escapism

...is sometimes a good thing, especially when reading news (or even worse watching them on tv) is as frelling depressing as right now. The main point of this post is to try to get back to that happy space I inhabited this afternoon after unpacking the package with comics that arrived (that also happened to be before I had read online news).

Anyway, I got
Batman: A Lonely Place of Dying
Nightwing: Rough Justice
Essential Spider-Man 2

Also now that Nightwing: Rough Justice finally arrived, I can look forward to reading Nightwing: Love and Bullets and Nightwing: A Darker Shade of Justice as well, which I bought a bit over two weeks ago, when I saw them at a reduced price and got them cheaper. But I didn't want to read with huge gaps. I guess I can live with skipping Nightwing #19 and #20 (which seem to have been part of some crossover called Cataclysm, I think that's part of the Earthquake story) and #23 (probably also part of some crossover that I'm not aware of). I think I'll get at least the Earthquake stories at some point in the future since it seems pretty relevant, but for now there's going to be one more "placeholder" in my head, like "Earthquake story followed by No Man's Land goes here" just as I have one for "Bane, Knightfall and Azrael replacement here" and for other stuff as well, like all the Teen Titans things I heard about with Dick marrying aliens and stuff.

So I'm going to spend some considerable quality time with costumed characters in tights over the next few days, thus being in a much happier place than the here and now -- okay, it's Gotham, still it results in me being in a happier headspace.

Batman TPB and single issues: Cataclysm/No Man's Land

As I research how to proceed with my plan towards world domination getting an overview of recent Batman canon and continuity (heh, the level of difficulty is about the same), I'm accumulating a lot of notes (both paper and electronic) on which stories are published where, what the main events are etc. And of course I continue to promptly misplace or loose them almost as soon as I gathered the information.

So I have decided to post this in my blog, sort of as a "note to self", well a rather public note, but after all there may be other people for whom such an overview might be interesting and more importantly it won't be some obscure text document lost in the unorganized mess that's my hard drive but neatly indexed and visibly posted in my blog, where I can find it.

I don't own most of these comics (yet), so I'm relying on information provided on web sites. My sources are the The Unofficial Guide to the DC Universe, this continuity page, this timeline, this German DC fan page, and information on issues and trade paperbacks provided by various online comic stores.

For now I started with the Cataclysm/No Man's Land time frame.

Corrections are very welcome.

( Overview of how the TPB compare to the single issues. )