(When it comes to DC Comics 2026 is a weird year for anniversaries. One Year Later was 20 years ago, The New 52 was 15 years ago, Rebirth was 10 years ago, and Infinite Frontier was 5 years ago. Because of this happenstance, I thought it would be fun to look at where Superman and Batman were before, during, and slightly after those eras. Thus was born…the admittedly unwieldy title…20/15/10/5.)

I don’t know if you have heard…it’s been in a few of the papers…but Batman is popular.

I’ll give you a few minutes to process this information and come to terms with it.

Anyway, Batman is popular and his popularity hasn’t fallen below a certain threshold since 1989. It was a little earlier for comic book fans. Between Dark Knight Returns and Year One, both published in 1986, and other stories like The Killing Joke, The Cult, and A Death in the Family, comic readers were a little ahead of that game, though to be fair, the ongoing titles were a little rocky until 1988ish. Then the movie happened in ’89 and the dam broke. Three live action theatrical films, one animated theatrical film, and two animated series over two networks along with a metric ton of merchandise followed. Add in the comics, where you had a series of crossover events, five ongoing series, and a stable of Bat-family titles, and the nineties were a good time for the Dark Knight.

(Yes, I’m aware that Batman and Robin was a critical failure and ended that franchise, but one bum note doesn’t absolutely ruin a concert.)

All of which is to say that Batman came into the 2000s on what could be argued was the strongest footing of his publication history.

From a thousand foot view the Bat-titles continued to be successful from 2000 to 2005, when Infinite Crisis started. Looking deeper it’s a little more nuanced. That five-ish year period can actually be split into two different eras. From January 2000 to September 2002 is the first era, and October 2002 to Infinite Crisis is the second. Both eras have their highs and low and both can be looked at in terms of the stories that were told and how Batman was treated as a character.

January 2000 to September 2002

As I wrote earlier, Batman came into the 2000s strong. No Man’s Land was a giant story that managed to do something giant stories normally struggle with and that is to stick the landing. It also gave the titles a new era to play with. There was even a change in the editor’s chair. Denny O’Neil stepped down as group editor of that Batman titles after a fourteen-year tenure. His replacement was Bob Schreck, who had previously worked for Comico and Dark Horse in addition to founding Oni Press. On the creative side Larry Hama and Scott McDaniel worked on Batman, Greg Rucka and Shawn Martinborough were on Detective Comics, and Devin Grayson wrote Batman: Gotham Knights with a rotating roster of artists.

The New Gotham era was stable. For the most part. Hama left Batman after seven issues with Ed Brubaker replacing him. All three of the main Batman titles had their own look and feel and while things weren’t too dissimilar to what had been the standard in the late nineties there were signs that things could and would change. Commissioner Gordon retired after the Officer Down storyline and his replacement, Michael Akins, wasn’t as trusting of Batman as his predecessor was. Alfred left Wayne Manor for a brief period after the events of No Man’s Land. Bruce was assigned a bodyguard named Sasha Bordeux in Detective Comics, which complicated Bruce’s life until she discovered that he was Batman and even joined him on the streets.

Batman, as a character, was also relatively stable. Brubaker, Rucka, and Grayson, along with occasional Batman writer Brian K. Vaughan, all portrayed Bruce as focused on the mission, sometimes to the detriment of his relationships with his allies and in having anything resembling a work/life balance. The stories in Detective by Rucka veered slightly into science-fiction with villains that could shift into animal forms but were mostly grounded. Brubaker’s Batman was also grounded, and he even brought back the character of Lew Moxon, who in the pre-Crisis era was ultimately responsible for the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne. Grayson’s stories in Gotham Knights were more character driven and focused on the lives of the Bat-family.

Grayson also added some bits and bobs to the backstory. Some were small, like Alfred and Leslie Thompkins being more than friends. Some were larger, like James Gordon slept with his brother’s wife and was Barbara’s biological father.

Overall, the main Bat books were a reliable place to go month after month for a satisfying read.

This era ended with the one-two punch of Bruce Wayne: Murderer and Bruce Wayne: Fugitive. Vesper Fairchild, former love interest of Bruce Wayne, is found dead at Wayne Manor and both Bruce and Sasha are arrested. Things go from bad to worse as Bruce begins to shut out everyone around him. Eventually he escapes and vows to live only as Batman, which leads to a confrontation with Nightwing in the Batcave. In the end, the real murderer is revealed (I’m being vague here on purpose in case you want to read the story and don’t want it spoiled) and Bruce has another moment of realizing that his life is missing something and that he needs to learn to rely on his “family” more.

It’s not a completely happy ending, but it’s a good one.

It’s also one we had seen before. During No Man’s Land, Bruce initially tried to solve every problem by himself before realizing that he had to rely on his allies for help. What separated the Murderer and Fugitive resolution from this was in No Man’s Land Bruce felt like a failure because he wasn’t able to stop the government from isolating Gotham from the rest of the United States. In the case of Murderer/Fugitive it was more dealing with the fact that the walls between his two lives were breaking apart, and he felt the only way to deal with that was to just stop being Bruce Wayne entirely. The outcomes were similar but the reason for them were different.

Looking back on this first era as a whole I can’t help but think how lucky Batman was as a character. The early 2000s was a weird time for mainstream comics in general and DC was not immune from that. To be fair, the early years of any decade are kind of a hangover period from the latter years of the previous decade in terms of the culture, especially pop culture. Things don’t reset just because the year ends in zero. It takes a year or two or three for the new culture to form and during that time there’s this weird uncanny valley feeling where part of our brain wants something new and different and the other part that is used to how things are. It usually takes something big to shake us out of that particular funk.

For DC as a whole, things were haphazard on that front. Many of the titles were still going on as if it wasn’t a new decade, much less a new century, much less a new millennium. The books that got new creative teams tended to weather that easier because it was a new creative team, so things were changing right from the jump. Other books took a little longer. Batman managed to avoid most of that with strong writers and strong storylines. The change that happened was slow and eased the reader into the new normal while also giving readers a bold new era to either jump on to (like I did) or one to stick around for.

Was everything amazing? No, but it was consistently enjoyable.

And then, in October of 2002, “something big” finally happened. Batman #608 hit the stands. The first chapter of a storyline that would quickly become an evergreen story for the Dark Knight.

The storyline was Hush.

Things were about to get very chaotic for Batman and his family.

But I’ll get into all of that in part 4. Next week I’ll get into Superman in the early 2000s.

More to follow…