No Man's Land

Q: I've been doing a big Batman read-through and just got to No Man's Land. Why does that story work so well? -- @thealan81 A: When you consider how complicated it was to put together, how long it dominated an entire corner of DC's line, and how just plain weird it was right from the very premise, it's kind of amazing that No Man's Land works at all, let alone that it works well. You're right, though --- of all the Batman crossovers that the '90s brought to us, the one that closed out the decade by leveling Gotham City and building stories around Batman spraypainting a gang tag on ruined buildings to mark his territory is easily the best. But as for why it works, well, there's one reason that's actually pretty simple. It is, for all intents and purposes, post-apocalyptic Batman.

To say that Greg Rucka had a profound impact on DC Comics in the 21st Century is underselling things quite a bit. After arriving on the scene in the late '90s, he became one of the few writers to have written all three of DC's biggest characters, with critically acclaimed runs on Action Comics and Wonder Woman. It was on Batman, however, where he made his biggest impact, as one of the writers for the year-long No Man's Land crossover, the relaunched "New Gotham" era of Detective Comics, and cowriter of the enduringly influential Gotham Central. Today, we begin an in-depth look back at Rucka's tenure on the Dark Knight, starting with No Man's Land, both the comic and its surprisingly popular novelization, in which Gotham City becomes a dark dystopia following a cataclysmic earthquake; his feelings about the core idea of Batman; and his frustrations on seeing the Joker show up in the pages of Superman.