Collecting Chuck Dixon’s Batman

Hey there, True Believers,

As you know, we’re big fans of The Legend Chuck Dixon’s work around these parts, and he’s very well known for his take on Batman, along with artist Graham Nolan. He is one of the most prolific writers on the Bat-titles, and not all of his work is available in collected editions as of now, but a lot of it is, so I’ll give a nice overview of Dixon’s work in Collected edition.

His first Batman work in issues 467-469 will be available in a collection called “The Caped Crusader” volume 5, which is coming out January 2021.

Beyond that, the early Dixon Batman work is not available until Knightfall, starting 10 issues after he took over Detective Comics, which comes in three beautiful hardcover omnibuses:

There’s a ton of story here, including the creation of Chuck’s most famous character, Bane, who runs Batman through a hellish gauntlet before breaking his back. It also covers the period afterward where Bruce Wayne was temporarily replaced, and then his return.

After Knightfall comes another mini-event, Contagion, which has ramifications lasting through Dixon’s tenure on the book and is collected in a thick trade paperback.

Then a storyline called Legacy takes place, which is collected in 2 trade paperbacks with similar covers:

Chuck’s work after this just came out in a really cool hardcover called Knight Out, which contains the named storyline and some other issues which don’t fall within these events:

And Finally, Chuck’s run concludes in No Man’s Land, which starts with an event called Cataclysm, and spans 2 more thick trades for a “road to No Man’s Land” and then 4 thick trades of No Man’s Land proper. Cataclycsm and Road To are going to be collected in a hardcover omnibus later this month (November 2020), so you may wish to wait for the oversized art in that version.

Dixon has a lot of other Bat-Verse books, which we may go over in another post, but for his main line, this is the current available collected editions out there. It’s all very much worth a read and I hope the earlier Pre-Knightfall work gets collected, as Dixon created my favorite character in the DCU in that era, Stephanie Brown, aka Spoiler.

That’s all for now! Happy hunting and enjoy your Dixon!

JDA