Batman - Legends Of The Dark Knight #46 [1993] (Random Comics Theatre)

 Random Comics Theatre

Batman - Legends Of The Dark Knight #46 [1993]

Russ Heath (1926-2018) did relatively few straight super-hero stories in his long and prolific career, most of which was spent on war and western comics. One of the exceptions was this 1993 4-issue, 100 page story "Heat". At this time, LEGENDS was mostly telling stories of the nebulous early years of Batman, pre-Robin, basically an extended "Year Two", with various creators doing stories between 1 and 5 issues long (with some exceptions for crossovers and the like).

That's a good fit for Heath, doing a slightly slicker version of that David Mazzucchelli-defined urban landscape. I think the colouring is a bit garish for what Heath was trying to go for, and if it had something more like what Richmond Lewis did in "Year One" that would have worked better.

As you might guess from the title, this is a story set in a heat wave in Gotham, and as you can tell from the cover it features Batman teaming up with Catwoman to fight the villain who falls right in the middle of the two of them, Catman.

It's a pretty nice looking story, overall, hits the beats you'd expect in a Batman story of the era. If Heath didn't do enough Batman, he's teamed up with a writer who probably did too many, Doug Moench. I've always found Moench to be a bit of an uneven writer, capable of some quite good work, but also a bit prone to get bogged down in cliché and melodrama. It's been a while since I read this full story, so my memory is hazy, but based on re-reading this issue I think this on the lower half of his career. Which is a shame, since there were so many writers who did LEGENDS story around this period who I think would have really benefitted from Heath's artwork.