NML Crossing, Episode 047 – Batman: No Man’s Land #1 (1999)
NML Crossing, Episode Forty-Seven
Batman: No Man’s Land #1 (March, 1999)
“No Law and a New Order, Part One: Values”
Writer – Bob Gale
Pencils – Alex Maleev
Inks – Wayne Faucher
Colors – Digital Chameleon
Letters – Willie Schubert
Edits – Joseph Illidge, Gorfinkel, Peterson, O’Neil
Cover Price: $3.95
It’s taken us over two months… and many, many, many hours to get here… but, today we finally enter NO MAN’S LAND!
Welcome to the “new normal” where apples are worth more than diamonds, crudely-sharpened spears are more valuable than firearms, and the GCPD is nothing more than a roving street gang. The Penguin rules the roost, and Batman hasn’t been seen in over three months… or, has he? We’re laying the first few bricks in our massive year-spanning crossovent… and it’s gonna be a good time (for us anyway, notsomuch the poor Gothamites).
NML Crossing on Youtube
This was the perfect first issue for this storyline. Allthe information a reader needs to understand this new era is provided. And the Bat-teaser is just enough to draw you in and make you come back for more.
It was well worth going through the Quakemaster and Nicholas Scratch and his incompetent goons to get to this story.
The title Graphic Novel gets thrown around a lot. Not every great comics story is a Graphic Novel. The Dark Phoenix Saga and The Judas Contract are both great serialized stories but they are just parts of the larger overarching story of the X-Men and Titans respectively. This is a Graphic Novel. It stands on its own away from the rest of the DC Universe and has a definitive beginning, middle and ending. This is different from everything else that was on the shelves at the time. It’s more than just a change in status quo.
I was a loyal DC and Marvel reader at the time that this came out. So I was buying just about everything they were putting out. All the Bat-titles were already on my monthly pull list, but this storyline put the Bat-books higher on the pile of what got read first.
This was a great issue.
I first read this with the rest of the No Law and a New Order storyarc in a hybird comic/trade paperback released shortly after the arc came out (it looked like a thick comic, a bit bigger than an annual but with the same type of binding/spine used for an annual; it’s more like a trade paperback, though, since it collected the arc). It was $5.95 and a cool artifact since most stories wouldn’t be collected in this type of format.
A quick Google didn’t bring up much about this specific format and release, only seeing it mentioned if its for sale, like on the below ebay link (not putting this link there to say someone should buy it but to let someone see it if they want):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/202944524995