Batman (created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane)

[Lottel]

I read the whole thing twice and was going to type up a bunch of thoughts about it but thought better of it.

Let's just say Sherman's review is kinder and glosses over a lot of the rough bumps in the comic such as the shallow characterization of Barbara, the forced romance subplot, and the continuous trying to overexplain inconsequential things while handwaving important information.

I really got the feeling Geoff Johns read some Grant Morrison and thought "I can do that" and no one told him he, in fact, could not.

Every page tried to be ambiguous while also presenting information with an air of finality and it just was a brown and grey slog.

[Lottel]

Actually really quick, both you and Sherman talk about how the Clown and the Comedian aren't necessarily different enough. I'll have you know they lampshade that specifically during their very first appearance in the book when The Clown tells the Comedian he's wearing his shirt. The Comedian looks down at the shirt to show us he's wearing very same Hawaiian shirt from the Killing Joke and he says "Actually no. This is my shirt. It's from my finest work."

It's just as bad as it sounds.

[Mongrel]

Woooowwwwwww

[Grath]

More specifically: the idea that the Joker is actually three different people isn't necessarily dumb, but the World's Greatest Detective never noticing this before is dumb.

To be fair...

[Friday]

Going all in on horrifying murder Joker is stupid, because the Joker is actually scarier when he's mostly a weirdo who does gags but very occasionally will just beat someone to death with a crowbar.

So by turning the Joker into a grimdark edgelord, you're eliminating anything fun AND making him less scary. Worst of both worlds.

[Thad]

Going all in on horrifying murder Joker is stupid, because the Joker is actually scarier when he's mostly a weirdo who does gags but very occasionally will just beat someone to death with a crowbar.

Yeah, I hate the fucking crowbar, though. If he's gonna murder somebody, I'd rather he do it with fish or parade floats.

Some further stray thoughts:

One of my favorite comics of the past couple of years is Gideon Falls, by Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino. It's a horror comic, and the villain is a hideous, demonic figure whose most recognizable feature is his smile.



So obviously these guys seem like a natural fit for a Joker comic. DC gave them one; it was called Joker: Killer Smile.

I thumbed through an issue of it in the comic shop. And I got to a page with the fucking crowbar on it, and I put it down and didn't buy it.

And I think that's interesting. It's interesting how much I enjoy a violent, disturbing original work by Lemire and Sorrentino, and how much I fucking hate the same approach when it's applied to an established character.

I think, as much as anything, it's the format. Gideon Falls is their book; they created it, they put together every issue themselves, and it's going to end (maybe already has; I haven't been into the comic shop for a couple weeks but the last issue is due out around now). All the characters are theirs.

The Joker, OTOH, has been around for 80 years. A hell of a lot of people have put their own stamp on him. But two things happened in the '80s that have fundamentally affected his characterization ever since: he beat Robin to death with a crowbar, and he shot Batgirl in the spine, crippled her, and sexually assaulted her.

And the thing about that is, if you tell a story that even acknowledges that either one of those two things happened, those are going to be the things that define who the Joker is and what his relationship is to the rest of the characters in the story. You can't have that stuff in the background and then just dial him back. (Unless you're Grant Morrison and use a play like "Joker just reinvents himself periodically; his personality can completely change and he's basically not even the same person anymore.") You can ignore it and just not bring that stuff up at all (which is especially difficult if you're telling a Joker story that has Jason or Babs in it), but once you acknowledge those stories, where he crossed those lines, there's not really any coming back or toning him down again. He's just cranked up to 11, all the time. He can't just be a one-off villain anymore, either; every time he shows up, it's a fucking event.

It's fucking exhausting, is what it is.

[beatbandito]

I never knew that "Joker's Crowbar" was a thing. But if there has to be an established iconic weapon for him, and even if it has to be one that he used on a Robin: why the hell isn't it a "bang"-flag pistol that then fires the flag like a bullet?

[Thad]

Because DCAU isn't comics canon, and Return of the Joker came out 12 years after Death in the Family.

Frankly I'm not crazy about the Joker/Robin story in RotJ either, but it at least has the benefit of being the last story for both of them in the DCAU timeline, so it doesn't really have a chance to become the defining DCAU Joker story in the way that A Death in the Family and The Killing Joke have become the definitive Joker stories in DC continuity.

