Batman: Bad Seeds — What's On The Shelf Now
DC COMICS · BATMAN: BAD SEEDS · 4 CHAPTERS ON THE SHELF NOW · 20% OFF COVER · EVENT CLOSES 10/28/26
Pamela Isley got elected mayor, then lost the room — so she let the prehistoric growth out instead. DC is telling the whole thing across one long night, and four chapters are already on the shelf. Here's what's out, in what order, and what it costs at CTX.
The gimmick of this one is the clock. Twenty-six chapters, ten weeks of shipping, and all of it happening between one sunset and one sunrise.
Batman: Bad Seeds is the first big Gotham event of the Matt Fraction run, co-steered with G. Willow Wilson — the two of them working as showrunners while each ongoing book's regular team writes its own chapter. That structure is the reason it reads well: nothing gets hijacked for three months, because the whole event is one night long.
The setup, in the order it happened. Pamela Isley won the mayor's office. Her support collapsed. Her answer was to seed Gotham with prehistoric plant life — vines through the buildings, spores in the air, floronic things walking around in the streets. And the man holding the badge on the other side is Commissioner Vandal Savage, who looks at a city full of hunted vigilantes and an unkillable plant god and sees one very convenient opportunity to be rid of both.
Heroes are being hunted. The city is being converted. And the open question is whether sunrise is going to be worse than the night was.
On The Shelf Right Now
Everything below is in the store today at 20% off cover. Read them in this order — it's the publication order and the story order.
Batman: Bad Seeds – Sunset #1 · Fraction & Wilson · Camuncoli, Rathburn & Morey · 08/26/26
The opening chapter, and the one issue you can't skip. Isley makes her move, Savage starts counting his advantages, and Gotham begins turning into something that was here long before the city was. Six covers, including a Jorge Jimenez spot foil and a Camuncoli foil.
Batman #13 · Matt Fraction & Matteo Scalera · 09/02/26
Savage has a chemical weapon built to kill Poison Ivy, and he's keeping it inside GCPD headquarters. Batman goes in after it — no power, no comms, a private militia between him and the building's heart. Nine covers on this one, including a Frank Miller DKR 40th and a 1:25 David Aja.
Batman: Bad Seeds – Gotham Central #1 (of 2) · Christopher Cantwell & Jacob Phillips · 09/09/26
The best idea in the whole event. Savage has pointed the entire GCPD at the Bat-Family, which means nobody is left to do actual police work — so Gordon and Espinoza are working a killer, a stalker at Arkham Towers, runaway subways and an Anarky heist, on a night the city is turning into a jungle. Cantwell and Phillips, and it earns the title it borrowed.
Detective Comics #1113 · Tom Taylor & Jeff Spokes · 09/16/26
Picks up straight out of Batman #13. Spores, vines and lumbering floronic monsters have the city, and Batman works out that Savage's TUCO squads may be the more lethal half of the problem. Guest artist Jeff Spokes painting a Gotham that's half greenhouse is the reason to grab this one. Five covers, including a Panosian Bad Seeds spot foil and a Jim Lee.
Batwoman #7 — Panosian Bad Seeds Spot Foil · 09/16/26
Kate's chapter of the night, and the copy we have in is the Bad Seeds spot foil — the connected trade-dress design that runs across the whole event. If you're building the foil set, this is one of the ones people forget to pick up.
Cover availability moves fast on event books — a few of the card stock variants above are already gone. Each product page shows exactly which covers are still on the shelf.
The Six Covers On Sunset #1
The opening chapter got the full treatment. All six are in the store now.
Cvr A — Camuncoli & Rathburn · $4.79 (cover $5.99)
Cvr B — Dan Mora card stock · $5.59 (cover $6.99)
Cvr C — Marcio Takara card stock · $5.59 (cover $6.99)
Cvr D — Blank sketch card stock · $5.59 (cover $6.99)
Cvr E — Jorge Jimenez spot foil · $7.19 (cover $8.99)
Cvr F — Camuncoli foil · $7.19 (cover $8.99)
What Lands Next
Preorders are open on all of these at 20% off. Dates are the publisher's and can move.
10/07 — Batman #14 (eleven covers)
10/14 — Streets of Gotham #1 (Fraction & Tamaki) · Gotham Central #2
10/21 — Detective Comics #1114 · Nightwing #143 · Catwoman #92 · Batwoman #8
10/28 — Sunrise #1 · Gotham General #1 · Poison Ivy #49 · Harley Quinn #67
Sunrise #1 is the closer, back with Fraction, Wilson and Camuncoli, and it ships the same week as Gotham General #1 — Greg Rucka and Rosa Ekedal inside Gotham's trauma center on the worst night it has ever had. Power out, fires burning, transport gone, and the calls not stopping. No capes required.
Why This One Is Worth Your Shelf
One night, not one year. Ten weeks of shipping covering a single evening. Nothing gets derailed for a season, and every chapter is a different hour of the same disaster.
The showrunner model actually works. Fraction and Wilson hold the spine; each book's own team writes its own chapter. You get event coherence without the house style flattening everybody.
The best chapters have no cape in them. Gotham Central puts two detectives on ordinary casework in an impossible night. Gotham General does it with ER staff. That's the stuff people will still be recommending in five years.
Ivy as the engine, not the guest star. This is the payoff of a long Poison Ivy run, not a villain dropped in for a crossover. Wilson has been building to it.
The foil trade dress connects. The Bad Seeds spot foil covers run across every tie-in as one design. If you collect variants, the set is the point — and the tie-in foils are the ones that quietly disappear first.
CTX Original Fiction: Green Hours
The streetlights went first, and nobody thought much of it.
Gotham loses power the way other cities lose keys — constantly, casually, with a shrug and a generator. So when the grid browned out at dusk the dispatcher logged it and moved on, and the man on the radio said something about a transformer, and forty minutes later the radio was describing a tree growing through the sixth floor of a parking structure and asking, in a voice that had stopped being professional, what code that was.
There is no code for it. That is the first thing everyone learns.
The second thing is that the night has an order to it, and the order is not the one anybody planned. The heroes are busy being hunted. The police are busy hunting them. Which leaves the actual city — the stalled subway, the stalker in the tower, the man with a mask and a grudge helping himself to a vault while everyone else looks up — to two detectives who did not get the memo that tonight was supposed to be about gods.
And in the hospital, nobody looks up at all. They look down, at hands, at charts, at the next one coming through the doors. Power's out. Fires are burning. Transport is gone. The calls keep coming and somebody keeps answering them, which may be the only genuinely heroic act performed in Gotham tonight.
Somewhere above all of it a woman who was elected to fix this city is finishing the job a different way, and a man with a commissioner's badge and several thousand years of patience is deciding he can live with the outcome as long as he gets to pick the survivors.
The vines are not in a hurry. That's the part that unsettles people. They came up out of something older than Gotham and they are simply resuming, and a resumption has no urgency in it at all.
Dawn is coming. Everybody keeps saying it like it's good news.
Start With Sunset
DC Comics · Matt Fraction & G. Willow Wilson · 20% off cover on every chapter. Four issues on the shelf now. The event closes with Sunrise #1 on 10/28/26.
Solicit information courtesy of the publisher. Covers, prices and availability current as of publication and subject to change. All characters and artwork are © their respective owners.
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