Englehart-Rogers BATMAN Hardcover Cancelled — At Least For Now

The new Super Friends hardcover and Aquaman: The Silver Age Omnibus too, according to a report…

Sigh.

You just never know with these things.

DC Comics has evidently cancelled three anticipated hardcover collections — including one that would finally bring Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers’ seminal late ’70s Detective Comics run back into print, and in hardcover for the first time.

At least for now.

According to a report in Bleeding Cool, DC has told retailers that orders for Legends of the Dark Knight: Steve EnglehartSuper Friends: Saturday Morning Comics Vol. 1 and Aquaman: The Silver Age Omnibus Vol. 1 are being cancelled — but will be resolicited at a later date.

We’ve covered all three of these looming releases and we typically note that DC has a weird track record over the last couple years of soliciting books and then yanking them. What this means for these titles in the end is any guess. DC doesn’t usually comment on moves like this but I’ll update this post in case they do.

It’s especially disappointing about the Englehart book, which was set to finally reprint the story as the writer himself envisioned. (Click here for a rundown of the planned collection and the arc’s historical import.)

Sure, you can read the back issues. Sure, you can read the issues online. Sure, you may already have the long out-of-print Strange Apparitions softcover or the 1980s Shadow of the Batman reprint series.

Thing is, this is a story that should be eternally in print. Hell, it should have an Absolute Edition. The run was enormously influential — earlier this year, our blue-ribbon panel of experts ranked it the third greatest Batman story of all time — and the less available it is to modern readers, the more it fades into memory.

That, as I’ve stated a number of times in the past, would be a crime against comics.

MORE

— An INSIDE LOOK at ENGLEHART AND ROGERS’ Unfinished BATMAN Trilogy. Click here.

— The TOP 13 BATMAN Countdown: ENGLEHART & ROGERS. Click here.

Author: Dan Greenfield

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10 Comments

  1. Maybe they canceled it to put it into an even better edition that includes the Wein issues and the never before reprinted framing sequence issue that has the true first appearance of Clayface III!

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    • Exactly what I was thinking. In this day an age, better to just do an oversized hardcover of “Strange Apparitions: The Deluxe Edition” with all the material included.

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  2. I have original copies of the well-regarded Detective Comics series. One of the best of any decades.

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  3. When this is re-solicited, likely for April 2020, pre-order it through your LCS or Amazon or whatever. Pre-order a copy for a friend too. Make it so they won’t even consider pulling it again.

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  4. Typical DC. Their reprint program is a mess – no consistency in format, timing, or focus. Titles are announced, then cancelled. Formats are started, then abandoned. Series lines are stopped, sometimes just one volume short of completion. It appears that they are just throwing stuff against the wall and hoping something sticks.

    I’m at an age where I’m not interested in floppies, but have plenty of money to spend on quality reprints. However, even though I am definitely at “DC person,” DC is not getting my dollars – most of my money is going to Marvel, or Fantagraphics, or IDW because those companies have their act together in terms of a reprint program

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  5. Disappointing, but predictable. This delay does give them the chance to include an Englehart story from Batman #311 (and possibly Batman’s portion of the Millennium crossover?), but I’m not optimistic.

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  6. There was a HC Legends of the Dark Knight Marshall Rogers that had a good deal of the Englehart original run. It didn’t include the two Dr. Phosphorous issues as they weren’t drawn by Rogers.

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