Christmas with Robin!

It's Christmastime here at the castle, which makes it the perfect time to talk about the first appearance of Robin, the Boy Wonder, for reasons which are so obvious that I needn't bother mentioning them. Or making them up, in point of fact.

That's a bold way to advertise a new character on the cover of a comic. The most important find of the entire year? Isn't his also the year that Flash Comics were first published? And maybe it's a little pedantic, but how do you classify something you created as a 'find'? I suppose the idea was 'found' in the sense that someone pitched him to an editor and the editor said yes, but that's something of a stretch.

Animated Batman... Hypocrite?

While watching Son of Batman, I noted something strange. While the story followed the only broadest outline of Grant Morrison's intro to Damien (Batman Jr.) Wayne, the storytellers were careful to include Bruce's famous harping about how it's important not to kill anyone, ever. This would be less significant if Batman and his friends didn't kill a whole lot of people over the course of the story.

Let's take a look at Batman's reaction to being cornered by a group of Man-Bats who - and this is important to note - are just regular people (in this case assassins from the League of Shadows) given an entirely reversible serum that has temporarily transformed them into monsters. Here's Batman's play-



That's right - he blew them up with a terrifying powerful explosive, then crushed them under tons of steel and other debris.

It's possible that you're wrong about The Dark Knight Rises

I've been very hard on terrible movie Skyfall here on the website, and as a consequence, a question has been asked of me: how is it that I'm so critical of terrible movie Skyfall, while I'm happy ignoring the many plot holes and stupid contrivances of wonderful movie The Dark Knight Rises? A fair question, one which I'll answer in the form of a picto-illustratory article.

The short version - The Dark Knight Rises doesn't actually have many plot holes or stupid character decisions. What people have incorrectly regarded as such are largely examples of them not paying close enough attention to the film, or misinterpreting things (willfully or not) out of a biased intent to claim that the film isn't actually any good. I'm not going to attempt to engage their motivations for doing this, but rather just explain where their reasoning is flawed.

So, let's start at the beginning, shall we?

Twelve Years Later, I Accuse Wild Wild West of Plagiarism

Remember Wild Wild West? I'll understand if you don't. It wasn't fantastic, and hasn't been well-recorded by history. While researching a project I came across something strange involving it - but first, a synopsis.

Wild Wild West revolved around a pair of government agents desperate to stop a science villain with a devious plan: Use a bizarre steampunk contraption to attack the joining ceremony of the First Transcontinental Railroad, and then head east, laying waste to the country before finally using it to occupy Washington DC and taking over the country!

There was more to the plot, of course, with magnetic death blades and flying bicycles, but those are the broad strokes, which I thought it important to lay out before moving onto the program I recently stumbled upon.

That show? Batman (the animated series)!

Arkham Asylum: Madness Has Something Weird About It

Not the story, of course. It’s pretty much the standard ‘Arkham is a preposterously poorly-run madhouse’ storyline that DC has been publishing over and over again since the late 80s. No, there’s something weird in the writing/art that writer/artist Sam Kieth is responsible for.

And not in a normal ‘Sam Kieth’s art looks weird’ sort of way, either.

The panels in question come right at the end of the story, which concerns a psychiatric nurse who’s forced by dire economic conditions to take literally the worst job an RN trained in how to deal with mental patients could possibly have.

At the end of the story (SPOILER ALERT) the nurse is trying to decide whether or not to quit working at Arkham Asylum. She’s typed up a letter of resignation, but hasn’t turned it in yet:

(click to bigify)

It must be great to be a mainstream comic villain.

People talk about the world of Grand Theft Auto having no consequences for violent mayhem. It seems like they're unfamiliar with the world of Gotham City.

Here are a series of images from Batman: Battle for the Cowl #1. In case you're unfamiliar with the storyline, it concerns the long process of deciding who's going to take over for Batman during his long exile in the distant past (or possibly the Australian outback - it's unlcear). Now, a normal person upon hearing that Batman's "dead" would naturally just assume that Dick Grayson would take over being Batman. DC, on the other hand, took four months and fifteen issues, for a combined cover price of 45 dollars American, to get to that point.

