I discussed the most ambitious arc in Doug Moench's BATMAN run here, but as it happened the writer continued to script Bat-tales until late 1986, and within that time-frame his last one seems to be this celebration of the Caped Crusader's four hundredth issue of his own title. Oddly, the long-term Bat-writer who had immediately preceded Moench, Gerry Conway, also departed by writing an "anniversary" issue of sorts, that of Batman's 500th appearance in DETECTIVE COMICS. That celebration, like Moench's, depended on pitting the crusader and his allies against a huge smorgasbord of villains.
Neither story is anything special, since the trope of assembling of so many evildoers in one tale creates a "too many crooks spoil the broth" situation. But "Resurrection Night" has a better gimmick, in that Moench's story was illustrated by a round-robin group of established artists, as seen on the cover above. This was the main attraction of "Night," giving fans the chance to see Batman and his cosmos rendered by many artists who wouldn't ordinarily work on the regular titles.
The plot is necessarily simple: on the actual anniversary of Batman's genesis (I think-- Moench is vague on the matter), the mastermind Ra's Al Ghul liberates twenty-something villains from prison and from Arkham Asylum, in order to make a massed attack on the crusader and his allies. Said allies include "Jason Todd Robin" and Batman's competing love-interests Talia and Catwoman, both of whom are wearing their good-girl hats this time. I did appreciate that Moench almost immediately rids his story of about a dozen malcontents who simply refuse to play along with the big scheme against Batman. This economizing kept Moench and his collaborators from making an error like the one Conway made in his opus. That 1983 villain-rally began by showing the Penguin meeting up the rest of his criminal cronies--after which Conway evidently forgot that the Birdman Bandit was part of the story, since the Penguin vanished from the tale thereafter.
So the villains break up into separate units, which makes it all the easier for the round-robin artists to handle separate sections of the peripatetic plot. IMO the most enjoyable outing is that of independent artist Ken Steacy, who made only irregular contributions to either of the Big Two.
But what if anything justifies my calling "Resurrection Night" a near-myth? The closest the story comes to a "master thread" appears in a segment penciled (in a strangely hyperactive style) by Bill Sienkiewicz. Ra's, after unleashing this gang of ghouls upon Gotham, appears in the Batcave and offers the hero his idea of a "temptation in the desert;" offering to kill off all of Batman's foes if Batman will put aside crimefighting and join the mastermind's League of Assassins. Most Bat-readers will not think this an especially well-thought-out idea, and of course Batman utterly rejects trading one evil for another. The most one can say for the master villain's plan is that he also has his pawns kidnap four innocents, including Alfred the Butler, so on some level Ra's hopes to guilt the hero into forswearing heroism. After the defeat of the pawns, Batman finds Ra's holed up in a windmill and defeats him,
The Brian Bolland art for the near-finale is also a standout, but the coda is a little more psychologically interesting, First, after the heroes and their friends meet in the Batcave for a cheery anniversary party, It's then that we're told that the windmill where Ra's was defeated (in the usual fiery explosion) created an aftershock that just happened to punctuate the celebration with a stalactite of death. Batman being Batman, he takes the occurrence as a justification to stalk away and brood. Does he reflect on how his destiny has tied him inextricably to a world of freaks and fiends? Well, Moench doesn't exactly say so, but that's what I got out of it. As usual, some of Moench's poetic tropes are labored. The stalactite that impales the cake is a "candle?" And being just one candle, that means it signifies the "resurrection" of Batman's crimefighting career (albeit in other hands than those of Moench)? Not his most inspired symbol-correlation. But "Night" is certainly a better wrap-up for Moench's tenure on BATMAN than the rather piddling stories that appeared in the post-Nocturna months.
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