batman | the m0vie blog

Denny O’Neil & Neal Adams’ Batman – Batman Illustrated by Neal Adams, Vol. 2 & 3 (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Darren

To celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, July is “Batman month” here at the m0vie blog. Check back daily for comics, movies and television reviews and discussion of the Caped Crusader.

It’s really quite difficult to overstate just how influential the team of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams were in redefining Batman during the seventies. Editor Julius Schwartz had made some steps in the right direction with his “new look” relaunch in the sixties, but his attempt to revitalise Batman wouldn’t truly bear fruit until the seventies. While the other definitive Batman partnership of the decade – Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers – had a clear run of issues with an over-arching story, O’Neil and Adams worked together on a number of issues scattered across a period of time when the entire Batman line was showing signs of improvement. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that we wouldn’t have Batman today without O’Neil and Adams, but I would argue that he would look pretty different.

Sharp pencil work…

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: Adam, Arthur Reeves, batman, Batman: Vow from the Grave, Bob Haney, dark knight returns, Dennis O'Neil, Frank Robbins, gordon, gotham city, Grave, Julius Schwartz, Marshall Rogers, Neal Adams, O'Neil | 6 Comments »

Batman and the Monster Men (Review)

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Darren

I really liked both of Matt Wagner’s Dark Moon Rising miniseries, offering a modern retelling of two classic Golden Age Batman stories, fit within the context of the Caped Crusader’s early career. I honestly don’t think that we get enough Golden Age nostalgia within DC comics – the focus of the recent wave of revisionism seems to have been the decidedly wacky and zany Silver Age. Still, between this and Grant Morrison’s Action Comics, perhaps we can start a trend. This is a story transitioning between Frank Miller’s iconic Batman: Year One and Jeph Loeb’s slightly more colourful The Long Halloween, built on the idea that Batman inhabits a comic book world – too much “realism” or too heavy a focus on “gritty urban crime” might rob the character of some of his appeal.

He sure knows how to make an entrance…

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: batman, batman #1, Batman and the Monster Men, Batman in film, batman: year one, dark knight returns, dc comics, frank miller, Hugo Strange, matt wagner, Miller, monster men | Leave a comment »

Bob Haney & Neal Adams on The Brave & The Bold – Batman Illustrated by Neal Adams, Vol. 1 (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Darren

In his introduction to this volume, Adams suggests that Bob Haney is one of the most “overlooked” writers in comic book history. “Though they have not gotten the recognition they deserve,” Adams argues, “Bob Haney’s stories are classics of good old comic-book drama, and dense in plot, incident, and twists.” I actually really agree with that summary of Haney’s work, and I think it’s a shame that he’s not included among Denny O’Neil and Steve Englehart as one of the writers who shaped Batman as comics entered the Bronze Age. His stories were ridiculous, but they had a sense of pulpy energy and dynamism to them. Idle folly like reason and logic are subdued to rapid-fire high-concepts, a no-nonsense Batman and a sense that literally anything could happen.

So this collaboration should be epic. Bob Haney is – to me, at least – a definitive Batman writer; Neal Adams is – widely accepted, I hope – as a (if not the) definitive Batman artist. However, combining the two doesn’t work quite as fluidly as one might hope. The stories here are solid, highly entertaining and beautifully rendered, but they’re nowhere near as effective as either creator would be working with a later collaborator. Still, even if not quite at the peak of their powers, Haney and Adams make for a powerful creative team, and there’s a lot to enjoy on their collaboration on The Brave and the Bold.

Wall-to-wall excitement…

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: Adams, aquaman, batman, Bob Haney, BobHaney, Brave & the Bold, Creeper, gordon, gotham city, Haney, james gordon, Julius Schwartz, Kubla Khan, Neal Adams, uncle sam | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Batman – Year One

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Darren

With the release of The Dark Knight Rises just around the corner, it makes sense for Warner Brothers to capitalise on one of the greatest influences on Nolan’s trilogy. Frank Miller’s take on Batman – as defined in Year One and The Dark Knight Returns – was bold, brash, clever and iconoclastic. So it’s only fair that both stories are receiving animated adaptations for Warner Brothers. While Batman: Year One might be little more than a shot-for-shot and line-by-line adaptation of Frank Miller’s origin for the Dark Knight, there’s absolutely no shame in that. Year One is perhaps my favourite Batman story, and I think it’s one certainly worth telling.

“I shall become a bat…”

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: batman, batman begins, Bruce, Christopher Nolan, dark knight returns, Dark Knight Rises, dc animated universe, dcau, film, frank miller, FrankMiller, gordon, Miller, Movie, non-review review, review | 2 Comments »

Legends of the Dark Knight: Marshall Rogers (Review)

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Darren

I do appreciate these nice hardcover collections that DC are putting out, collecting the work of iconic artists on iconic characters. There have been a number of Legends of the Dark Knight and Tales of the Batman collections, and DC will soon be publishing an Adventures of Superman: Gil Kane collection. So it is great to have pretty much all of Marshall Rogers’ work on Batman collected in one nicely-sized hardcover for the reader to digest, especially considering the monumental impact that some of his work has had on the character and his mythology. That said, there are unfortunately some production issues with the hardcover that take away from the experience of having all these stories released in a high-quality format in one place.

Na na na na na na na… Batman!

