having none of it.

I said DC Comics likes their reboots, right? 2016’s Rebirth was the most recent of these reboots, though the Batman titles didn’t feel the changes quite as much as some other titles. King and Finch took over Batman with a new #1 and introduced a pair of new superheroes to Gotham, ushering in the current volume of Batman.

Elseworlds was a term DC Comics applied to non-canonical, usually alternative-reality stories, now called DC Black Label. The Dark Knight Returns is one of the most famous Batman stories ever, in which a 55-year-old Bruce Wayne comes out of retirement to defend Gotham City from a new, hyperviolent gang called The Mutants. It’s dark, gritty, and pushes back against all the camp that came before it.