Batman Album #10
Batman Album #10 sits at the beginning of Norbert Hethke Verlag's German serialization of one of the most consequential post-Crisis Batman story arcs: 'A Lonely Place of Dying,' written by Marv Wolfman with co-plotting by George Pérez. That arc directly introduced Tim Drake as the character who would become the third Robin, marking a deliberate editorial decision to rebuild Batman's support structure after Jason Todd's reader-voted death at the Joker's hands. By bringing this material to a German-language readership in 1991, Hethke's Album series carried the full emotional and narrative weight of a turning point in Batman mythology — the moment the creative team argued, through story, that Batman fundamentally needs a Robin. The issue also foregrounds Dick Grayson's settled identity as Nightwing, cementing the post-Crisis generational handoff from the first Robin to the Dark Knight's new era.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
Norbert Hethke Verlag, founded in 1977 and based in Schönau, Germany, obtained DC Comics licenses in the late 1980s and published Batman across four parallel series — Batman, Batman Album, Batman Sonderband, and Batman Klassik — from 1989 to 1992. The Batman Album line ran in a square-bound album format and reprinted contemporary DC storylines in German translation, with Norbert Hethke himself credited as Chefredaktion (editor-in-chief) alongside editors Hajo F. Breuer and Claus Bürvenich. The source material for Album #10 falls within the 'A Lonely Place of Dying' arc (Batman #440–442 / New Titans #60–61, 1989), written by Wolfman with art by Jim Aparo, George Pérez, and Tom Grummett — a crossover that straddled two DC titles simultaneously.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published in 1991 by Norbert Hethke Verlag GmbH (Schönau, Germany) as part of the Batman Album series, which ran from 1989 to 1992.
- Reprints material from the 'A Lonely Place of Dying' crossover arc (Batman #440–442, The New Titans #60–61, 1989), written by Marv Wolfman with co-plotting by George Pérez.
- Art on the Batman chapters is by Jim Aparo; the New Titans chapters were drawn by Tom Grummett, with George Pérez contributing covers and layouts.
- 'A Lonely Place of Dying' is the arc that introduces Tim Drake, the character who ultimately becomes the third Robin — deducing both Batman's and Nightwing's secret identities through analytical observation.
- Dick Grayson appears throughout in his Nightwing identity, not as Robin; a key narrative beat has him explicitly refuse to resume the Robin role, cementing Nightwing as his permanent post-Robin persona.
- Alfred Pennyworth plays an active story role: alarmed by Batman's self-destructive behavior following Jason Todd's death, Alfred reaches out to Nightwing to intervene.
- The arc is structured as a dual-title crossover, alternating chapters between the Batman and New Titans monthly series — an editorial format Hethke's Album line consolidated into a single collected sequence for German readers.
- Norbert Hethke Verlag was a reprint-specialist publisher that also issued Die Sprechblase (a comics industry trade journal) and the Deutschen Comic-Preiskatalog, giving it unusual visibility within the German collector community.