This is "Look Back," a feature that I plan to do for at least all of 2019 and possibly beyond that (and possibly forget about in a week, who knows?). The concept is that every week (I'll probably be skipping the four fifth weeks in the year, but maybe not) of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each week will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first week of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second week looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third week looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth week looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago.

We'll be doing October in a day!

We begin with October 2009's Batman/Superman #65, a delightfully dark Halloween issue by writers Peter Johnson and Matt Cherniss and artists Brian Stelfreeze, Brian Haberlin, Kelley Jones, Joe Quinones and Federico Dallocchio.

The concept of the issue is simple but striking, as it speaks to the very nature of the A-List and the B/C-List supervillain. Even in the comic book world, there is a clear hierarchy and where Joker and Luthor are clearly A-Listers, someone like Scarecrow is a lot further down the list. Now, because there are SO many bad villains out there, it is probably not fair to call Scarecrow anything worse than a C-Lister, but still, there is clearly a big difference between Scarecrow and Joker. However...that difference has less of an impact on certain days. In other words, Scarecrow acknowledges that he can't get the headlines 364 days of the year, but on Halloween, the day of fear, that is HIS day...

By the way, let me note that the Dustin Nguyen cover is outstanding...

It's so unsettling that it really stands out from the crowd.

Brian Haberlin draws the Scarecrow scenes.

So Scarecrow captures Batman, Superman, Lex Luthor and the Joker and subjects them to fear gas, giving them nightmares on Halloween.

For Superman (in a bit drawn by Brian Stelfreeze), Superman's nightmare is not being able to save Lois Lane's life (something that Tom Kin and Andy Kubert recently did a whole big thing on in the Superman: Up In the Sky comic book)...

For the Joker (drawn by Kelley Jones), it is people not finding him shocking, but just seeing him as a laugh...

For Luthor (drawn by Joe Quinones), it's literally being Jimmy Olsen (how awesome is it that THAT's Luthor's nightmare?)...

For Batman (drawn by Federico Dallocchio), it's having a happy family...

and then having them torn from him AGAIN...

But Johnson and Cherniss take a page out of Grant Morrison's Final Crisis (not literally, as that series had JUST come out, so I'm sure it is a coincidence) by noting that one of Batman's big deals is that he IS the nightmare, so you can't really get him with a nightmare...

For a regular-length comic book, getting in four separate, worthwhile dream bits, is a hard thing to achieve, but the creators nailed it, making this one of my favorite Batman Halloween issues.

If you have any suggestions for October (or any other later months) 2009, 1994, 1969 and 1944 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we're discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.