10 Bronze Age Comics That Changed DC & Marvel Forever

Detective Comics #469-#479 (May 1977-October 1978)

By the late 70s, Batman had already begun to swing from the bright and camp adventures of the Silver Age and toward the grim dark style embodied by the work of Alan Moore and Frank Miller in the age that followed. But it was Strange Apparitions - the name retroactively applied to the brief run of stories from writer Steve Englehart and artist Marshall Rogers - that really established the template for Bats's future.

This run brought forgotten figures like Hugo Strange and Deadshot back into the limelight and introduced new players like mob boss Rupert Thorne and socialite love interest Silver St Cloud.

Most significant, though, was what Englehart and Rogers did with the Joker. As Englehart described it, his run on Batman was designed to "get back to the idea of Batman fighting insane murderers at 3 AM under the full moon, as the clouds scuttled by", with a genuinely scary Joker as the most insane of the bunch.

Strange Apparitions' Joker stories - Laughing Fish and Sign Of The Joker - cemented the Clown Prince Of Crime as the manically unpredictable dangerous sociopath he remains in the popular imagination today. The success of these stories made the Joker a villain as popular with fans as any DC hero.

When the time came for Batman to step up to the big screen with the 1989 Tim Burton movie, these were the comics that the film looked to for inspiration.