batman

The Not-So-New 52: Son of Batman (2014)

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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. 

Canon is a funny thing. I think that for a lot of people and within a lot of media, what’s “real” in any long-running piece of fiction is whatever was the normal state of affairs when you entered the fandom. Whatever happens moving forward from there is just new stuff to enjoy or not. When something is added retroactively (usually referred to as “retcon,” as in “retroactive continuity”), it can be something really fun and new and interesting, or it might end up being a big pile of steaming garbage. For the former, my favorite comic book character of all time, Jessica Jones, was completely retconned out of nothing for the series Alias (no relation) because Brian Michael Bendis wasn’t allowed to use Jessica “Spider-Woman” Drew for his noir detective series, so he had to make someone up. For the latter, my go-to example is the 2003 retcon that Chuck Austen introduced in an X-Men storyline entitled “The Draco.” This arc “revealed” that beloved character Nightcrawler was actually half-demon and his entire years-long arc of coming to terms with his faith and becoming a member of the clergy was actually a manipulation on the part of a group that sought to “unveil” his “demonic” form in concurrence with a technologically-induced rapture once they were able to elevate him to pope. Everybody hated it, no one accepts it as canon, and we’ve probably had two or three more retcons since then. As an example of changes that have gone back and forth for better and for worse, there are the characters of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, who were initially introduced merely as members of Magento’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants before being revealed to be his children (good), before they were again retconned to not only not be his children, but to also not be mutants at all. Why? Because the characters had been members of the Avengers at one point, and thus were shared between Disney’s ownership of MCU-related film rights and Fox’s then-independent ownership of X-Men-related film rights, and Disney, like a toxic parent in a shared custody situation, flexed their muscles to get the source material to change. 

I have to admit that I struggle with this myself, with the particular way that my brain functions meaning that I’m in conflict between being (a) resistant to big changes, (b) appreciative of new angles that make for a more interesting story even if it’s not in alignment with what I’ve believed before, and (c) annoyed by changes that conflicts with what we already knew. Where I was worst about this (and where I’ve been forced to grow the most in how I approach the material) is in the Star Trek franchise. My weird little prepubescent brain accepted the aesthetic differences between my contemporary present and the original series without question, but by the time Enterprise rolled around, I was of just the right age to take offense at and get too caught up in complaining about its “too modern” look for a prequel series. It’s been over two decades since, and the large and amorphous continuity of Star Trek has just gotten bigger and more difficult to contain in the intervening years, and at this point, I don’t care how neurodivergent you (and by “you” I mean “we”) are, sometimes you just have to let go. 

This is all a long-winded introduction to talk about my feelings about the ways that the story of Batman changed over the course of my life. When I was a kid, Batman: The Animated Series was Batman, with the occasional sighting of an episode of the Adam West sixties series when I was at the home of a relative who had cable. All of the things that are “Batman” to me are caught up in that series: the faithful loyalty and acerbic wit of Alfred, the partnership of a Robin, the unresolved romantic/sexual tension with Catwoman, the rivalry with the Joker, the presence of a large, consistent rogues gallery (Mr. Freeze, The Riddler, Penguin, Poison Ivy, Two-Face, and second-stringers like Clayface, Scarecrow, and Mad Hatter), and an eventual Batgirl. But when you’re talking about a story continuity that was already six decades old at that point, all of those elements had to have been introduced as new at some point, and, as it was ongoing, it was never going to remain static and unchanging at that point. In fact, the character of Harley Quinn, who is now one of the most recognizable and well-known DC characters in the mainstream, was created for and introduced within BTAS, and although she’s beloved by now, I’m sure that there were cranky gatekeepers at the time who hated her introduction. New live action films continued to be made, and their effect on the landscape of the comics and their affiliated media would echo across the narrative topography, and those reverberations would then end up in the new adaptations, symbiotically. It’s impossible to know which ones are going to be a flash in the pan before being rejected and never referenced again (see above re: demon Nightcrawler) and which ones will “take” and stick around. When the whole “Court of Owls” thing (a secret society of rich Gothamites going back generations who influenced the city) was introduced in 2012, I didn’t think it would stick around, but given that it’s now associated with Bat-lore in the public consciousness because of Fox’s Gotham, it’s probably here to stay. Even before that when Damian Wayne, Batman’s son via Talia al Ghul, was first introduced in comics in 2006, the obvious expectation was that he would prove so unpopular that he would be written out as a character and written off as a failed ploy, but here we are, nearly twenty years later, and it looks like he’s here to stay, too. 

