Nice reviews so far. I never had the first few issues, but did have a few from somewhere in the middle of its run, and then the last few - I thought the series definitely finished with a bang. Well, sort of finished, as the Batman Family concept was moved over to Detective Comics for a while afterward.

I had/have a smattering of issues. I seem to remember it changing directions at least two times during it's short run. It should be interesting to refresh on the ones I no longer have. For awhile it, then Detective, Superman Family and World's Finest were giants with a lot of original material but it couldn't be sustained given lower priced comics on the same spinner racks a lot of buyer's would go for two skinny comics even if they added up to fewer pages than the dollar comics format. DC made a few attempts to break comics out of the cheap product niche so that retailers might take more care of something with a higher return per unit as with most non-comics magazines.

Batman Family always sounded too much to me like it should have been called Batman Leftovers - a bait and switch attempt to do something with all the characters who couldn't carry their own series using a title which implied a little bit more than a nominal role for the selling point of the series.  However, for a character whose handlers were merciless in pretending that certain characters and ideas never existed once they had either abandoned their old direction (good-bye Bat-Mite, Bat-Hound, Batwoman, Bat-Girl; hello New Look) or simply forgotten who they had laying around (misplacing The Riddler for 19 years; The Scarecrow for 26; Catwoman for 12; etc) Batman Family is an interesting curiosity.  In 1975, The Riddler had just been rescued from seven years of oblivion (prior to Batman 263 dated May, 1975 Edward Nigma had last appeared in 1968), The Penguin had appeared only once in that same span of time (in 1974), and while other villains such as The Scarecrow, Catwoman, and Poison Ivy fared a little better, they were mostly dependant upon appearances in Lois Lane or Justice League or The Secret Society of Supervillains to earn a regular paycheque.  

And yet at the same time that the main Batman titles seemed too snobby to use any of their classic villains perhaps due to their association with the '66 TV series, Batman Family is proudly using cool villains such as Killer Moth, The Outsider (!), and Killer Moth while tossing Batwoman and Bat-Girl into the mix.  

I suspect that I'm the minority by regarding Robin and Batgirl as characters "who couldn't carry their own series" (sorry, but I never really saw Robin as anything more than a convenient Damsel in Distress or sounding board for Batman) but I wonder if those in charge of the title felt similarly and decided to be more experimental here than they would elsewhere.  I mean, The Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman, Scarecrow all have to beg for a chance to appear in Batman/Detective, but The Cavalier, Killer Moth, Man-Bat, Joker's Daughter, and Batwoman are the rotating cover features over at Batman Family?  This really sounds like a fun title compared to a lot of what was being offered over at the regular series (the 1980 end point is the same year Brave and the Bold 166's gave us a Penguin tale meant to evoke The Joker's Five Way Revenge in which Oswald Cobblepot plots his revenge against four ex-henchmen who sent him to prison and 1979's Detective 485 contribution to Batman Family treated Kathy Kane a lot less reverentially than previous writers had as two indications of how seriously readers were expected to take the Batman Universe over in the main Bat-titles). 

Really looking forward to this Shaxper and thanks!

I guess I consider Schwartz's to be "The Bat Office". He was running, Batman, 'Tec, and now this. Brave and the Bold was the outlier. I changed my terminology in order to avoid future confusion.



Noted. Thanks for this.



"half a decade" vs. eight years. I suppose that's more like "three quarters of a decade."




This was also a common practice with the Marvel Giant-Sizes, wasn't it? I've only read a handful, but I definitely recall GS X-Men employing this tactic.



Yes indeed. I think this came up in the 1st Issue Special episode of the CCF Podcast, as well.

I like the concept of an anthology book featuring all various the Bat-characters, which I felt was the purpose of Batman Family and have always wanted a book that did it well as although my sample size is small I never really got into Batman Family.

Batman Eternal came close to what I felt Batman Family should be, with a big story that had a lot of subplots featuring the different characters but it fell apart at the end, and it could have been just as good if the stories weren't all inter-related and instead were just lumped together because they took place in Gotham.

Then only appealing aspect of this too-bad-to-be-bland cover is the Cardy Batman, which I can't place (or find) for the life of me. Some reprint title? Or was he drawn specifically to save this cover? Maybe Grell drew a Batman figure that was just too awful to put there? 

Anyway, this is the kind of Grell art that makes Ernie Chan's covers look good. Just try to assume that Benedict Arnold batting stance. You'll wrench your back in two seconds. He wouldn't make a tee-ball team.

And four months later, Grell decided we just couldn't get enough of ill-proportioned caped guys jumping at another guy with batwings in the background.