(Though as I noted upthread, the recent Batman: The Adventures Continue just crowbarred A Death in the Family into something resembling the DCAU, so that's fun.)

[Friday]

It's fucking exhausting, is what it is.

I hear you, man. Personally I think Batman in general (both the character and the Franchise) has just gone so far down the Edgelord hole that I just cannot take it remotely seriously (or have any fun with it) anymore. There are stories you can tell in that hole, good ones even, but grimdark is almost always used as a crutch to thinly disguise bad writing and lazy tropes.

[Thad]

Yeah. It's not so bad in other media, where we've had stuff like Lego Batman and The Brave and the Bold. And this looks fun:



And the comics aren't all bad. Morrison's run was messy at times but a whole lot of fun, and there was that Detective run a few years back that had Batwoman training a Bat-Family that included a reformed Clayface. But it just seems like it's almost impossible for any story, especially any Joker story, to escape the orbit of those couple of famous comics from the '80s. Even the damn Batman: TAS followup had to wedge A Death in the Family into the DCAU (and have Mr. Freeze dig up his wife's corpse, because why not?).

I dunno. The publisher's under new leadership now and it at least seems like they're being a little less anal retentive about strict adherence to continuity. Maybe we'll get a reprieve.

[Thad]

I recently bought the Burton and Schumacher Bat-films on 4K/HDR. I watched Batman Returns for Christmas and my biggest takeaway is that there is absolutely no reason to own this movie in HDR. I hadn't watched it in a decade or more and had forgotten just how gray and washed-out the whole thing is, but in hindsight it's obvious why: it's an homage to films from the '20s. (Burton's not exactly subtle about it, what with including a character named after Max Schreck.)

As it happens, a fan edit transforming it into a black-and-white silent film made the rounds a few years back:



(Link's dead, unfortunately, and so far I haven't been able to find it anywhere.)

[Thad]

Future State is exactly the kind of DC sales gimmick I hate. About the only thing they could do to get me interested in it would be if they, I dunno, replaced Batman with a black guy and it was written by the creator of Undercover Brother.

...they what now?

You're shittin' me.

[Thad]

Timm's got a new Batman series coming.

Now, nearly three decades later, Timm is returning to the world of the Bat, this time alongside two acclaimed filmmakers and fans: J.J. Abrams and The Batman director Matt Reeves. Utilizing state-of-the-art animation techniques and technology, Batman: Caped Crusader promises to once again reinvent Batman and his super-villains with sophisticated storytelling, nuanced characters and intense action sequences all set in a visually striking world.

“We are beyond excited to be working together to bring this character back, to tell engrossing new stories in Gotham City,” said Timm, Abrams and Reeves in a joint statement. “The series will be thrilling, cinematic and evocative of Batman’s noir roots, while diving deeper into the psychology of these iconic characters. We cannot wait to share this new world.”

All that "reinvent" and "new world" talk would seem to make it pretty clear this is a new continuity and not a return to the DCAU. Which seems kinda odd given that they're trying to remind us of Batman: TAS so hard that they're using the same typeface on the logo.

Also there's a new Superman series coming. It might be good too! But it's not Timm and it sounds like it's aimed at a younger audience.

[Thad]

Batman: The Adventures Continue continues, and I continue to have mixed feelings about it.

There's some good stuff in Season Two #1! I like the bits with Deadman, the revelation that he and Dick know each other from their circus days, and the foreshadowing that we're going to learn more about that relationship as the story moves forward.

But the same problems continue to bog it down, too.

One of those is that it suffers from that "let's make it darker than we were allowed to on the TV series for kids" impulse that a lot of DCAU-adjacent media do (from Return of the Joker to the Batman Beyond comics written by Adam Beechen to the Arkham games). This issue kicks off with the murder of Mayor Hill. Fun! (We're also subsequently introduced to his previously-unmentioned son, Hamilton Junior -- older brother to Jordan, who we saw in the "Be a Clown" episode of TAS and who gets a cameo -- who seems to be next in line for the mayor's office, which is of course not suspicious at all.)

The other thing is, this is a toy comic. It's designed to sell toys based on the premise, "what if Batman character who was never on TAS, done in a style that looks like TAS?" And look, I am not a guy who looks down his nose at comics that are designed to sell toys; I've described Chromedome and Rewind in Transformers: Lost Light as the greatest love story since Maggie and Hopey, and I stand by it. But y'know, some of these characters mesh better into TAS continuity than others. Deathstroke and Azrael wound up working out pretty well! Red Hood, on the other hand, just seemed pointless and redundant.