Son of Batman opens on the island fortress headquarters of the League of Assassins, headed by Ra’s al Ghul (Giancarlo Esposito). Under his grandfather’s tutelage, young Damian (Stuart Allan) is being trained to one day replace Ra’s, all under the watchful eye of his mother, Talia (Morena Baccarin). Under the cover of night, spurned pupil Deathstroke (Thomas Gibson), who was previously being groomed to become the new leader of the League before Damian’s birth, has returned for revenge. Ra’s is critically injured and, unable to make it to the Lazarus Pit that has so prolonged his life, dies. In order to seek out her father’s killer and find her revenge, Talia leaves her son with his father, whom she knows is both Bruce Wayne and Batman (Jason O’Mara), under the care of the hero and his butler, Alfred (David McCallum). Gotham is less of a safe haven than expected, however, as this is also the home of Dr. Kirk Langstrom (Xander Berkeley), a scientist who has been working on a serum that will turn League assassins into bat hybrid creatures known as “Manbats.” When Langstrom and Talia are both captured by Deathstroke, it’s up to Batman and former protege turned independent hero Dick “Nightwing” Grayson (Sean Maher) to find them and stop Deathstroke, with young Damian as the newer, less morally clear Robin.

This is a good one. The animation is crisp, the designs are clean, the contrast is extremely well done. Scenes in the day are suffused with light, and the more frequent night scenes have a slight moonlight glow to them. It’s carried over from Justice League: War, of course, but it’s nice that it’s consistent here, and this slots into the same art style as that film without looking identical to it, which is a nicer touch than I was expecting from this ongoing series. The fact that this is supposed to be a new timeline that’s still in the early days of the emergence of heroes continues to be a bit of sand in the shoe, as the previous film made it seem like Batman had only been on the scene for a couple of years at the most, while this one now establishes that he’s been at this long enough that he’s already had one young sidekick graduate to start his own enterprise. It’s also strange that this series would decide to kill off Ra’s al Ghul so early into this franchise (only the third film now if we count Flashpoint Paradox, and the first to focus on Batman primarily), it seems very sudden and early to get rid of one of the Bat’s most important foes, and means that any attempts to graft other adaptations of stories into this continuity may have to compensate for his absence. 

Still, that’s not this film’s problem. It’s good! Not special, really, but good, definitely above the median of quality in this overall franchise so far. I ended up making yet another long-winded introduction and a comparison to Star Trek (two of my specialties!) all up top because, really, there’s not that much to say. I’ve listed what I didn’t like above, and it’s mostly minor stuff that relates to continuity, and which most people probably wouldn’t care too much about. What there is to like isn’t so groundbreaking that it requires description, either; the fight choreography is very good, and the more ninja-style action is a real standout when most of these fights are all about punching while flying, eye beams, and occasional Amazonian hand-to-hand content. Damian has a lot of potential for his petulance to be extremely annoying, especially when he has a nepo baby’s sense of smug entitlement coupled with no real qualms about committing straight up murder because of how he was raised. Instead, he’s not only tolerable, but occasionally even likable, when he isn’t being a twerp about how effeminate the original Robin costume was. 

I might have been wrong about this new continuity within the larger franchise. I’ve seen a few of the others and although I don’t remember disliking them, I don’t remember them being particularly memorable, either. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The People’s Joker (2024)

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The People’s Joker made me cry. 

