10 Best Single Issue Comics Ever

8. Detective Comics 475 - The Laughing Fish

Batman The Sign of the Joker — DC Comics

One of the biggest myths in comic book-dom is that Frank Miller reinvented Batman. It was actually Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams who birthed the definitive image of the Dark Knight, but Steve Englehart could lay claim to having done the same too.

Englehart's Batman writings are collected in the Strange Apparitions book, but the beauty of them is that they're mostly all one-and-done stories. To many, the high point of his run came in Detective Comics 475, which told the story of the Joker's attempts to trademark his own "laughing fish".

The rest, as they say, is history, with the story going on to inspire an equally seminal episode of Batman: The Animated Series some two decades after its original publication.

There are no shortage of compelling Batman one-shots though. Grant Morrison's Batman #666 served as a compelling window into a dystopia where Damian Wayne fought against the anti-christ as the Caped Crusader, and Tom King and Lee Weeks' Batman annual from 2017 that managed to break all our hearts with its UP-like romance involving Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle.

Either way, there's no shortage of fantastic one-and-done Batman stories to check out if you get the chance.

Ewan Paterson

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.

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