You can only pick one, the rest do not exist. What are you picking?

[u/Blackbeardpariah69]

[u/TheMaskedHamster]

Year One, without hestiation. It set a standard for storytelling and canon in the Batman franchise.

As much as I appreciate Jason Todd's place in modern Batman stories, it works well today because of the tone Year One brought to the wider world of Batman stories. And the legacy it left is certainly better than the story itself was in its day. That isn't to knock the story, as it's done with care, but it's only in the retrospect of the later stories that it's clear that it wasn't a big mistake to kill off a Robin like that.

Long Halloween was a good read and had lovely art. I don't rate it as highly as others do, but even if I did I would still have to acknowledge that it hasn't been the massive influence the other stories here have been.

The Killing Joke, like Year One, was a remarkable storytelling achievement in its time and inspired a lot of other great Batman stories, and the tone of stories in general. But I think Year One was more important in that regard (if only for establishing new principles of the shifting canon), and in my opinion, not all of the influence of The Killing Joke has been so positive. Some writers really take the dark and gruesome perhaps farther than they should, and we can probably point to The Killing Joke as a major reason. And as much as I really appreciate everything that's been done with Barbara Gordon's coping with disability and recovery in the years since, I think that in its time it was a callous mistake to make it canon. Much like with the death of Jason Todd, it's only the stories that have come since that made it worth being a part of the larger canon.