My Background

What should help inform people of where I'm coming from is going to explain my background in the world of comics.

I, like many of my generation, had my first exposure to comics through superhero cartoons from the 1990's. Mostly I watched Batman and Spider-Man, but I caught X-Men here and there, and I watched some of Superman and Batman Beyond.

But I was growing older, and thought I was "outgrowing" superheros, but then shortly thereafter, superhero movies started coming out. And I loved X-Men, X2, as well as Batman Begins and the Dark Knight. And then I started reading MTV's "Splashpage," which reports on comic book movie and TV adaptations. Then one week they published an article previewing Grant Morrison's "Batman & Robin."

I had no idea who Grant Morrison was, that Bruce had a son, or anything that had really happened in Bat-comics, but Dick Grayson has always been my favorite character. I won't waste time right now explaining why he was my favorite (still is, but for different reasons entirely), but then I realized that Dick Grayson had obviously gone through much more than what was briefly covered in Batman: The Animated Series. So I decided to read Nightwing, and give that a try. And after reading through all 153 issues I was...satisfied is the best way to put it. The first several issues were great. Then it lagged, but I was so far in I knew I had to finish it, and it ended awesomely as well.

Naturally, I thought back to the article I read on "Batman & Robin" and realized that I should continue on. So I read through the first few issues, which were fantastic, and made me want to read more. And then I started working backward, reading "R.I.P.", "Battle for the Cowl", "Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul", etc. And then at a point I decided that I wanted to get a gist of Bat-history, finding all the pivotal titles that explained how the comics arrived to that point ("Year One", "Death in the Family", "Long Halloween", "Dark Victory", "No Man's Land", "The Killing Joke", "Under the Hood", etc.).

And from there I just read everything I could get my hands on in the Bat-verse. And at this point I've read pretty much everything there is to read in the Post-Crisis world of Batman, as well as some Pre-Crisis to boot.

Along the way I've become well-versed in Green Lantern (most of the big Geoff Johns arcs, as well as the Hal Jordan/Parallax stuff from the early 90's, including the origins of Kyle Rayner), started reading Deadpool, read some X-Men (Joss Whedon and Grant Morrison authored work), and some of the early Ultimate Universe stuff (Brian Michael Bendis is overrated by the way).

So there you have it. Now on to the first actual review: Batgirl #1.