Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue at random, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

Ah, early-90s DC crossovers. They tend to come in for a lot of flak these days for being big, flashy, all-style-no-substance events. And you can sort of see the point. But I’ve got a bit of affection for them – partly because they’re the sort of thing that served as my childhood introduction to comics, and partly because… well, as crossovers in the technical sense, they’re a damned sight better executed than most of the ones Marvel and DC tend to do nowadays.

You see, in the current climate, if there’s a big crossover going on, you have to read everything if you want to keep up. You can’t just read the core series, because big events might be happening in the regular titles. And if you’re a subscriber to some, but not all, of those regular titles, then your reading is severely compromised – the titles you read will only be giving you an incomprehensible part of a story, and they might as well be blank paper and staples for all they’re worth to you.

But the likes of Armageddon 2001 and Eclipso : The Darkness Within are reader-friendly in the extreme, following the classic template: have your core miniseries, which – if so desired – can be read without having to refer to any of the monthly titles; and have those titles, meanwhile, interact with the story to varying degrees, also serving as standalone vignettes in their own right (and, in the case of the ’91 and ’92 DC summer events, actually published in special Annuals so as to impact on the regular titles even less). Case in point: Detective Comics Annual #5.

Written by 2000AD stalwarts Alan Grant and John Wagner, it’s essentially a story about the Ventriloquist and Scarface breaking the Joker out of Arkham so that he can discover the whereabouts of a twenty-five million dollar haul. The crossover elements, meanwhile, are simply that a handful of the gems that contain supervillain Eclipso’s essence have found their way to Gotham, spawning a revenge-fuelled monster via Commissioner Gordon – busy brooding on the anniversary of the Joker paralysing his daughter – and thus forcing Batman to actually try and protect his arch-nemesis. If anything, though, it feels like the Scarface/Joker story was one they had ready to go, before deciding to make it the crossover issue – the Eclipso elements are quite separate from the main story until the third act, when admittedly they do throw a big purple monster into it – but aside from that, don’t impinge on the story in any negative way.

As it happens, it’s a fairly entertaining yarn, whose main strength is a healthy dose of humour – the Joker is on particularly fine form, but there are also some nice (if obvious) ventriloquism gags around Scarface, and even a chucklesome little moment with henchman Rhino enchanted by some clockwork kids’ toys. It feels like just the sort of self-contained story that, really, Detective should be doing all the time (and, indeed, at which Paul Dini is having an admirable stab at the moment). If there’s any real criticism, it’s that Batman is very much a passenger in his own title (and gets some moments of poor dialogue, to boot). Oh, and the cover is pretty lousy, but it’s not a reflection of Tom Mandrake’s art, which is fairly standard fare, taking some of its cues from then-supremo Norm Breyfogle.

Eclipso wasn’t the strongest of summer crossovers – it was a story seemingly designed solely to serve the purpose, which is never a good sign – but the flexibility of the format at least meant that creators of the calibre of Grant/Wagner (who really should have got more American work in the ‘90s) could still tell decent – and non-compromised – stories like this.