Hello everyone! I'm super excited to have come across this site. I was doing a Google search for "batman third man" to try to find the origin of the Third Man adversary in Batman #672 I had been reading.

Anyways, I've loved Batman since the 1989 movie introduced me to him. Something about how he's just a normal guy without super powers other than intelligence has always resounded with me. I often like to discuss with others who, in real life, could pull off being Batman (but that's for another topic!). So my girlfriend bought me a subscription to Batman for my birthday in October. The first issue I got was Part 4 of the Resurrection of Ra's storyline (and I ended up getting all the crossover issues and reading them).

But, when I get into something, I become hardcore about it, and so I wanted to get as much as I could. So what I did was, I ended up downloading some mega torrent (18Gb) called Batman storylines. It turned out to be an assortment arranged chronologically of various Batman comics (and crossovers) which I began reading. I read Year One, followed by Tenses, and followed thereafter by Four of a Kind.

Now, not wanting to just be a leech and wanting to support the medium, I purchased all 4 volumes of the Batman Chronicles and am currently midway through volume 2. These seem to focus more on Detective Comics, but that's okay, and they're humorously ultra-cheesy due to their era.

I also managed to acquire every single issue of Batman, but I've yet to catch up on the past 670 issues because...

While researching characters and what not, I learned about Crisis. And so I had to learn all about that as well. So, in the past several months, I've been trying to play catchup with the entire DC Crisis chronology. I read Crisis on Infinite Earths. I followed that with Zero Hour, then Identity Crisis (my favorite so far). I read Kingdom Come and then The Kingdom. I then read Countdown to Infinite Crisis, and the 4 mini-series as well (Day of Vengeance, Villains United, OMAC Project, and Raan/Thanagar War). Also as a primer, I read all the articles linked in the Infinite Crisis guide here.

I have recently just finished the first issue of Infinite Crisis (utterly confused, despite the massive research I put into prepping for it to avoid the cluelessness I felt with Crisis on Infinite Earths) and will begin the second today. I am hoping to finish Infinite Crisis asap, then read 52 (which I can only see as taking me FOREVER due to four volumes of it), then moving on to Countdown to Final Crisis, in time to catch it when it starts in May.

I'm wondering if anyone has any advice on how to go about the journey I've set out on. I've read a few thousand pages so far, I believe, but I'm always up for suggestions. And I prefer the real book in my hands than just reading a summary on Wikipedia or something.

Anyways, thanks for having made it this far in this massive post. And thanks for any replies.