I feel like Batman got short shrift this Batman and Football month. Since we're almost out of time, here's a link to the song that R.E.M. wrote in 1992 for Batman Returns:

Winged Mammal Theme

I don't love it, but at just just under three minutes in length, I find it a lot more palatable than the nearly twice as long and much more widely known One Word Wonder Batdance.

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98/2668. Dames (1934)
You have to watch an hour of not very entertaining romantic comedy to get to the giant Busby Berkley finale play-within-a-play. But it's worth it.

99/2669. The Kid Detective (2020)
A dark, dark take on the elevator pitch "What happens to Encyclopedia Brown when he grow up?" It shares the cynical comedic sensibilities of Inherent Vice, and I'm sure it would horrify most Donald J. Sobol fans (which is kind of the point). I enjoyed it.

100/2670. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026)
Despite what I'd read in reviews, I found this sequel more engaging than the first, probably because it leans harder into Easter Eggs from games deeper in the Mario Bros. canon.

101/2671. Gunga Din (1939)
I was constantly distracted by the studio's choice to have Indian Gunga Din played by a 40-year-old white man, which makes him seem more like someone with a mental handicap as opposed to an adventurous boy. Otherwise, Cary Grant is fine as a British sargent.

102/2672. Destination Tokyo (1943)
Cary Grant is also fine here as a U.S. Navy captain, though the too-long picture felt unfocused for a wartime submarine slice-of-life melodrama.

103/2673. The Man Who Laughs (1928)
This is the movie Bob Kane credits in his 1989 autobiography, Batman and Me, as the inspiration for the Joker in 1940's Batman #1. Specifically, "a 'photo-play' edition of [the Victor Hugo source novel], made from the screenplay," illustrated with a "photo of Conrad Veidt as Gynplaine." Given that almost everything else in Batman and Me is bullshit, this story probably is, too. (Kane couldn't even be bothered to verify that in the original French, Hugo named his character "Gwynplaine," which is how it is spelled on the silent film's English intertitle cards.) I don't care for the Joker, and neither did I care for this movie. Pacing is too slow in all the wrong parts, and I learned only after the fact that the unearned "happy" ending is a Hollywood rewrite of Hugo's original (but not particularly better) intent. At least now I've seen it and don't have to watch it again.

More to come.

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Today is the official "Batman Day" as declared by DC Comics, whose press release encourages you to celebrate by buying their newest Batman comic, Batman of Two Worlds, for the surprisingly reasonable price of $2.99. That's not bad for 2026. I mean, these days $3 will barely buy you a half gallon of gas (or half a copy of any monthly issue of Detective Comics). Take what you can get, Bat fans.

Here at Wriphe.com, we will celebrate with the best One Word Wonder in television history:

Batman

Whap! Biff! Oooof! Take that, Matlock.

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What makes American superhero comic books so great?

Exhibit one, your honor:

Injustice 2 #16, January 2018

Trash cans are a cowardly and superstitious lot.

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College football isn't the only thing that's fucked up in 2026. Everything is fucked up in 2026. Including Batman.

Back in April, DC Comics published their latest annual "event" story in which the biggest names (read: most economically valuable intellectual property) in the DC Universe had to fight to the death to earn the power to — I shit you not — stop a guy from killing everyone. In the fourth issue of that awful series, Batman violates his no-kill rule by cheerfully driving a stake through the Joker's chest (thus saving his pal Superman's life so that Superman could... kill Lex Luthor with heat vision). Does Batman ever express remorse for this? No. Like everyone else involved in this story, he sensibly chooses to pretend it never happened.

Seriously. Don't read this story.

This approach to storytelling explains why I don't buy or read Batman comic books anymore. The same guy who wrote this event story is also the guy who writes the industry's best-selling comic, Absolute Batman, which, based on sales numbers, must be *everybody* else's Batman. The first issue is now on its twelfth printing in just 20 months. That's crazy. It took twelve *years* for The Killing Joke to get a twelfth printing. At this point, I might be the only person who hasn't bought a copy of this thing. And I absolutely still won't. Absolute Batman is just a broke asshole on steroids. None for me, thank you.

My Batman is this badass who forces his son to spank pirates with swords:

"Blackbeard's Crew and the Yacht Society," Batman #4, Winter 1941

Show 'em how it's done, boys.

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I interviewed Vince Sullivan at Comic-Con back in, I believe, 1993. I don't recall him saying he wanted a character that had unearthly powers. I think he just wanted one as colorful [as Superman] and able to do amazing things.

