Batman (created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane)

[Thad]

I remembered liking Sideshow but I forgot just what an animation showcase it was. A good big chunk of the first act is silent, with Batman tracking Croc through the wilderness.

(And Croc throws a rock at him.)

The director of the episode is Boyd Kirkland. I never paid a lot of attention to the director credit but I know I saw his name pretty frequently. You know how your own name sticks out to you when you see it. I know he worked on a lot of DCAU stuff over the years, and then over on the Marvel side; there was a dedication to him on Avengers: EMH after he passed away.

It's different watching Batman: TAS than it used to be. Whole lot of ghosts on that show now. Conroy's the biggest, of course, but before we lost him we lost Kirkland and Shirley Walker and Bob Hastings and Efrem Zimbalist Jr and Michael Ansara and David Warner and Ed Asner and Adam West and John Vernon and Brock Peters and Roddy McDowall and I'm probably forgetting some. 30 years is a long time.

[Mongrel]

(And Croc throws a rock at him.)

Now that's just perfect.

[Thad]

It was a big rock.

[Thad]

Season 2 is an interesting change of pace because, much like X-Men, I saw every episode of the first season multiple times but didn't catch the later episodes with the same kind of frequency or repetition. I saw most of these in their original run, and all of them on DVD at least once, but it's a different sensation from season 1. Season 1 every episode is like "Oh yeah, I remember this one." There's a lot less of that familiarity in season 2. I barely remembered "Avatar"; I remembered a few visuals like the fight at the museum, Ra's al Ghul appearing really old, and Ubu leaving Batman a canteen at the end, but overall it felt really unfamiliar.

There was a color choice I liked: once Batman got to the desert, they changed his coloring; the highlights on his costume look brown instead of blue for most of this episode.



It reminded me of this Matt Wagner cover:



And the "don't mess with Batman's cake" image by Joe Quinones:



Between this and "Sideshow", season 2's been pretty good so far for getting Batman out of Gotham and into less-familiar environments. It's a good choice; changes things up a bit.

[Büge]

Brentai Thoth Khepera is covering you in goopy slime

[Thad]

Batman: The Adventures Continue continues with Season 3, and hot damn the art by Jordan Gibson looks good and the colors by Monica Kubina look amazing.

Kubina's colors remain amazing in issue #2 but I don't like Kevin Altieri's art as much. It's not that it breaks from the Timm house style they use for all these tie-ins; I don't have a problem with that. I just never particularly liked the digital inking style where the finished art looks like scratchy pencils. There are guys who can pull it off, like Sinkiewicz and Cowan, but generally speaking it's not my favorite.

I will say he does absolutely fantastic work with Harley's acrobatics, and gives them a kinetic look I've seldom seen on a static page. The pencils are quite good, it's just that I would have preferred them with traditional inks over them.

I'm not quite sure what to make of the sexual politics of the book. A major character component of the story is Bruce finding out that a woman he dated in college was hooking up with Harley on the side. At first it's funny, and feels like one of those stories where Batman's uptight about something for no good reason (Alfred, ever the voice of reason, even comments that it's perfectly normal at that age for people to still be deciding what they want), but as the story goes on it starts to feel a little slut-shamey. I guess you could argue that it never condemns Cassie for having multiple partners, only for manipulating Bruce and making him think he was the only one. But that's a tough needle to thread and I'm not sure Dini and Burnett pull it off.

[Mothra]

Was seeing this clip of Shazam from JLU floating around:

And the discussion about how Superman was definitely in the wrong on this one, but how hard a thread that is to weave while also staying true to a character as "perfect" as Supes.

Anyways, it was mentioned in the comments that Keegan Michael-Key found out that Dwayne McDuffie was his half-brother. Pretty crazy.

[Mothra]

[Thad]

That one still hurts.

He was an incredible storyteller, a deep thinker, and by all accounts a wonderful guy.

I went through a similar "oh shit, they're talking about Dwayne McDuffie" moment when I read Previously, On X-Men. There's an interview near the end with Charlotte Fullerton, who managed the X-Men cartoon fan club back in the '90s; I knew I recognized her name from somewhere else but couldn't immediately place where. She mentioned her late husband a couple times and how he'd done some work for Marvel, but I couldn't work out who she was talking about until she mentioned Damage Control.