Avod Wednesday!

There's a new Avod for all y'all to listen to!

It can be found here!

Enjoy some spirited discussions about Harper's Island, Skinwalkers, and the third-best John Carpenter movie, Prince of Darkness!

Batman isn't the only moron in the Batcave

This is Doctor Tommy Elliot. Like most Batman villains, he enjoys murdering people. His list of murders includes, but is not limited to, his own parents, Batman’s mechanic Harold, and many Gotham police officers.

Unlike most Batman villains, he knows Batman’s secret identity (Riddler mentioned it over drinks one night. Riddler discovered the identity off-panel), and when he’s not dressed as the invisible man, he looks exactly like Bruce Wayne.

Batman's Not-Very-Secret Identity

Batman's been around for a few decades now so, despite the fact that he was semi-rebooted back in the 80s, he's got a long enough history that more than a few people have either figured out, or just been told his secret identity. If 2003's "Batman: Family (issue 7)" can be believed, he's just getting lazy.

The setup: After WayneCo CEO Lucius Fox suffers a stroke, Bruce Wayne is convinced to put a mysterious old woman in charge of his multi-billion dollar empire, based solely on the fact that she used to be an acquaintance of Bruce's mother. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that she's the head of a 'family' of criminals out to steal all of his money. In the following scene, Batman has locked one of the 'family' members in a glass cage which, while escape-proof, is by no means soundproof:

Bat-News!

Here's an article from industry news section of the IMDB:

Dark Knight Director Puzzled By Success

29 July 2008 10:16 AM, PDT

The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan has told reporters in Tokyo that he has no idea why his Batman movie is breaking box-office records. "I would not be able to point to exactly what it is," he said. "If I knew that all my films would have been successful." Final weekend figures confirmed Monday that the movie has broken yet another record -- best second-week performance of any film. The movie earned $75.2 million, which brought its 10-day total to more than $300 million, according to box-office trackers Media by Numbers. (The results somewhat diminished the achievement of Sony's Hancock, starring Will Smith, which crossed the $200-million mark after four weeks.) The film is now taking aim at Titanic's record of $600.8 million in ticket sales -- by far the top money maker of all time.

While I'm on the subject of Batman-

After my initial negative feelings towards the film yesterday, today I kept wondering if I was being too hard on it, and having second thoughts about my 'review' of Heath Ledger's performance.

Then I had a sudden realization - what I was doing was what all those die-hard Star Wars fans had done right after Revenge of the Sith - I was talking myself into liking the film more than I did. I was rewriting my memories so that the Joker had been incredible, rather than awful. Ledger was quickly fading away (not a surprise, given how much he underplayed it), and being replaced with an imagined version of a better performance by another actor. Adrien Brody or Guy Pearce or perhaps even Johnny Depp. Someone who could have brought the Joker's madness to life the way it deserved to be, rather than the mumbly mess we got. Seriously, I can now close my eyes and picture a great scene between the Joker and Kieth Szarbajaka (I hope that's how it's spelled), rather than a bad one - and it's entirely the bad 'homeless child molester' Joker portrayal that ruined the moment.

Oh, and one other Batman-related thing

After watching Batman vs. Dracula, the animated film, I came up with a simple math equation that allows people to determine whether or not they had made a good Batman film. It's not a universal rule, obviously, and you could misuse it, but I think there's some truth to it, and it should have been applied to The Dark Knight.

THE BATMAN QUALITY FORMULA

(# batarangs in the film)x(# of explosions in the film)x(# of recognizable bat-villains in the film)x(# of references to the film Jerry Maguire). If the resulting number is anything but 0, you haven't made a good Batman movie.

I haven't crunched the numbers yet, but The Dark Knight's number, sadly, is not 0.

I Love Batman (The Joker, not so much)

I know I generally talk about Indiana Jones, and I'll get back to that soon, but I wanted to pause and react to The Dark Knight, which I've just returned from seeing.

My review: Loved it, with one major reservation.

That reservation? I can't believe how terrible Heath Ledger's Joker was. Just absolutely so wrong for the movie that every time he showed up on screen it took me right out of the experience.