I'm caught up with the Batman craze again, so please recommend me some awesome standalone arcs.
What I've read before:
- Year One, TDKR (awesome)
- Long Halloween, Dark Victory (awesome)
- The Man Who Laughs, Killing Joke (good)
- Monster Men, Mad Monk (awesome)
- Hush (good)
- Batman and Robin: The Boy Wonder (ok. is this dead?)
- Morrison's run (meh/ok)
- Snyder's Detective Comics and Court of the Owls (good)
I'm thinking of catching up on Knightfall now after watching TDKR.
I think you've covered the basics of the canon there. You've got your Millars, Morrisons and Snyders in there. I think you're ready for the big leagues now sonny jim, so if I were you I'd start reading the new prints of Knightfall. they're including the whole middle Knightquest stuff this time afaik so it'll be a really good read. Then you could read Contagion and then No Mans Land (skip Legacy, Cataclysm and the aftershocks, they suck). And then..l I dunno, random trades and collections I guess. You'll have read all the good big stuff by then. War Games is terrible, avoid that.
Trying to think of good runs, and the trouble is that the collections are so very patchy. There's a lot of great stuff from Legends of the Dark Knight - arcs like Shaman, Gothic, Venom are the classics and are really good. There are also a lot of brilliant smaller stories there too. There's Blink/Don't Blink, Snow (especially awesome for the rare Seth fisher work), Faces (a great Matt Wagner story)... There was a good trade I got as a kid that had a few stories in it, including an early Tim Sale story, a poison ivy story (i think by P Craig Russell) and the first BatMite story by Kevin O'Neil.
What else...? The Batman/Predator stuff is actually good. Greg Rucka's run on Detective was brilliant (and informed EVERYTHING he did since, including the brilliant Gotham Central and Batwoman and Montoya stuff). Rucka's run is actually a good follow up from No Mans Land, and from there you can go to GC, and then theres a good Huntress mini called Cry For Blood that leads quite nicely into his work on 52 with Montoya which flows well into the series of Batwoman/question stuff he did (Crime Bible, Final Crisis Revelations and then Elegy).
Nd that's about everything I can think of. If you have any questions please ask, I know a disturbing amount about Batman comics...