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: Archie Goodwin, batman, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Batman: Strange Apparitions, Batman: The Dark Detective, Bronze Age, ChristopherNolan, dark knight, dark knight returns, Dark Knight Rise, Dark Knight Rises, dc comic, dc comics, Golden Age Batman, Hugo Strange, james robinson, joker, Legends of the Dark Knight: Siege, Len Wein, Marshall Roger, Marshall Rogers, Siege, silver age, Silver St. Cloud, Steve Englehart, Strange Apparitions, The Golden Age Batman, tim burton, two face | 8 Comments »

Batman: The Dynamic Duo Archives, Vol. 2 (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Darren

DC’s archive line for their Silver Age Batman and Detective Comics line begins considerably later than it does for most of their other superheroes, including Superman, The Flash and Green Lantern. The Archives series are devoted to offering readers a chance to browse various comics from a character’s history in a chronological manner, often from the first book published featuring a character or at an appropriate point. For Batman, in the Silver Age, the point was deemed to be editor Julius Schwartz’s “new look” Batman.

The first collection of these comics showed potential. It was clear that the editor who had revived The Flash and Green Lantern was trying to pull Batman away from the wacky alien adventures of the fifties. While the creative teams hadn’t yet refined the darker avenger that would take root in the Bronze Age, it felt like a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the second collection of the “new look” Batman and Detective Comics run feels like something of a regression, a step backwards rather than forwards.

“This looks like a job for… err… Batman, I guess!”

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: alfred pennyworth, batman, Bruce, Dark Knight Rises, dc comics, detective comics, frank gorshin, gotham city, Grantmorrison, green lantern, joker, Michael Uslan, riddler, robin, silver age, superman | Leave a comment »

Do We See Too Much of Film Before It’s Released These Days?

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Darren

It’s a week before The Dark Knight Rises is released, but I haven’t watched any new footage since the last time I posted a trailer for the film. And boy, has that been more difficult than I make it sound. It seems like every other day there’s a new TV spot or a clip being released. Last December, like The Dark Knight before it, the prologue to the film aired in certain Imax cinemas. Warner Brothers even taking the somewhat unexpected step of releasing the production notes to the public. While Warners and Nolan have actually managed to do a great job keeping the movie under wraps, this level of awareness is hardly uncommon these days. Do we get to see too much of a movie before it’s released these days?

Is too much information the Bane of modern movie-goers?

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Amazing Spider-Man, bane, batman, christian bale, Christopher Nolan, Dark Knight Rises, imax, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, joss whedon, nolan, Rian Johnson, sam raimi, spider man, Television advertisement, Warner Bros | 8 Comments »

Paul Dini and Dustin Nguyen’s Streets of Gotham – Hush Money, Leviathan, The House of Hush (Review)

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Darren

I’m a big fan of Paul Dini. He was perhaps the finest writer on staff for the superb Batman: The Animated Series and he wrote a superb run on Detective Comics (culminating in the rehabilitation of a modern villain in Heart of Hush). He’s one of few writers out there who genuinely has a firm grip on the characters that inhabit the world of Gotham. I was quite looking forward Streets of Gotham, the Batman title that Dini would be writing in wake of Batman R.I.P., promising a unique perspective on Gotham and its guardians. Unfortunately, the end result feels relatively slight, with the series never truly finding a comfortable niche, and bouncing around somewhat inconsistantly.

Batman could handle this in his sleep…

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: batman, Batman: Streets of Gotham, batman: the animated series, dc comics, detective comics, Dini, Dustin Nguyen, gotham, gotham central, House of Hush, Joe Chill, joker, Martha Wayne, paul dini, Streets of Gotham, The House of Hush | 2 Comments »

Batman: The Dynamic Duo Archives, Vol. 1 (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Darren

It’s very hard to believe, but there was a time when both Batman and Detective Comics were on the verge of cancellation. While the character had been one of the first major superheroes to emerge, and had a profound impact on many who followed, the fifties had not been kind to the Batman. When changes in the market forced the publisher to move away from the traditional crime stories, they tried to tell science-fiction epics. This approach actually worked quite well on Superman and Action Comics, as Superman leant himself to stories about aliens and other dimensions, but these elements felt somewhat out of place in a Batman comic book. In a last ditch effort to save the titles, editor Julius Schwartz was drafted in to revamp the character and his world, resulted in a “new look” version of the Caped Crusader who would inspire Adam West’s version of the character, but felt like something of a return to the character’s roots.

Na na na na na na na na…

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: Batcave, batman, Batmobile, Bob Kane, Carmine Infantino, Dark Knight Rises, dc comics, detective comics, gordon, gotham city, james gordon, John Broome, joker, Kane, Patricia Powell, robin | Leave a comment »

Batwoman: Elegy (Hardcover) (Review)

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Darren

When I read Batwoman: Elegy, I couldn’t help but feel like I just didn’t get it. I mean, it’s good, it’s really good, but everybody and their mother had been going on and on about how it was the best Batman book in ages, and how it really was redefining what you could and couldn’t do in mainstream comic books. I liked it, but I didn’t love it, and it’s hard to put the finger on why – I suspect it’s something purely aesthetic. As much as I appreciate the fantastic art of J.H. Williams, it all seemed rather conventionally plotted by Greg Rucka. It was your standard cookie-cutter superhero story, which meant that the art just looked like pretty window dressing on a fairly routine storyline.