I have never read No Mans Land, that’s the Batman story line from the late 90s, right? Is it worth going back to?
Yeah, I think it stands up and is in many ways what every Batman EVENT will ever be chasing and trying to match in scope. It's 80 fucking parts across like 15 different books. The first trades left out half of the issues.
There's sorta a thematic MAXI-ARC that begins in "Cataclysm"/"No Man's Land" then continues into "Officer Down" before finishing in "War Games"/"War Crimes" that spun out
Gotham Central and was treated as this look at Gotham as an entity itself, and Batman as a piece of that and an unique piece who can be both savior and terror, and also the places for Jim Gordon and the GCPD who operate in a world where Batman and his team does so much of their jobs and can bend or ignore laws they can't.
Catwoman's second series also begins to follow this path and is where the "conclusion" of the arc truly is. And unlike Snyder's similar attempt at this, it basically does little with Bruce Wayne, it does things with Bruce but mainly in his place as Batman, and control issues within the team and the city and not Bruce as a Wayne or whatever else. Like his main theme for the arc is Bruce's obsessive need to control events in Gotham, No Man's Land takes this away from him, and after "Officer Down" he tries to force a rebuild on it that culminates in "War Games."
This was sorta stuff (Bruce's obsessive need to control) Snyder explored especially in METAL of all things, but in this arc it's grounded in the real world. There's very very little superheroics of that kind of scope. The famous visit in No Man's Land has Superman come into the city to help and find that he doesn't understand Gotham on a level that allows him to use his powers for anything good, he's more effective as Clark Kent, the farmer in helping fix up a community garden.
NML is my favorite single storyline probably, but that huge arc formed from the multiple storylines and also spun-off into the two series of
Gotham Central and
Catwoman is overall my favorite take and "definitive" set of Batman/Gotham stories. The characters are fallible and have to deal with that for the most part. Especially in their relationships with others. Like Bruce and Jim. There's a moment where they argue and Jim snaps at Bruce for sending first Azrael and then Dick in as Batman (after Knightfall) while trying to play it off like they were the same person all along. And Bruce's recent pattern of generally not trusting Jim of all people.
Gotham Central obviously explores Gotham from the view of the GCPD detectives and their views on Batman are all over the place.
Catwoman uses its unique position of her "outside the law" in a way Bruce isn't to explore the consequences of that on other people in a way they can't with Bruce's side-characters since they can't just kill off Dick, Barbara, etc. or have them murder someone or whatever. They're tied together by existing in the same temporal place and events spinning off into them. The events of NML, lead to the rise of Black Mask in the vacuum and he never really gets brought down in the other books, it's
Catwoman that winds up being the denouement for that plot as a result of the strands of plots that were in that book leading to that point.
So...yeah...check it out. No Man's Land that is, the rest is just some silly benji wank.
