This is "Provide Some Answers," which is a feature where long unresolved plot points are eventually resolved.
Today, we look at the surprising reason why the Reaper left Gotham City so many years ago!
Detective Comics #575 (by Mike W. Barr, Alan Davis and Paul Neary) was the start of Batman: Year Two and it opened with the revelation that there was a vigilante in Gotham City named the Reaper who was in Gotham twenty years before Batman...
We then meet Judson Caspian, who has returned to Gotham from overseas to be with his daughter, Rachel, as she becomes a nun...
However, Rachel and Bruce Wayne are vibing seriously...
Judson, of course, was the Reaper and now that he is back in Gotham, he can't help but start preying on bad guys and slaughtering them, blaming them all for the murder of his wife by a crook many years ago...
Batman tries to stop him and gets beaten badly.
Later, Batman forms an uneasy alliance with the mob, as they both want to stop Reaper's killing spree of criminals. Awkwardly, Batman is paired with Joe Chill, the very assassin who murdered Bruce's parents years ago!
Bruce reveals his true identity to Chill in Detective Comics #578 (with Todd McFarlane on art duties now) and considers killing him, but before he can, the Reaper shows up and kills Chill instead...
They have another fight, but this time, Batman wins out...
The Reaper then falls to his death, content in knowing that Gotham has a worthy replacement for him (of course, he does so thinking that Batman is a killer because of what he saw with Batman and Joe Chill, which wasn't the case - which, by the way, is an AWESOME bit of writing by Barr)...
Interestingly, the comic book story doesn't say precisely WHY Judson left Gotham so many years ago.
Nearly three years later, Alan Brennert came up with an explanation in, of all places, the Secret Origin of Black Canary in Secret Origins #50 (art by Joe Staton and Dick Giordano)!
While giving Black Canary's origin, Brennert also shows the history of vigilante justice in Gotham City and part of that shows the rise of the Reaper...
Alan Scott, Green Lantern, comes out of retirement to stop him...
In their fight, Reaper unknowingly defeats Alan Scott using wooden nunchuks...
The rest of the Justice Society come out of retirement to hunt down the man who attacked their friend, and so the Reaper realized that he had to get out of Dodge (or Gotham, as it were).
Fascinating stuff by Brennert.
If anyone else has a suggestion for a comic book plot that got resolved after a few years (I tend to use two years as the minimum, as otherwise, you're probably just in the middle of the actual initial reveal of the storyline, ya know? But I'll allow exceptions where a new writer takes over a storyline and has to resolve the previous writer's unresolved plots), drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!