Which brings us to the villain of this story: the Court of Owls and the Talon.

So, okay. The Court of Owls never worked for me.

Problem number one is the premise. "There's a secret society that's been controlling Gotham for 150 years, and the World's Greatest Detective is just now hearing about it for the first time." That story might work if it's set early in Batman's career, but by the time he's been around long enough to be on his third or fourth Robin, y'know, it kinda starts to feel like a secret society controlling the city is something he would have noticed by now. My suspension of disbelief has its limits. Even when it comes to Batman.

Now, we don't see much of what the Court of Owls has been up to all these years in this story, so it's possible that in this version they've been dormant for a long time and Batman assumed they were a myth. It's too early to tell if that's the way they're going, but if it is, okay, that's problem number one solved.

But problem number two lingers. And that's the premise that costumed vigilantes have been running around Gotham City dressed like nocturnal flying animals for 150 years. And I just think that's a profoundly misguided idea. It makes Batman less special and unique. It's one thing to have villains who copy his shtick; it's another to retroactively establish that actually he's been copying the villains' shtick this whole time.

Anyway. It's not bad. It's pretty good, even! But it still strikes the occasional sour note for me.

[Thad]

Having recovered my remote from my old house, this morning I watched Heart of Ice, and this is hardly an original sentiment but damned if it isn't a perfect half-hour of television.

One of the things that really struck me on this viewing is how much it relies on Ansara's performance (and, presumably, Romano's direction). It could have been camp. The script has more ice puns per minute than Batman and Robin -- hell, it opens with "revenge is a dish best served cold," which isn't just an ice pun but a fourth-wall-speckling reference to Ansara's past work. It centers around a conflict between a guy named Fries and a guy named Boyle.

It's a great script but it's really, really jokey, and it's easy to picture a less-restrained cast and director leaning into it and making it really goofy. The decision to play it completely straight, even where the dialogue is downright corny, is what makes the episode. It gives Mr. Freeze real pathos, and it's become his definitive portrayal.

[Thad]

Also, there were two line reads that really stood out to me this time:

Henchman: We've got company!
Mr. Freeze: Keep your mind on your business. I'll handle this.

Mr. Freeze: Tonight I mean to pay back the man who ruined my life. Our lives.
Batman: Even if you have to kill everyone in the building to it?
Mr. Freeze: Think of it, Batman. To never again walk upon a summer's day with a hot wind in your face, and a warm hand to hold. Oh, yes. I'd kill for that.

If I were reading those lines, I'd emphasize the nouns: "I'll handle this" and "I'd kill for that". But Ansara emphasizes the verbs -- "I'll handle this" and "I'd kill for that."

He emphasizes the doing. It reinforces the notion that he's completely driven by his mission, his cause -- and of course, as all good Batman villains are a dark reflection of Batman himself, we can see the parallels here, a man who lost someone he loved, who made his life's mission a reaction to that loss, and who's become completely consumed by that mission.

Course, we're still early in the series at this point and we haven't really seen Batman completely consumed by the mission yet -- he actually seems pretty well-adjusted this early on! -- but of course the farther we get along this arc, the clearer the parallel becomes, on to its ultimate resolution in Batman Beyond.

[Friday]

One of the main things I liked about Nolan's ending for Rises, despite the movie having a lot of problems, is that Batman gets to just quit, settle down with Catwoman and be happy.

As much as I like bitter old man Bruce from Beyond, I don't like the implication that Gotham will just forever remain a crime-ridden shithole and Batman an increasingly bitter and cynical brooding asshole. It teaches the reader/viewer a bad lesson, that no matter how hard you fight things will never improve.

[zaratustra]

As much as I like bitter old man Bruce from Beyond, I don't like the implication that Gotham will just forever remain a crime-ridden shithole and Batman an increasingly bitter and cynical brooding asshole. It teaches the reader/viewer a bad lesson, that no matter how hard you fight things will never improve.

I think we've pretty much exhausted the number of things that can be learned from superhero stories.

[Friday]

but zara what if we made yet another story about what if superheroes were real but bad

[Friday]

I for one would love to see a rated R version of a superhero story where the superheroes were bad and people like got killed and there was blood, a thing I have never ever seen before and certainly isn't the new zombie genre of the current media