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Batman: Dark Victory

This post is part of the DCAU fortnight, a series of articles looking at the Warner Brothers animations featuring DC’s iconic selection of characters. I’ll be looking at movies and episodes and even some of the related comic books. We’re winding down now, having worked our way through the nine animated features, so I’m just going to look at a few odds-and-ends, some of the more interesting or important episodes that the DC animated universe has produced. Earlier today we looked at the Emmy-winning Robin’s Reckoning, so I thought we might take a look at the comic book origin of Robin that it inspired.

“And while the Maronis and the Falcones have often been bitter rivals, they all now share a common enemy,” Batman narrates at one point in the sequel to The Long Halloween“Extinction.” Dark Victory is the story of the death of “the gangster element of Gotham City” as the organised crime families attempt one last struggle against the emerging freaks. It closes the book on the story threads that Frank Miller introduced in his revision of Batman’s origin in Year One, which continued through Loeb and Sale’s The Long Halloween (which itself provided the basis of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight). The book serves as an origin story for Dick Grayson, and thus offers a nice bookend for the early years of Bruce’s crimefighting career.

Face the facts...

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Justice League: A Better World

This post is part of the DCAU fortnight, a series of articles looking at the Warner Brothers animations featuring DC’s iconic selection of characters. I’ll be looking at movies and episodes and even some of the related comic books. Tomorrow I’ll be reviewing Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, so I thought it might be worth a look at what a world run by an evil Justice League might look like.

One of the central challenges that the iconic Justice League characters have had to face over the years has been the way that the comic book world has slow and sometimes subtly morphed into something far more sinister than the bright-coloured origin stories of the forties, fifties or even sixties. There was a time when supervillains were a relatively harmless sort, the hero would always save everyone’s life and there would be a “happy ever after” ending thrown on – most obviously in the Silver Age, which produced characters like the modern Flash and Green Lantern. Even the characters who were originally somewhat darker and edgier – Superman and Batman, for example, were originally relatively indifferent to human life – passed through this phase with a healthy respect for a game based around rules – the first being “thou shalt not kill”. However, times changed. Villains went from being theives and irritations to being murderers and rapists. Naturally, the fact that no prison could hold a popular bad guy long enough kinda undermines the good that these heroes do – the Joker is always going to kill more people unless he is eventually killed.Sure, there’s comic book logic at play here – the same way that having genius heroes hasn’t altered the way normal people live too much – but at some point the old fashioned values seem a little outmoded. Somebody suggests that a line should be crossed. Various iterations of the characters have tackled the issue in multiple ways, and A Better World is the attempt by Bruce Timm and the writers of the DC animated universe to address it. 

Being the group's plucky comic relief isn't without risks...

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Gotham Central – In The Line of Duty & Jokers And Madmen (Review)

Just when you think there isn’t an original concept left in comic book storytelling, Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka come up this ingenious concept: what is it like to police a comic book city – and the one populated with the same sorts of loons which give Batman a headache? Brubaker and Rucka construct a truly surprisingly awesome noir police procedure that takes a gutter’s-eye view of one of the darkest cities ever to appear in comic books. It manages to combine the two aspects brilliantly, simultaneously bringing a fresh perspective to both the Batman mythos and the police procedural.

The joke's on Gotham...

The joke's on Gotham...

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Absolute Batman: Hush (Review/Retrospective)

Hush is a divisive story arc. It seems that you either love it or you hate it, there seems to be no middle ground to speak of. Depending on where you stand it’s either a compelling exploration of Batman’s insecurities featuring a worthy new opponent for his rogues’ gallery, or it’s a hackneyed and poorly-conceived mystery which relies on an overly convoluted resolution. Honestly, I can see both sides of the argument. While I won’t argue that it’s a prestigious masterpiece in the mold of Year One or The Long Halloween, I must confess that I quite enjoyed it. Teaming up veteran Batman writer Jeph Loeb with superstar artist Jim Lee, this is very much a Batman blockbuster. It’s epic in scale, spanning most of the DC universe, with more than a few interesting (if jumbled) ideas thrown into the mix.

… Don’t say a word…

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Batman: Gothic (Review)

Legends of the Dark Knight was an interesting concept – tell self-contained stories using different creative teams set at various points during Batman’s crime-fighting career. As such, those stories would make the title easy to pick up, without tying it excessively to continuity. It’s a simple and an interesting premise, and it did produce all manner of intriguing Batman stories. Grant Morrison’s Gothicis perhaps one of the most intriguing of those stories, taking the character well outside what readers might have expected.

It’s all upside down…

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Random Thoughts on the Dark Knight Sequel…

We don’t know if Nolan’s coming back. We don’t know (though we doubt) if they’ll recast the Joker. We don’t know that Johnny Depp is the Riddler (though we know he’d like to be). We know nothing about the third film in the Batman trilogy.

Except know that there will be a third film.

You'll believe a man can glide...

You'll believe a man can glide...

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