Summary
- In January 1999, Batman’s “No Man’s Land” saga began, where Gotham City was declared a “No Man’s Land” after being ravaged by an earthquake and abandoned by the United States government.
- The Batman titles underwent a year-long event where all four titles told story arcs by different creative teams, creating one overall story. This allowed for different perspectives and fresh voices in the Batman universe.
- The initial story arc, “No Law and a New Order,” introduced the dire state of Gotham City, with supervillains claiming territories and Batman missing. The GCPD attempted to bring law and order but faced challenges and had to resort to extreme measures. Suspense and mystery were key elements of the story, but eventually Batman returned (but in his absence, a new Batgirl had debuted, as well).
In every Look Back, we examine a comic book issue from 10/25/50/75 years ago (plus a wild card every month with a fifth week in it). This time around, we head back to January 1999, for the start of Batman’s historic “No Man’s Land” saga.
Obviously, the idea of a shared universe has been a significant part of the world of superhero comes all the way back to the 1940s, when MLJ comics had the first superhero crossover between the Shield and the Wizard, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that the shared universe concept became heavily embraced by Marvel Comics, and thus, due to its popularity, picked up by pretty much every other comic book company, to the point where DC had a major crossover event designed to make it easier for it to have a shared universe (by narrowing its multiple alternate Earths into one shared Earth).
Meanwhile, in the 1980s, the Batman comic book titles tried a novel concept where writer Gerry Conway would write both Batman and Detective Comics, and treat both titles as if they were just one comic book released bi-weekly, as the story would continue from one issue to the next. Doug Moench followed Conway on the series, and continued the same approach. This setup ended after the aforementioned Crisis on Infinite Earths. However, a few years later, the Superman titles started using a similar idea, only with multiple writers. Each Superman comic book would have its own subplots, but they would share an arc together, so that it felt like you were getting installments of a larger overall story each month. In 1991, with the addition of a fourth title (thus giving it one title a week), the Superman titles even adopted having a small number on the cover in a Superman triangle logo to let you know which order to read the titles.
However, even with all of these novel approaches, it couldn’t match the striking changes that the Batman titles underwent with its year-long event, “No Man’s Land,” that began, of course, in January 1999.
30 Years Ago, Harley Quinn’s Origin Was Revealed for the First Time
A look back to 30 years ago, when Harley Quinn’s origin was revealed for the first time
What was No Man’s Land? What made the Batman crossover special?
Following the dramatic success of the Knightfall crossover event, which led to KnightQuest, and then, finally, to KnightsEnd, the Batman titles under group editor Denny O’Neil would routinely do an annual crossover event between the three main Batman titles at the time (Batman, written by Doug Moench; Detective Comics, written by Chuck Dixon; and Batman: Shadow of the Bat, written by Alan Grant), and the ancillary titles like Robin, Nightwing, Catwoman and Azrael would often get lumped in, as well (and occasionally Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, which normally only told stories set in the past or out-of-continuity entirely). In 1998, that crossover event was Cataclysm, which saw Gotham City ravaged by an earthquake.
This, though, led to the idea that instead of just having Gotham City recover from the earthquake, the United States government would instead take this opportunity to essentially…
This article was originally published by a www.cbr.com . Read the Original article here. .