10 Best Single Issue Comics Ever

8. Detective Comics 475 - The Laughing Fish

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.