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Batman Post-Crisis #36
Legends of the Dark Knight: Marshall Rodgers
This spectacular new hardcover collects the Batman stories illustrated by Marshall Rogers, whose work helped redefine The Dark Knight as a more human hero. Featuring bold, rich portrayals of The Joker, Clayface, Hugo Strange and The Penguin set in sweeping, gothic portrayals of Gotham City, this book includes Bruce Wayne’s love affair with Silver St. Cloud and her astonishing discovery of his alter ego.
496 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 24, 2017
The first half of this collection is stone cold magic. The Englehart/Rogers stories are some of the best-loved in the Batman canon, and with good reason. These issues are so quintessential that it's difficult to believe that there was a time when these stories didn't exist, that they haven't always been there. These tales are essential reading and it's a shame DC hasn't done a better job making them available to all the generations of Batman fans that have come along since the issues' initial publication.
Then there's the second half of the book.
It's not as great.
There's a six issue arc from Legends of the Dark Knight that is pretty forgettable. Englehart isn't the writer and Marshall Rogers' work has transmogrified into a weird almagamation of Jim Balent and Brian Bolland but it doesn't do either man justice.
Things get a little better when Englehart returns for a miniseries called "Dark Detective" but the lightning of their initial run doesn't get recaptured.
The first half of the book deserves five stars while the second probably doesn't net more than two and a half or three. Call it four stars and know that it's brilliance mixed in with more than a little disappointment.
Then there's the second half of the book.
It's not as great.
There's a six issue arc from Legends of the Dark Knight that is pretty forgettable. Englehart isn't the writer and Marshall Rogers' work has transmogrified into a weird almagamation of Jim Balent and Brian Bolland but it doesn't do either man justice.
Things get a little better when Englehart returns for a miniseries called "Dark Detective" but the lightning of their initial run doesn't get recaptured.
The first half of the book deserves five stars while the second probably doesn't net more than two and a half or three. Call it four stars and know that it's brilliance mixed in with more than a little disappointment.
September 24, 2015
imo a good place to start if youre dipping into batman comics for the first time but have a bit of knowledge from movies, cartoons, etc. Has well known villians such as joker or two face but ones id never heard of (the calculator was a funny one). Silver St. Cloud was a completely new character to me, I enjoyed her story but less so in the later comics where she returns to gotham - after breaking up with her fiance to reunite with bruce, she's kidnapped by the joker and about to be tortured in her underwear when batman saves her. yawn. a disappoining change from the Silver who would usually get into trouble from following an investigative type impulse - peering round that corner, calling out to batman, visiting bruce in that odd hospital. anyway I like her and how cool would it be if she returned as a villian.
November 15, 2023
I am normally not a fan of these creator centric scatter-shot collections. This book in particular spans 18 years of publication over its 496 pages, and yet there is a strange thread of continuity due to the fact that the creative team of Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers, and Terry Austin all reunited some 17 years later and revisited some plotlines from their previous run on the character. This book compiles out of print collections like Batman: Dark Detective and the bulk of Batman: Strange Apparitions.
The restoration is hit and miss. (See The OCD zone below for more details.) In some issues you can see the brilliance of the team of Rogers and Austin, while others are a complete disservice to their artwork.
Steve Englehart rules! He does a great job with ongoing plotlines and organically shuffling in Robin as well as classic villains like the Joker, the Penguin, and the super obscure Doctor Hugo Strange. Boss Rupert Thorne remains a thorn in Batman's side. Englehart ties up all of his loose ends and hands the book over to Len Wein with issue 478, a personal favorite of mine. My Mom bought it for me on vacation in the summer of 1978 at a rural northern Michigan convenience store near my Grandparents' cottage. Wein's narrative style is a lost art in this age of decompressed comic books. He sets mood and tone in a manner that modern comic writers can't pull off. The “pictures do the heavy lifting” crowd can call me a dinosaur all they like, but I am sticking to my guns on this one. Len Wein also rules!
Roy Thomas does a great retelling of Batman's origin in Secret Origins #6. I am not a DC expert, nor do I pretend to have a firm grasp on their myriad continuity. I freely admit to having a double standard when it comes to DC. With Marvel, things must fit likes pieces in a puzzle. With DC, anything goes as far as I am concerned. It's completely liberating, albeit completely unfair, but there you have it.
Rogers' artwork actually improved with age, as clearly shown in Legends of the Dark Knight Nos. 132-136 (the Siege storyline). Again, these stories are all great reads, and Marshall Rogers is a great artist. It's just a damn shame that his work was immortalized in such a substandard package.
The OCD zone- The branding on these creator centric Batman books sucks. Wouldn't you think that you would want the name of the character in the title of the book? This is an embarrassing oversight on DC's part.
DC can be infuriating with the way that they do their collected editions. For example, they include the covers as a cover gallery in the back of the book as opposed to putting them before each issue as a chapter marker. We get a solid black blank page before each issue when they could have just as easily placed the cover there. This is clowntown, and I'm not referring to the Joker, folks.
The Detective Comics issues are an embarrassment. Seriously, this is comic book restoration amateur hour. The recoloring is harsh and sloppy, with cheesy gradient airbrush blends. Did DC hire first semester Photoshop students to do the recoloring here? It's that bad. The color palette isn't even close to the original publications, which is blasphemous. It's not like they did some bang up recoloring the material using the latest computer coloring techniques.
The linework is obliterated and/or pixelated, depending on the page. It's really sad, because these are such great issues. A few pages look okay, but the '70s issues are a hackjob in terms of restoration. I suspect that DC starts out with a price point in mind and then cuts any and all corners to meet that MSRP. DC cheapens their product to meet that $50 price point. Folks like myself who buy these high end hardcovers are put off by the cheapness of the restoration and materials, and they end up bailing on future purchases. Meanwhile, the $50 price point doesn't attract some mythological mainstream bookstore buyer. It's the ultimate lose-lose scenario.
All of the recoloring looks garish compared to the original issues, and there are, shall we say, “liberties” taken throughout the book. Pick an issue, any issue, and you will see deviations from the original color palette. I will be laying awake in bed all night, counting the rotations of my ceiling fan as I try to fall asleep. Thanks a lot, DC.
DC used to use cheap mando paper in many of their “high end” hardcovers, which was laughable to those of us who buy tons of these books. So DC switched paper stock to super bright white, high gloss stock, which is even worse. While it is a good weight coated stock paper and is excellent for modern material with computer coloring, it fails miserably on the flat four color printing process material. The vintage material in this book looks positively garish, like Marvel Masterworks from 8-10 years ago.
Glued binding on so-called high end hardcovers is a complete joke. Having said that, this book lays reasonably flat, a feat even more remarkable when you consider that DC uses super squared, wedge-blocked hardbacks. It lays flat within the first and last 30 or so pages, which is again impressive considering how tight so many hardcovers with glued binding are.
The gutters are tight, a problem compounded by the glued binding and square block binding. The image actually curls around into the gutter, requiring you to tilt the book back and forth in order to see everything. This isn't a problem unless you try to, you know, read the words on the page.
The restoration is hit and miss. (See The OCD zone below for more details.) In some issues you can see the brilliance of the team of Rogers and Austin, while others are a complete disservice to their artwork.
Steve Englehart rules! He does a great job with ongoing plotlines and organically shuffling in Robin as well as classic villains like the Joker, the Penguin, and the super obscure Doctor Hugo Strange. Boss Rupert Thorne remains a thorn in Batman's side. Englehart ties up all of his loose ends and hands the book over to Len Wein with issue 478, a personal favorite of mine. My Mom bought it for me on vacation in the summer of 1978 at a rural northern Michigan convenience store near my Grandparents' cottage. Wein's narrative style is a lost art in this age of decompressed comic books. He sets mood and tone in a manner that modern comic writers can't pull off. The “pictures do the heavy lifting” crowd can call me a dinosaur all they like, but I am sticking to my guns on this one. Len Wein also rules!
Roy Thomas does a great retelling of Batman's origin in Secret Origins #6. I am not a DC expert, nor do I pretend to have a firm grasp on their myriad continuity. I freely admit to having a double standard when it comes to DC. With Marvel, things must fit likes pieces in a puzzle. With DC, anything goes as far as I am concerned. It's completely liberating, albeit completely unfair, but there you have it.
Rogers' artwork actually improved with age, as clearly shown in Legends of the Dark Knight Nos. 132-136 (the Siege storyline). Again, these stories are all great reads, and Marshall Rogers is a great artist. It's just a damn shame that his work was immortalized in such a substandard package.
The OCD zone- The branding on these creator centric Batman books sucks. Wouldn't you think that you would want the name of the character in the title of the book? This is an embarrassing oversight on DC's part.
DC can be infuriating with the way that they do their collected editions. For example, they include the covers as a cover gallery in the back of the book as opposed to putting them before each issue as a chapter marker. We get a solid black blank page before each issue when they could have just as easily placed the cover there. This is clowntown, and I'm not referring to the Joker, folks.
The Detective Comics issues are an embarrassment. Seriously, this is comic book restoration amateur hour. The recoloring is harsh and sloppy, with cheesy gradient airbrush blends. Did DC hire first semester Photoshop students to do the recoloring here? It's that bad. The color palette isn't even close to the original publications, which is blasphemous. It's not like they did some bang up recoloring the material using the latest computer coloring techniques.
The linework is obliterated and/or pixelated, depending on the page. It's really sad, because these are such great issues. A few pages look okay, but the '70s issues are a hackjob in terms of restoration. I suspect that DC starts out with a price point in mind and then cuts any and all corners to meet that MSRP. DC cheapens their product to meet that $50 price point. Folks like myself who buy these high end hardcovers are put off by the cheapness of the restoration and materials, and they end up bailing on future purchases. Meanwhile, the $50 price point doesn't attract some mythological mainstream bookstore buyer. It's the ultimate lose-lose scenario.
All of the recoloring looks garish compared to the original issues, and there are, shall we say, “liberties” taken throughout the book. Pick an issue, any issue, and you will see deviations from the original color palette. I will be laying awake in bed all night, counting the rotations of my ceiling fan as I try to fall asleep. Thanks a lot, DC.
DC used to use cheap mando paper in many of their “high end” hardcovers, which was laughable to those of us who buy tons of these books. So DC switched paper stock to super bright white, high gloss stock, which is even worse. While it is a good weight coated stock paper and is excellent for modern material with computer coloring, it fails miserably on the flat four color printing process material. The vintage material in this book looks positively garish, like Marvel Masterworks from 8-10 years ago.
Glued binding on so-called high end hardcovers is a complete joke. Having said that, this book lays reasonably flat, a feat even more remarkable when you consider that DC uses super squared, wedge-blocked hardbacks. It lays flat within the first and last 30 or so pages, which is again impressive considering how tight so many hardcovers with glued binding are.
The gutters are tight, a problem compounded by the glued binding and square block binding. The image actually curls around into the gutter, requiring you to tilt the book back and forth in order to see everything. This isn't a problem unless you try to, you know, read the words on the page.
March 4, 2017
This book contains some of the most influential and beautifully rendered Batman stories of any era. Rogers' output on the character was limited, but his two runs with Steve Englehart and his limited work with James Robinson are some of the best work ever done on the Dark Knight Detective.
August 14, 2013
Four stars more for the art than the stories. Though the Englehart tales from the 70's are among the best ever written, the rest of the stories are just ok. Marshall will certainly be missed.
November 29, 2020
Here I am ONLY reviewing the Legends of the Dark Knight story by Archie Goodwin, "Siege". See the Steve Englehart trade for my review of most of the other material.
This story started pretty slow, and I was quite bored of it within a single issue. However, I think it really picked up as it went along. We get to explore the history of the Waynes a bit, for better or worse. This is a story about legacy and inheritance that also functions as a fitting epilogue to the "penthouse era" of Batman comics. Considering the talent behind this story, it obviously reads a bit old-fashioned, but I was impressed that most of the action was directed by the art rather than excessive dialogue. I wouldn't expect that from oldschool creators like Goodwin. All of that being said, this isn't a story that is going to appeal to most people outside of those interested in Bat-history and continuity (like me). It's not the deepest, most exciting, or most emotional story out there. More of a fun diversion for fans of the penthouse era.
This story started pretty slow, and I was quite bored of it within a single issue. However, I think it really picked up as it went along. We get to explore the history of the Waynes a bit, for better or worse. This is a story about legacy and inheritance that also functions as a fitting epilogue to the "penthouse era" of Batman comics. Considering the talent behind this story, it obviously reads a bit old-fashioned, but I was impressed that most of the action was directed by the art rather than excessive dialogue. I wouldn't expect that from oldschool creators like Goodwin. All of that being said, this isn't a story that is going to appeal to most people outside of those interested in Bat-history and continuity (like me). It's not the deepest, most exciting, or most emotional story out there. More of a fun diversion for fans of the penthouse era.
March 17, 2025
This book mostly repeats material I already have in Tales of the Batman: Steve Englehart and Tales of the Batman: Archie Goodwin and I wish I'd realised that before I bought it but hey ho. There are a few snippets here that aren't collected anywhere else, the most significant being the Secret Origins story written by Roy Thomas which is a lovely little alternative retelling of Batman's Origin if Batman:Year One hadn't happened.
Anyway, Five Stars on the strength of Marshall Rodgers art which is superlative throughout but also the material here is just really, really good anyway, especially the Steve Englehart run.
Anyway, Five Stars on the strength of Marshall Rodgers art which is superlative throughout but also the material here is just really, really good anyway, especially the Steve Englehart run.
April 7, 2019
A pretty solid collection of 70s era and some modern day stories. Some of them are excellent and have been adapted into other media already (Laughing Fish) and even elements of Dark Detective were included in Nolan's Dark Knight. Overall, this is a solid collection and contains some of the better 70s Batman stories.
December 11, 2017
If you are collecting 70's and 80's Batman stuff, this is an amazing collection. Marshall Rogers is not quite my style, but if I had read this stuff as a kid, I would have loved it.
February 26, 2013
Five Stars for the 70s material in the first half of the book.
Two Stars for the more recent material in the second half.
Two Stars for the more recent material in the second half.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews