Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

Batman: Gotham Knight was the third direct-to-DVD release that DC submitted for the approval of general society. Releasing in 2008, it was intended to be consistent with the then-ongoing Christopher Nolan Batman films, specifically taking place between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I was really looking forward to this one at the time, and I remember being less than excited about the final product at the time. Serving as a series of six interconnected vignettes, the film was imagined as DC’s answer to The Animatrix, and although I didn’t much care for it when I first saw it (in fact, I distinctly remember buying the DVD, watching it once, and then trading it in for credit at Wherehouse Music almost immediately), my estimation of it has gone up in the intervening years. Maybe I’ve just grown more accustomed to non-Western art styles or more accepting of changing styles within a single narrative, but this one is pretty fun. 

In the first segment, “Have I Got a Story for You,” penned by A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson, several teenage friends gather to tell one another about having seen the urban legend figure of Batman battling it out on the streets with a supervillain: one describes him as a cyborg, another as some kind of vampire, and a third as a monstrous human/bat hybrid with giant wings. If that sounds familiar, you may have read the 1975 story on which it was based, or (more likely) you’re thinking of the 1998 episode “Legends of the Dark Knight” from The New Batman Adventures. This one isn’t a new story, but it does take advantage of the different art styles available from Studio 4°C, the art house that directed this one. Some of the art here could be considered ugly, but it works both as an intro to this particular omnibus-style film and in its own right. 

The second segment, “Crossfire,” is written by prolific comic book writer and author Greg Rucka and animated by Production I.G (Ghost in the Shell). It introduces one of the throughlines of the overarching narrative, the background element of a looming gang war between the forces of Sal Maroni and a mobster known only as “The Russian.” This one serves as a character study of two Gotham City detectives for the Major Crimes Unit. They work directly for Jim Gordon and have conflicting feelings about their leader’s association with Batman – Crispus Allen, who is planning on resigning as he feels that he and his partner are stuck running errands for a vigilante (including the return of the captured felon from the first segment to his cell in Arkham Asylum), and Anna Ramirez, who believes that Batman has changed Gotham for the better. The two end up in a crossfire between the Russians and Maroni’s forces and are rescued by Batman, who tells them that Gordon is a good judge of character, and that he recognizes them and trusts them based on Gordon’s belief in them. 

The third (and in my opinion best) segment is “Field Test,” animated by Bee Train (.hack//Sign) and written by Jeff Goldberg, who was perhaps the closest to Nolan’s work of anyone involved with the production (other than David S. Goyer, who we’ll come back to), as he was associate producer on The Prestige and The Dark Knight before becoming co-producer on Inception and The Dark Knight Rises and executive producing Interstellar. This is the segment with the most pathos, as a mechanical malfunction in a WayneTech satellite is shown to have the side effect of creating an electromagnetic field, which resident tech genius Lucius Fox is able to reverse engineer into a device in the Batsuit that can deflect bullets. Bruce first uses it to frustrate a businessman whom he suspects of having had a local aid worker killed and uses a PDA that he steals from the man to force Maroni and the Russian into a confrontation that he can mediate to force a truce (to keep them from expanding their war into the civilian population while he collects enough evidence to put them away). However, when one of the henchmen is gravely injured by a bullet deflected by the new device, Batman becomes distressed by the violence that is so like the kind that took his parents from him. He gets the man to a hospital and forgoes the use of the deflector belt for the time being. 

Although this one is my favorite, it is worth pointing out since I haven’t so far that no one from the Nolan films is reprising their roles here, but having Kevin Conroy, who is the definitive Batman as far as I’m concerned, more than makes up for it. The only drawback to that is that his voice doesn’t always match with the animation style that the film has. It’s most noticeable here, where Bruce is drawn in a very pretty, bishōnen style, but which I mean that he’s always looking at the camera like this: 

Or this: 

And there’s something about it that just doesn’t set the right mood, even if this is the strongest link in this chain. 

Segment four, “In Darkness Dwells,” was written by David S. Goyer (who contributed to all three Nolan films) and animated by Madhouse (Beyblade, Vampire Hunter D). This segment follows Batman as he pursues the kidnapper of a local church cardinal into the sewers and learns that his opponent, the so-called Killer Croc, is acting under the influence of fear toxin that is continuing to be created by the on-the-loose Scarecrow. It’s the most action-focused of the segments and is more interested in creating interesting visuals than pushing the narrative forward, and it works for what it is, with several fairly tense sequences that really had me on the edge of my seat, credit where credit is due. The segment that follows, “Working Through Pain,” sees the return of Studio 4°C as the animator, with Brian Azzarello taking on writing duties. This one picks up immediately where the previous chapter left off, with Batman being shot by a hallucinating man. He cauterizes the wound and spends the larger part of the segment trying to find his way out of the sewers while flashing back to learning pain management techniques from a woman named Cassandra, who took him in when he was rejected by a monastic order which promised to teach him to work through physical pain. This one is probably second best, as its shift in focus to Cassandra and her own story; the same monks previously took her in when she was posing as a boy in order to learn their ways, only to eventually expose and shame her when they are unable to break her spirit as she excels in their order. In the sixth and final segment, Madhouse returns to provide animation for the story “Deadshot,” penned by longtime animation writer Alan Burnett. It’s straightforward enough: the shady businessman from earlier in the film hires the titular assassin to kill Batman after he lures the Dark Knight into the light by staging an assassination attempt on Jim Gordon. It’s a fine end, if not necessarily a climactic one. 

There’s less to talk about here than in the previous two films. The segments range from acceptable to quite good, but they never reach the point of being truly amazing. At a brief 76 minutes, it’s worth checking out, even if you don’t care all that much about Nolan’s films. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond