Batman - the Golden Age Omnibus 8

I love these giant omnibus packages. You get a ton of comics you can't afford to buy individually, and if you can get it close to 40% off retail (or more) then it's a real bargain. There are some drawbacks. For one thing, these books are heavy and if you're an old guy (like me), they're hard to handle. Plus you can't read too many stories in a row because you get deja vu all over again. Spread it out over a week or so as to avoid the repetition feelings you're likely to get.

Well, I have mixed feelings about this. If you’ve tried to collect Golden Age Batman reprints, you probably know that every few years DC starts repackaging them in some new format and then, when sales dip, they ditch the format and start over again at the beginning. What that means of course is that the first years have been collected over and over, but the later part of the Golden Age mostly hasn’t. When they started doing these omnibuses, I wasn’t interested at first because I thought they’d do the same thing and ditch them after the first few, but by the time they got to around Volume 5 and were still putting them out at a steady pace, I got interested because it seemed like they might actually finish a series this time, or at least soon get to material that mostly hasn’t been collected before, which is what Volume 8 is.So I got the first seven, but then there started to be delays. Volumes 8 and 9 have been solicited and then canceled and rescheduled multiple times. This most likely has something to do with the behind the scenes drama that’s been going on at DC over the last couple of years, but the reasons for it are beside the point. I started to wonder if they were going to keep going with the series at all. Then, they started to reprint some of the other omnibuses with redesigned covers. I know it’s not the most important thing, but if you’re buying all of these then at this point you’re about $800 in, so you’d like it to look like a nice, complete set of books on your shelf. Imagine if Fantagraphics had just decided they wanted to change the covers of Complete Peanuts halfway through. At this point, the only people buying these Batman omnibuses are people who have been buying them before and are heavily invested in the series. Nobody is going to just impulse buy Volume 8 in a series of $100 books because they liked the cover. It makes no sense at all.So, the good news is that they had the sense to keep the original cover design. Sort of. The front cover and the spine are basically the same, but the back cover is different. Now it has a cover gallery on the back like Marvel omnibuses do. Not the end of the world, but you can see in my picture than the different color on the back cover is visible on the spine when the book is on the shelf. Also, up until now, on the front cover they usually had a new illustration, and some of them were pretty nice. On this one, it seems that they just used an illustration from one of the issues in the book, and not reproduced in the best quality. The cover image that Amazon is showing now is the cover on the copy that I got. It’s not terrible, and I’m happy that the layout is still in the style of the other volumes, but would springing for one new illustration really have broke the budget? But still… this more or less looks like it’s of a set with the other volumes when it’s on your shelf, which I’m happy about.There are a few other small issues. The paper is definitely thinner now. You can see in my picture, it looks about half as thick as the first volumes. The page count has also gone down, but not enough to account for the difference in size. I understand that the reason is that we’re now mostly into stories that haven’t been reprinted before, which requires more restoration work. Really they should have done new restorations for the first volumes as well, because on most of those early issues they’re still using restorations that are around 30 years old at this point and the quality is often very poor, but that’s an issue for a review of those volumes. In this case, the restoration isn’t bad, but it isn’t great, either. There’s definitely detail lost in the line art in whatever process they’re using to recolor the pages. I’m not sure what the reason is in this case or what their process is for recoloring these issues. You would think in a nice set of expensive books like this aimed at adult collectors, there would at least be an introduction and some kind of note explaining the sources used for the art. DC doesn’t do that, though, so we’re left to guess. But if restoration of the comics is the reason that we are now down to much fewer pages per volume and much thinner paper, even as the price has gone up to $125 when the first volume was only $75, then it seems like the restoration could look a little nicer. You would think that DC would have copies of every comic they’ve published scanned and restored at the highest possible quality just to protect their history, even if they aren’t republishing a particular issue, so I don’t really understand why it’s such an issue for them to restore a comic that hasn’t been reprinted before. But I digress again.In the end, I’m glad the book came out, and I’m glad the cover is basically the same, and I’m willing to pay a little more if that’s the only way they’ll publish it. I do understand that this deep into an expensive series like this, they’re going to be selling less copies and they’re down to a much smaller audience than the people who might just grab the first volume as a gift or to read Batman’s origin. These later volumes are for completists and collectors. But that’s also why I feel like it’s fair to quibble about the covers and the picture quality, because who else are they trying to sell these to other than people who care about those things?I hesitate to give this less than five stars, because I do want to encourage people to buy it. I’m not sure what they’re counting as the end of the Golden Age, but at this point, if they do Volume 9, they’ll only have to do one or two more to complete the set, so it would really be a shame for them to quit now. But there are a few issues, and I wanted to write a review to answer questions I had been wondering myself about the cover and all of that. It definitely seems like they’ve had budget cuts to the series, and they could do a better job… but they’re so close to the end, I’m just really hoping they don’t bail out now. And then they should start a Silver Age Batman Omnibus series. With matching covers (the gray, Silver Age versions), please.

We’re now up to the 8th Golden Age Batman Omnibus and I’ve read them all. So, have I been having a blast with all this Golden Age goodness? Not really. The Golden Age Batman stories are extremely forgettable and repetitive. Batman has his slowly expanding roster of rogue’s, but they had surprisingly similar modus operandi back in the day. As time has gone on, the stories have leaned more heavily on the reoccurring freak villains and less on common crooks and this was a good decision. In this volume, the rogues have become a bit tiresome and The Joker is dominating the appearances. Most of the best stories in this volume don’t contain reoccurring villains and The Joker has become mostly harmless and silly.I’ve complained about the modern Batman essentially being omnipotent and unrelatable, but I have to admit that even in the Golden Age, Batman was nigh unstoppable. In ‘The Robberies in the Batcave’, it appeared that Batman and Robin had mistakenly sent an innocent man to the electric chair, which would have been interesting. But, no. Turns out the only mistake made by Batman was thinking that he made a mistake. In another story, a criminal gang start gathering incredibly skilled thieves and one manages to straight up beat Batman in a series of competitions. Again, that would have been really interesting if you had a crook who was simply more athletic and more intelligent that Batman but, of course, it turned out the criminal had cheated. Besides the reuse of criminals there is no real continuity. Batman and Robin have zero depth of character and never evolve.There is some groanworthy silliness in these stories. When Batman faces off against a new criminal, the King of the Cats, he prepares by building a new glass trophy case for trophies from future cases. Batman faces off against what may have been his first super powered foe, the Human Magnet. Even Clayface was non superpowered in the Golden Age. There are some good stories including, ‘The Undersea Hideout’ which featured the hilariously named Batosphere. It has been joked that Robin is ‘the boy hostage’ and never has that been truer than in this volume where I can’t even count the number of times Robin is taken hostage to manipulate Batman.The retail price of $125 for a ton of mediocre stories is a tough pill to swallow and although I’ve never paid nearly that price, the cost is still pretty steep. Honestly, it feels like I continue collecting this series more out of a sunk cost and desire to see it through. I would say these are the best stories yet for these Golden Age Batman Omnibus, but at this point the bar is pretty low. The last two stories in the book are two of my favorites, so that may bode well for the future. I would suggest this collection for people with a real love of the Golden Age and/or a fair amount of disposable income.

I love the old classic Batman stories better than the new ones. Relaxing reading.

Came in perfect condition.