The Best Ever Batman Comic Is One You've Never Heard Of
1. The Essence Of The Dark Knight
At its core, Batman: Ego is as much a celebration of the Bob Kane, Bill Finger creation as it is an analysis of his evolution over the years. Atmosphere drips from every panel, and in addressing one of the most contentious aspects of the character, the book's importance is impossible to overstate.
What Cooke's story also does, however, is encapsulate pretty much everything there is to love about the character in a tremendously short space of time. It's Batman as he's meant to be; emotive, determined, but also uniquely human. In a world crammed with Kryptonian aliens, magic users, and intergalactic policeman, that element - more than any other - is of key importance.
And yet, whether it be because of its length, or its age, Ego struggles to find the fame other Bat-books have for so many years. It might not have redefined the genre in the same way like a Dark Knight Returns or a Year One could, but it's no less salient. Those comics wrote the book on modern Batman, but Darwyn Cooke understood what those stories didn't. The Dark Knight might be a force of nature, but he is, at his core, still Bruce Wayne.
You can't take away one, without losing the other.
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