A few weeks ago, comics lost one of the legends of the late Silver and Bronze Age. While Gerry Conway is probably best known for his work on Spider-Man at Marvel, where he killed Gwen Stacy and creating the Punisher, and to a somewhat lesser extent creating Firestorm at DC, Conway had a solid run on both Batman and Detective Comics, as well as writing other Batman stories. In memory of Conway, this week we're reading three stories he wrote. We have a one-off featuring the return of the Silver Age Mystery Analysts of Gotham City, a two parter featuring Two-Face and a story from Brave and the Bold where Batman solves a space mystery with Green Lantern and the Guardians of the Universe

The Adventure of the Houdini Whodunit (Batman V.1 # 295)

Half a Hero is Better than None (Batman V.1 # 346, Detective Comics V.1 # 513)

One of Us is Not One of Us (The Brave and the Bold V.1 # 173-174)

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It amazes me sometimes that, 242 episodes into this whole thing. how many stories we still haven't read. When Jason Todd tier backer Kyle Still came to me with his options for this week's episode, and one of them included the Batman and Robin tie-in to the Joker-centric event "Death of the Family" I realized that we had never actually done the main arc from Scott Snyder's run on Batman. So, well, that sort of settled things. This week we read a story that features, as Will calls him, "the gayest Joker ever," as Joker, who at this point has no face, does everything he can to show how much he loves Batman in stories from the New 52 volumes of Batman, Batman and Robin and (sort of anyway) Detective Comics.

Death of the Family (Batman V.2 # 13-17)

Little Big Man (Batman and Robin V.2 # 15-16)

Nothin' But Smiles (Detective Comics V.2 # 16-17)

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It's our annual Pride episode of BatChat. It's nice to see that we have plenty of stories we can cover about queer, out Bat characters, you know? We're covering the first of DC's big Pride anthologies, which features stories including Batwoman, The Question (Renee Montoya), Harley and Ivy and Alan Scott Green Lantern, who might not be a Bat character but is certainly connected to Gotham. Then we read a fun Batwoman/Montoya adventure, and dip into the very lady forward, and queer lady forward, DC Comics Bombshells universe.

DC Pride 2021

The Time of Your Life (Batwoman V.3 # 17-18)

Enlisted (DC Comics Bombshells # 1-6)

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Of all of DC's obscure characters outside the Bat family, two of Matt's absolute favorites are the Elongated Man, Ralph Dibny, and his wife, Sue. Inspired by Nick and Nora Charles from Dashiell Hammett's novel, The Thin Man, Ralph and Sue are a bantering, loving couple who solve mysteries. They are, as the kids at one point or another said, couple goals. And ignoring the ignominy of Identity Crisis, Ralph and Sue made it through any problem with a smile, a wink and the twitch of a nose. Being a detective himself, you'd think Batman and Elongated Man team-ups would be mysteries. This week, well, two out of three ain't bad. We read their first meeting in the Silver Age, an early Justice League story and a more recent story where Ralph and Sue team up with one Matches Malone.

Museum of Mixed-Up Men! (Detective Comics V.1 # 331)

Z– As In Zatanna– And Zero Hour! (Justice League of America V.1 # 51)

Rubber Soul (Batman: Gotham Knights # 41)

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There are plenty of legacy characters in the Bat universe; how many Robins are there now? But there are far fewer legacy villains than there are heroes. But before Flashpoint and the New 52 scrambled things, or repositioned them anyway, one of Batman's solid B-tier villains was replaced. Black Mask, a character introduced in the mid-80s, was replaced in the mid-00s. Sam Hopper, Patreon backer and friend of the show, returns this week to talk about the death of the original Black Mask and the rise of his replacement. Expect lots of talk and pondering of how much editorial interference is involved in all of these stories...

Backward Masking (Catwoman V.3 # 50-52)

Life After Death (Batman V.1 # 692-697)

Arkham Reborn # 1-3

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The last time we were joined by Patreon backer John Wickham, he played a little game with Will, channeling his inner Edward Nygma, and got Will to select the theme for this episode. The theme we wound up getting were three stories with art by Irish born artist Liam Sharp. And so we have a mini-series written and drawn by Sharp teaming up Batman and Wonder Woman, a Catwoman anthology that has all of four pages of Sharp in it, but a ton of great work from other creators, and a mini-series drawn by Sharp and written by Garth Ennis. Oh, Garth Ennis, comics' greatest superhero hater. We have a lot to say there

The Brave and the Bold: Batman & Wonder Woman # 1-6

Catwoman 80th Anniversary 100 Page Giant

Batman: Reptilian # 1-6

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When a writer works on a character for an extended period of time, it's fascinating to watch how their interpretation of that character evolves. When Patreon backer Josh Weil came to us and wanted to cover the Robins mini-series that won DC's fan voted Round Robin competition, the natural stories to pair with it were other stories written by Tim Seeley that featured Dick Grayson; Seeley had quite a history with him after all, from Grayson through his ongoing to that mini-series and beyond. So here we have the first arc of the Rebirth era Nightwing, the Robins mini-series, and a team up of carnies, with Dick working with Deadman.

Better Than Batman (Nightwing: Rebirth, Nightwing V.4 #1-4)

Being Robin (Robins #1-6)

Down the Road (Batman: The Brave and the Bold V.1 #13-16)

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Not long ago, we did an episode entirely dedicated to Batman stories that originated in Japan. Amongst those stories was a collection of creator Jiro Kuwata's 60s Batman manga, that were adaptations of earlier American Batman stories. This week, we dive into those stories, reading three of them and seeing not just how they rank, but how the compare to Kuwata's versions.

The Man Who Quit the Human Race!( Batman V.1 # 165)

Batman Battles the Living Beast-Bomb! (Detective Comics V.1 # 339)

The Weather Wizard’s Triple Treasure Thefts! (Detective Comics V.1 # 353)

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Event comics are a weird thing. And those events that slip in and take over the monthly slots of other comics are even weirder. Could you imagine if Law & Order was cancelled for two weeks to be replaced by Anarchy & Chaos? People wouldn't know what to do with it. But we comics fans are made of sterner stuff. This week, Matt McThorn joins us to talk about three mini-series from DC's Future State event, an event that led into one of the most important initiatives in DC history: 5G. Wait, what? 5G never happened, and so this was just sort of like an Elseworlds that some reverberations in continuity but mostly was quickly forgotten? Well, crap. But at least a couple of these were really fun!

Future State: Dark Detective # 1-4

Future State: Catwoman # 1-2

Future State: The Next Batman # 1-4

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When I, Matt, came to Will in the waning days of pandemic lockdown with the idea to this podcast, legally completely unrelated to Battle of the Atom, a podcast I may or may not have mainlined 300-ish episodes of during the pandemic, I figured we'd goof around for a bit, and maybe get in about 50 episodes. That's a decent run, right? Well, looks like it got out of hand, because this week we're at episode 234 and ranking our 700th story. Thanks to everyone who is listening, and we're celebrating with an episode where we talk about more individual stories than we ever have before. We're covering three anthologies: the last volume of Batman: Black and White we haven't, an issue of the grey lady of Batman anthology series, Legends of the Dark Knight and one of those big anniversary anthologies.

Batman: Black & White V.4 Trade (Batman: Black & White V.2 # 1-6)

Stories (Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight # 94)

Detective Comics V.3 # 1,027

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Support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/batchatwithmattandwill