Here we go again.
I do not know why I am surprised. Batman Day rolls around every September and without fail, without a single year of exception, something in my brain goes oh yes, it is time, and before I know what has happened I am three issues deep into The Long Halloween at midnight on a Tuesday with a Batman miniature half painted on the desk next to me and Arkham Asylum downloaded on the PS5.
Five years ago I wrote that the Batman obsession had completely taken over my life and I was catching up on every comic since 2011. Then in 2024 it happened all over again and I said, and I quote myself here with absolutely no shame: “It’s happened again. Five years since I last spiraled into the dark world of Gotham, and now I’m deep in it once more; this time with no signs of slowing down.”
No signs of slowing down. I wrote that. And here we are in 2026 and the Bat Signal is on again and I have nobody to blame but myself… and Batman Day.
This is the ninth time I have read The Long Halloween. Ninth. I know exactly what happens. I have known what happens for years. I know who Holiday is, I know every twist, I know every Tim Sale page by heart at this point. And I still cannot stop. There is something about Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Gotham, that cold noir version of the city where every shadow has weight and Harvey Dent is still Harvey Dent and Batman feels genuinely alone in a way the other comics rarely capture, that gets me every single time. It does not matter how many times I have been here. I open that first issue and I am gone.
The miniatures are a new development though and I want to talk about those because I think they represent a genuinely alarming escalation. I bought into the Batman Miniature Game. Proper metal miniatures, bases and everything. They are currently sitting on my desk in various states of being painted and they look absolutely fantastic and nobody is ever going to play this game with me. I know this. I have accepted this. My wife is going to come home and I am going to tell her that she is now interested in the Batman Miniature Game whether she likes it or not and she is going to look at me in that very specific way she looks at me when the obsession hits and sigh very quietly and go and make a cup of tea. It will be fine.
Then there is Batman Unburied, the Spotify audio drama created by David S. Goyer, which I have somehow never got around to despite it having come out in 2022 and being absolutely everywhere when it launched. Winston Duke as Bruce Wayne, Gina Rodriguez as Barbara Gordon, Jason Isaacs as Alfred, Lance Reddick as Thomas Wayne. The cast alone should have been enough to make me sit down with it immediately and yet here I am four years late to the party and completely hooked. It is not a traditional Batman story, it is a slow burning psychological thriller that is far more interested in the inside of Bruce Wayne’s mind than in watching him punch things. A serial killer called the Harvester is terrorising Gotham, organs being removed from victims, and the whole thing weaves through an alternate timeline where his parents never died. It is strange and unsettling and completely gripping and I am furious with myself for waiting this long. If you have not listened to it yet go and find it on Spotify immediately.
I am also playing every Batman game ever made in chronological order starting from the 1980s. Every single one. The truly terrible ones, the ones with no business existing, the ones that clearly had the license and nothing else. I am going to write much more about this soon because there is a lot to say, but going from the absolute chaos of those early licensed games all the way to the Arkham series in order hits differently than just booting up Arkham Asylum cold. The journey matters.
Speaking of which, I am playing Arkham Asylum again. Again. As I wrote back in 2024 when the last obsession hit: “it was a claustrophobic, intense experience that completely captured Gotham’s dark, twisted essence. Every creak of the Asylum, every deranged villain lurking in the shadows, felt so immersive.” And it still is. Every single time. The containment of it, the feeling of being trapped on this island with everyone who has ever wanted you dead, never gets old.
The Batman Judge Dredd graphic novel is on the desk too. Two of the most relentlessly grim characters in comics stuck in each other’s worlds and absolutely hating every second of it. Dredd thinks Batman is a lunatic vigilante. Batman thinks Mega City One is a dystopian hellhole. Both of them are correct.
And Absolute Batman is sitting on the shelf waiting. Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta’s new run, which by all accounts does something genuinely exciting with the character. I have been saving it deliberately. September Batman obsession feels like exactly the right time.
The Bat Signal is on. Again. Send help.