—Mark Evanier, newsfromme.com, July 6, 2026

If you don't know, Vince Sullivan was the first editor of National Allied Publications' Action Comics and Detective Comics when they both sold for 10¢. By all accounts (including Bob Kane's, right at the start of chapter 4, "A Vision Inspired by Da Vinci," in his notoriously inaccurate autobiography, Batman & Me), it was Sullivan who in early 1939 encouraged a young Kane to create a character that eventually became The Batman.

The point here is that by 1993, when Detective Comics cost $1.25, I had already been collecting Batman comic books for years. I eventually acquired most of the Batman comics that had been published during my lifetime, but I never seriously considered trying to own a complete run because the early issues seemed impossibly distant. Fifty-four years was a long time! No one could ever catch up on that many comics!

However, as the anecdote above about Batman's literary origin indicates, the man who ordered his creation was still very much alive and attending comic conventions at the time. (He died at age 87 in 1999 when Detective Comics cost $2.25.) Five decades probably didn't seem so long ago to someone who lived through them. And now that an additional 33 years have passed, I have to admit that 1939 is starting to feel closer than ever to me, too.

Which is not to say that I'm harboring any rekindled urge to collect 'em all. I quit collecting Batman when DC "killed" him off in 2009 when Detective Comics regularly cost $2.99 (though Batman's death was marked up to an opportunistic $3.99). Add that a copy of Batman's first Detective Comics appearance sold at auction in May for $1,525,000, and I think we can all agree that the best time to buy one has long passed me by. I wonder how long Sullivan held on to his?

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If you were keeping track of such things, DC Comics' latest Batman Day was this past Saturday. By all accounts, things went really well for comics retailers, who seem to have sold out of this week's Marvel Comics' Deadpool/Batman #1 inter-company crossover issue.

*ahem* "Clear to whom."

Yes, you read that right: The book was published by Marvel, not DC. It has been literally decades since competitors DC and Marvel agreed to put their intellectual properties in the same comic book, but, whether I agree with it or not, it is a fact of life that nothing is more important in 2025 America than the Almighty Dollar. Printing a comic with Deadpool and Batman in it is functionally the same as printing money, so of course they did.

Demand was unnaturally high for this, even considering the enduring appetite that some readers have for these two characters. I hear secondhand reports that a significant portion of buyers were new customers drawn in based on their familiarity of these characters' movie appearances. I cannot tell you how rarely that actually happens. Less surprisingly, many of these new customers bought multiple copies for speculation purposes. Comic companies have learned from past experience, and there were 20 covers to choose from. Too bad those speculating customers haven't learned from past experience the truth that few if any of those copies will outpace inflation in investment value. They'd be better off investing their money in crypto. (The currency, not the dog.)

I have no idea how many copies of Deadpool/Batman were printed. Publishers do everything they can to keep those numbers a secret these days because they're usually shockingly low, often (much) fewer than 15,000 copies. (If you want to follow along at home with a calculator, know that the average cover price is $3.99 with something near a 50/50 split between retailer and publisher.) But the recent relaunch of Batman #1 (cover price $4.99) is widely reported to have sold through half a million even before starting a second printing. Of course, that book also has 56 different covers (starting at $5.99), counting the many retailer incentive variants and event exclusives in addition to the open order and blind bag alternates. (If all those terms boggle you, please stay away from the comic book market. It's not safe for you. Frankly, It's not safe for anyone who values their pocketbook or their sanity.)

Don't worry that you might have missed out, though. There is a follow up coming from DC in November, naturally called Batman/Deadpool #1. That way they both get to be number ones! (Which they say will sell more. If They say it, who am I to question?) And this one will also have 20 covers. Isn't comic collecting fun?

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When my aunt told me I had to wear a mask to a masquerade ball she was throwing on Saturday, there was really only one option.

Beware, evildoers!

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Welcome to the 20th Annual Wriphe.com Batman and Football Month!

Twenty years is a long time. Not so long for Batman, though. He's a spry 87 years old and still fighting crime!

Not that you'd know he's an octogenarian from reading comic books. Comics have a way of sliding time so that "the past" is always no more than twenty years ago. For example, when Batman has a flashback to his college football days in 1978, it somehow looks like the facemask-free 1950s.

Batman Vol. 39, No. 304, Oct 1978

Some people will go to any length to stay young.

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