Of everything DC announced, this is the one I am most interested in, and it is not close.
Deniz Camp and Javier Rodríguez are reuniting for Shadow of the Bat, part of DC's new Next Level line. The same pair who just made Absolute Martian Manhunter, which is the best superhero comic I have read in years and now has the awards to back that up.
What they just did
Absolute Martian Manhunter ran twelve issues and finished with #12 in May 2026. It was a planned ending rather than a cancellation, which matters, because it means the shape of the thing was deliberate from the start.
The premise: FBI Agent John Jones, his brain infected by an alien consciousness simply called the Martian. Not a shapeshifting detective in a cape. A man carrying something inside his head that he does not understand and cannot remove.
At the 2026 Eisners it won Best Limited Series. Rodríguez personally took three: Best Limited Series, Best Penciller/Inker and Best Cover Artist. Camp took two, adding Best New Series for Assorted Crisis Events at Image. Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou won Best Letterer for his work on it.
That letterer award is worth pausing on, because it tells you what kind of book it was. The lettering was not sitting on top of the art delivering dialogue, it was part of how the story worked. Very few comics can say that.
What we know about Shadow of the Bat
Not a great deal yet, deliberately.
The teaser image puts Batman back at the chemical plant, the one that gave us the Joker. That is a loaded choice of setting for a book by these two, because Camp's writing tends to be about systems and consequences rather than origins, and the chemical plant is the single most origin-shaped location in Gotham.
It sits in DC's Next Level line alongside new takes on Vixen and Static, Jonah Hex and the Shadow of Death by Michael Walsh, and The Demon by James Harren.
One nice detail: the Absolute Martian Manhunter finale was reported at the time as setting up another Camp and Rodríguez collaboration. This is it.
The name is not an accident
Here is the part most coverage will skip, and it is the part that matters if you collect rather than just read.
Batman: Shadow of the Bat was a real series. It ran 96 issues from June 1992 to February 2000, created by Denny O'Neil as a vehicle for writer Alan Grant and artist Norm Breyfogle.
It was the psychological Batman book. Every issue opened with the line "the shadow of the bat falls on..." followed by whichever character that issue was going to get inside the head of. Brian Stelfreeze painted airbrushed covers for the first 50 issues, and they still look better than most of what is on the shelf now.
It ended as part of the fallout from No Man's Land and was replaced by Batman: Gotham Knights.
Why issue #1 is a key
The opening arc was The Last Arkham, issues #1 to #4. Jeremiah Arkham takes over the asylum, and Batman is chained to a wall inside it, in costume, shouting that he is not insane.
Batman: Shadow of the Bat #1 (June 1992) is the first appearance of both Victor Zsasz and Jeremiah Arkham.
Zsasz is the serial killer who carves a tally mark into his own skin for every person he kills. He has since turned up in the Arkham games, the Gotham TV series and the Birds of Prey film. Jeremiah Arkham later becomes the second Black Mask.
Two first appearances in one issue, from a 1992 book that was printed in copper age quantities, so it is not rare. What it is, is cheap for what it contains, and that is usually the more interesting category.
One live rumour worth flagging as a rumour. Since June 2026 there has been talk that Sebastian Stan may play Zsasz. I have not seen that confirmed by anyone official, so treat it as speculation. But casting talk moves prices on first appearances faster than almost anything else, so it is the kind of thing to be aware of either way.
I have added both first appearances to the first appearances database where you can check them alongside the rest.
Is the new one going to be any good?
My honest expectation is yes, with one caveat.
Absolute Martian Manhunter was divisive. For every reader calling it a masterpiece there was another who found it wilfully difficult, more interested in formal experiment than in telling a story. I do not agree with that reading, but it is not a stupid one, and anyone going into a Camp and Rodríguez book expecting a straight-ahead Batman story is likely to bounce off it.
Batman also carries more baggage than Martian Manhunter. Part of what made Absolute Martian Manhunter work was that almost nobody had fixed expectations of John Jones, so they could rebuild him from nothing. You cannot do that with Batman. Everyone has a version in their head already.
The counter-argument is that this is exactly what the original Shadow of the Bat was for: the book where Batman got taken apart psychologically while the other titles handled the plot. If DC has given them that brief on purpose, the name is a statement of intent rather than nostalgia.
What I would do
Read Absolute Martian Manhunter first. All twelve issues, or the collections. Not because Shadow of the Bat will follow on, it will not, but because it tells you whether these two are for you before you commit to a Batman run.
Pick up Shadow of the Bat #1 from 1992 while it is still sensible money. Two first appearances, one of them with live casting talk attached. Even setting speculation aside it is a genuinely good comic, and the Stelfreeze cover is worth having on a shelf.
Do not buy the whole 96 issue run expecting value. Around half of those issues were crossover chapters that only make sense with the other Bat titles from the same month, which makes the run frustrating to read in isolation and hard to sell on as a set. Pick the arcs.