As our mutual friend, The Irredeemable Shag, says, “Everyone has a Batman phase.”  I think that Stella is still in hers.  Mine started in 1990 and while I finally gave up Batman in the early 2000s, I’d say that its high point ended sometime around the middle of the decade.  The comics collected in this volume are from a few years before my phase; specifically, they are the first several issues of Detective Comics in the post-Crisis DCU.

I’d read a few of these both digitally and in print over the years, but most of my experience with this era of Detective was via the trade paperback for Batman: Year Two, which I had gotten from the Waldenbooks at the Smith Haven Mall back in the early 1990s.  Oh, and sometime in 1990 or 1991, I spent the $5 I earned from the only time I ever umpired a…

I’m a sucker for road trip books, especially those that involve a journey across the U.S.  I think it’s because I’ve always wanted to do a cross-country trek and even in my younger years never got or took the chance.  Anyway, I’ve read a number of the classic trek tales: Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley in Search of America, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, and even Kerouac’s On the Road (which, if I’m desperate, may get its own episode one day).  I even have had the chance to dig into less well-known works, such as the outstanding book Cross-Country by Robert Sullivan.  So, when Amazon offered up George Mahood’s Not Tonight Josephine at a deep discount (either $.99 or $1.99), I added it to my Kindle.

Mahood is an English travel writer who has written a number of other books and in this one, written in 2016, he recalls…