TFW you have to come up with a villain, good, but not so good you'll be sad when he bites it.

We saw the ghost of today's villain a couple years back, in the Ghosts crossover annuals, but today we've got his first appearance: from 1991, Detective Comics #625, "Abattoir!" Written by Marv Wolfman, pencils by Jim Aparo, inks by Mike DeCarlo.

Though technically his first appearance, you could imagine Abattoir in the backgrounds of crowd shots of the lunatics at Arkham Asylum, since he had apparently been in there for some time, after killing 19 people and eating some of them. Here, he's broken out by some goons-for-hire, then seemingly on a whim decides to attack a rally for mayoral candidate Etchison. Bruce Wayne is in attendance, arriving with Vicki Vale: I don't think they were a couple at the time, and Bruce is cheerfully playing the layabout cad card.

Abattoir, seemingly forcing the goons to go along with his madness, kills Etchison's wife; but is distracted when Vale gets a photo of him: he may or may not believe photos steal your soul, but he's going with that. Batman gets shot in the chest while Abattoir chases Vale, then manages to use her as a hostage until he can escape. Later, in the Batcave, Bats realizes someone had to have paid to break-out Abattoir, and he thinks he knows who...

Working through the bribed orderly and the getaway driver, Batman tracks Abattoir down to the family mortuary, where they have a brawl in a pile of bones. It's a cool visual even if Batman doesn't really seem to break a sweat, or take him down: he dumps a coffin full of bones on Abattoir, and leaves him for the cops, one of whom looks savagely displeased at the idea of going in there...Bats then picks up the mastermind that had Abattoir freed: Etchison, who had changed his name to distance himself from his cousin; but arranged the whole thing to kill his wife before she divorced him, and make it look like the anti-crime candidate was standing up to crime. At least some of that seemed to be out of nowhere, but we're running out of pages, so...

Later, when Jean-Paul Valley was Batman, he would hesitate to save Abattoir, who fell to his death. But Abattoir had taken another family member hostage, and dead, he couldn't tell anyone where he was, so the hostage died. This was supposed to be a straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back moment, showing how unworthy Jean-Paul was of being Batman. I can't help but think Bruce would've gotten a pass on that one; but I also wonder if Abattoir was specifically created to be killed off later, or if he just fit the bill at the time.

Crap, maybe this post should've been Memorial Day, instead of Labor Day. Always think of those things too late...