[Thad]

Okay, Baby-Doll is a great episode, but there's one detail I'm fixating on, and it's not that I've somehow watched two TV shows that make extensive reference to Cousin Oliver in one week.

Baby-Doll's former co-stars, Brian Daly and Tammy Vance, are starring in Death of a Salesman.

Who the fuck is Tammy playing?

There are only two female roles in Death of a Salesman. She's too young to be playing Linda, and if she's famous enough that you're putting her name on the marquee, you're not casting her as the Woman.

I kinda like the idea that this production of Death of a Salesman has her playing a gender-swapped Happy*, but on further reflection I think it suits the theme of the episode better if she's playing Linda in old-age makeup. Because that's one more thing Mary Louise Dahl can never do: even if you age her up with makeup, audiences still won't take her seriously playing someone older.

(BTW, not cool, Robin; her Lady Macbeth was fine.)

* gender-swapping Biff would mess up the double meaning of the title

[Thad]

BTW, Dick move, Robin

[Thad]

"The Lion and the Unicorn" is the first episode on the Blu-Ray set that's got significant video issues. Several shots, including all the bits where they're outside on the streets of London, look grainy and low-res. Presumably the film for those bits was lost or damaged and they had to fall back on the DVD versions.

Still, pretty damned impressive to get 77 episodes in before seeing anything like that.

...huh. I'm getting near the end of the original run. I'm planning on going through the DCAU roughly in order, so I'll be watching Superman season 1 before what this set calls Batman season 3 (which aired as the Batman half of The New Batman/Superman Adventures).

[Thad]

"The Lion and the Unicorn" is the first episode on the Blu-Ray set that's got significant video issues. Several shots, including all the bits where they're outside on the streets of London, look grainy and low-res. Presumably the film for those bits was lost or damaged and they had to fall back on the DVD versions.

It's a recurring issue in scenes with weather effects -- the fog of London in "The Lion and the Unicorn", the rain in "Riddler's Reform" and "Lock-Up".

I suspect that the effects are CG; Video Toaster or something. They probably scanned the original negatives, added the effects, and then printed up new negatives; that would explain why the frames with weather effects would have been lower-resolution than the ones photographed straight off the original cels.

It still looks good, but the change in quality from shot to shot is definitely noticeable.

[Mothra]

I found myself really enjoying Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham - essentially an alt universe 1920's gotham where Batman battles Cthulhu. Genuinely fun stuff!

[Thad]

Batman: The Adventures Continue continues, and the latest arc features the welcome return of Ty Templeton to art duties.

I've got mixed feelings about how much continuity this arc features -- Lock-Up returning as a member of the Suicide Squad is a nice touch, but Joker running with a new sidekick who he's brainwashed using Cadmus tech is the kind of foreshadowing I don't think we really need (I always thought Return of the Joker was a pretty shitty way to end Tim's story), and Batman encountering an adversary who's stolen a prototype suit WayneTech's been developing for the military, which grants enhanced strength, agility, and limited flight capabilities ("Don't get too excited, Robin. It'll be years before it's ready.") leans too far into "Hah? *nudge* Get it? *nudge* Hah?" territory for my tastes.

But it's definitely a big improvement over the Jason Todd arc in the previous volume/season. And best of all, Ty Templeton is back and cancer-free!

[Thad]

Look, I don't want to victim-blame, but if you live in Gotham City and you hear there's going to be an event called the "Laff-Off" and your reaction is "hey, that sounds like a good place to not get clown-murdered," I kinda feel like that's on you.

[nosimpleway]

I'm pretty sure at one point in Batman: TAS the actual Gotham police department orders catering for Comissioner Gordon's birthday party from "Krazy Klown" catering

guess who pops out of the cake

just guess

[Brantly B.]

[Thad]

Mean Seasons isn't a top-ten episode or anything, but it gets a certain extra poignancy knowing it was written by a woman who died at 50.

I can't help but wondering if Bader already knew she had cancer. It's entirely possible. Though a woman working in Hollywood in her mid-40s would have plenty of reasons to have age discrimination on her mind even if she didn't.

[Mongrel]

Probably goes without saying, but sound on.