Episode 26: The Knightfall Saga 25 Years Later
Twenty-five years ago (at least twenty-five years ago on the day this episode is released) Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #63 hit the stands. That issue marks the official end of a saga (though there would be Aftermath issues and several follow-up stories) that began nearly two years before in the pages of a mini-series called Batman: Sword of Azrael and eventually spread out over all of the main Batman titles and even into the (at the time) new satellite books, like Catwoman and Robin. Knightfall, Knightquest, and Knightsend are the three acts of a story that explores what happens after the Batman is broken and replaced by a man that is much more violent than Bruce Wayne ever was. Tom and I discuss this event from its behind the scenes beginnings (dispelling a myth along the way), to the Venom storyline in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, to Sword of Azrael to the Vengeance of Bane special (where I put my foot down about some people’s perception of Bane as a character) and then into the three movements of the story itself. There are some tangents along the way, but this is an exploration of the quality of the story, what it meant for Batman, and what it meant for us as readers.
Hey, look! Images tied to the episode.
First up is a gallery of the various collected editions associated with the story, including the first trades from 1993 and 1995, the next printings put out in 2000, the mammoth trades released in 2012 and the more recent omnibus covers.
Here are the covers to the trades and single issues of the stories that paved the way or led into the Knightfall saga.
Here are the covers to the novelizations of the story, plus the covers to the cassette and CD releases of the BBC adaptation.
Finally, Tom and I mentioned that an issue of Wizard: The Guide to Comics caused a bit of a dust up at DC. Here is that cover, because it feels like you can’t talk about a big storyline in the ’90s without talking about Wizard.
Next Time: I’m not quite sure what the next episode will be. I am working on a follow up to an episode I released five years ago and I have a few DragonCon panels that I can release, so it will be a surprise.