DC Comics have announced “The Bat-Man: First Knight,” a three-issue Black Label series by writer Dan Jurgens and artist Mike Perkins. The comic will mark Batman’s 85th anniversary by returning him to his original time period of 1939, reimagining some of his earliest adventures in their original context, instead of updating them for a new era.
The series will follow the Bat-Man as he investigates several killings, and begins to realize he is living in a sci-fi universe. “All of the evidence in the murder investigation defies logic: the perpetrators are all men who died in the electric chair. But when the Bat-Man comes face to face with one of these sickening anomalies, he barely escapes with his life — throwing into question his ability to survive in a world that is brutally evolving around him!”
The book marks something of a reunion for Jurgens with the Golden Age Batman, who was one of several temporally displaced characters he penned in the 2021 miniseries “Generations.” The series is also spiritually similar to Matt Wagner’s two retellings of Golden Age stories from the mid-to-late-2000s, “Batman and the Monster Men,” and “Batman and the Mad Monk,” which likewise explored the Dark Knight’s first encounters with the supernatural, albeit within the aforementioned context of the modernized ‘Year One’ timeline.
“The Bat-Man: First Knight” #1 will be released on March 5, 2024, with a main cover by Perkins, variant covers by Ramon Perez and Jacob Phillips, and a pulp-style variant by Marc Aspinall; you can check all of those out, along with unlettered interiors, at ComicBook.com. Like most Black Label comics, the intended readership is aged 17 and up, with the synopsis emphasizing a world still reeling from the First World War, and unprepared for the fascism that will drag it into World War II.
