Episode 98 – A Tale of Two Moench Tales

Andy and Mike are back and this time they are looking at stories from two different decades but written by the same writer. Doug Moench had two distinct runs on Batman. In the eighties he followed Gerry Conway on Dark Knight writing duties and continued the “Triangle Era before the Triangle Era and without triangles” storytelling style by working on both Batman and Detective Comics. He left the book after Batman #400, but came back to the Batman title in the early nineties just before Knightfall. He would stay on that title until No Mans Land and is one of the rare Bat writers to leave the character and then return.

First up on the docket is Batman #367 and Detective Comics #534, which has a pre-Crisis and even pre-Robin Jason Todd dressed in a fancy costume helping the Batman as he battles Poison Ivy. It’s a standard Ivy plot for the time, but this doesn’t stop these issues from being entertaining. The guys talk about how skimpy Poison Ivy’s outfit is, the very seventies television/Hammer Horror feel to the story, the subplots, and the differences between Don Newton and Gene Colan’s art.

Then they jump forward to 1995 and talk about Batman #525, which was an Underworld Unleased crossover issue. Not that you would be able to tell that as it has nearly nothing to do with the larger event going on. The story focuses on Mister Freeze and his Underworld Unleashed upgrade, but the bulk of the commentary is about Kelly Jones’s art. Mike was not the biggest fan of Kelly’s style back in 1995, but that has changed in a big way over the past three decades.

Below are the covers to the books discussed during this episode

It may not seem like it, but Andy and Mike do like feedback even if they are crap at getting to it. The most direct way to do this is to email them, which you can do by directing your thoughts to overlookeddarkknight@gmail.com. You can also leave a comment over on their Facebook page. You can also leave a comment at the new web home of the show, The Bailey Planet.

Next Time: Andy and Mike jump back to the early nineties and talk about Venom. Not the Spider-Man villain, but a storyline from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight that would later become important to the Knightfall storyline.