Arkham Manor

When DC Comics announced the new lineup of Batman Family titles a few months back, Arkham Manor was the only one that actually gave me a "wait what" moment. Dick Grayson as a super-spy traveling across the world dealing with stuff like a dude who had his eyes replaced with guns? Sure, makes perfect sense. Hipster Batgirl fighting crime with the power of Snapchat? All for it. Teens running around a creepy boarding school in the one place in the DC Universe where no one in their right mind would send unsupervised children? It's the book I've been waiting for all my life. But Arkham Manor stuck out. Right from the concept, it's this weird variation on familiar themes, trying to twist them into something new. That makes it an inherently interesting idea, even if it's one that I'm approaching with caution as a reader. I want to know what's going on here, and with the first issue out, it lives up to that. More than anything else, Arkham Manor #1 is intriguing.

Listen, all you had to do to get me excited about Gerry Duggan and Shawn Crystal's upcoming Arkham Manor was tell me exactly what it's about. The idea of housing all of Gotham City's most notorious arch-criminals right there in Batman's ancestral home is completely bonkers and incredibly intriguing, and I am exactly the kind of person who is going to be stoked for that from day one. If, however, there was anything that could get me more excited, it's seeing an amazing variant cover for the first issue by illustrator, animation artist and comic book storyteller Eric Canete. It's a phenomenal image, and while the issue won't be out until next month, Canete took to Twitter to post not only the cover, but his whole process from start to finish.

Between three monthly titles, a spot in the Justice League, an ongoing weekly series in print and an ongoing weekly digital-first series, you might be under the woefully mistaken impression that there were enough comics about Batman going around to satisfy everyone's needs. If you are, then you, my friend, are wrong. We always need more Batman. And apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so. Today, DC Comics announced not one, but three new Batman comics, set to be released soon: Arkham Manor by Gerry Duggan and Shawn Crystal, Gotham Academy by Becky Cloonan, Brendan Fletcher and Karl Kerschl, and a digital-first collection of Jiro Kuwata's Bat-Manga, translated and reprinted in its entirety for the first time since it was originally published in Japan in 1966.