A Month of Wednesdays: September 2026

BOUGHT: Batman: Gargoyle of Gotham—The Deluxe Edition (DC Comics) Mesmo Delivery and The Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child artist Rafael Grampa's Batman epic is an instant classic, a must-read masterpiece of a graphic novel that is the best Batman comic, perhaps the best superhero comic, in recent memory. The book began life as 2023-2026 four-issue Black Label miniseries (when you see Grampa's art, you'll understand why it took years to publish four issues), and is now available between a single set of covers, in a handsome "Deluxe Edition" that collects Grampa and his collaborators' story along with a substantial introduction and about 40 pages of variant covers by various all-stars and Grampa's preparatory sketches and paragraphs of prose on how the story took shape.Now, I've been reading Batman comics for as long as I've been reading comics—about 35 years now. I sometimes despair that I have at this point read too many Batman comics, as I did when I read the first collection of current Batman writer Matt Fraction's run, as it can be hard for me to be surprised by a Batman comic at this point, and sometimes even the better-written, better-drawn ones seem filled with elements ...