A festival darling a couple of years ago, this DIY transfemme autofiction bildungsroman took an usually long time to reach general audiences, seeing as it was stuck in legal limbo for a while. You see, Vera Drew chose to tell the story of her life—from her earliest realizations that her body didn’t match her concept of herself, to her first real romance and how that other person’s journey of self-discovery helped her understand herself even further, into a happy, fantasy future—all through the lens of living in a comic book world. After an opening that parodies the framing device of Joker, we see a flashback to our essentially unnamed protagonist as a child (when her deadname is spoken aloud, by her mother for instance, it’s bleeped, except in one scene later where it’s uncensored to great effect). In this world, the little AMAB’s greatest dream is to one day be a cast member on UCB (that is, the United Clown Bureau, rather than the Upright Citizen’s Brigade) Live, a parody of SNL in which men in the cast are credited individually as Jokers or Jokemen, while all of the women are consigned to being credited en masse as “The Harlequins.” 

Notably, in this imagining, that Bruce Wayne is Batman is a well-known fact, and he all but rules Gotham with an iron glove. His drones scour the streets for crime, all comedy other than that of UCB Live has been outlawed, and there are films about him in-universe, one of which is clearly a take on Batman Forever, with one of the lines spoken by Nicole Kidman cracking our protagonist’s egg. When she asks her mother about it on the car ride home after the movie, and whether one could be born into “the wrong body,” her mother takes her straight to Arkham, where the sinister Dr. Crane prescribes a semi-antidepressant called Smylex, which is taken via inhaler and instantly distorts the patient’s face into a rictus grin. After a troubled childhood in which an eternally offscreen father leaves all child-rearing to his wife, and with whom our protagonist has an understandably strained relationship, our protagonist (now played by Vera Drew as an adult) moves to Gotham and attempts to get involved on UCB Live and is accepted into the incubator program only to discover that it’s a for-profit scam. This does enable our protagonist to meet their new best friend, Oswald Cobblepot, at the UCB center, and the two of them decide to set up their own illegal anti-establishment “anti-comedy” club. A whole rogues gallery becomes the (lampshaded) found family of the protagonist, including Poison Ivy, Catwoman, Bane, and the Riddler (who gets in early as riddles are, in fact, the antithesis of jokes, making him perfect for their anti-comedy). Our protagonist finds that none of their jokes land, until one day, they see a performance by a Joker named Jason Todd, who’s modeled after the Jared Leto “interpretation” of the character, down to the “damaged” tattoo on his forehead. 

The audience notices before our protagonist does that Jason’s open coat reveals his top surgery scars, so it comes as little surprise to us when he comes out as transgender to our protagonist, although it’s a mild shock to them. Our protagonist asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin, and we see Joker and Jason, whom she calls “Mistah J,” play out, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of the complexity of relationships with people who are, whether they tell you at the start with a tattoo on their face or not, damaged. People who are toxic can also be the first people to see us for who we really are, and while that doesn’t cover for the ways in which their behavior is harmful, it does add shades of gray to the fact that these are people who may ultimately teach us something about ourselves. This culminates in our protagonist’s decision to proceed with gender affirming care, presented here as her plummet into a vat of estrogen, Harley Quinn style, only for her and Mr. J to come face to face with the Batman, who has his own abusive backstory with Jason. This is all stuff that is better discovered than recapped, so I won’t summarize further, but this sort of gives you the idea of what this narrative is. Kinda. 

What’s really fun here is just how many different ideas and styles are combined. The segments about J-the-H’s childhood are largely live action, sometimes in locations or sets but sometimes backgrounded only by collages or drawings of her hometown of Smallville. The film-within-a-film mentioned above uses action figures and 3D models to bring not-Batman Forever to life, while some sequences are fully comprised of what appears to be hand-drawn animation. One character exists solely as a puppet, while Poison Ivy is a purely a computer model that looks like she was rendered for a Windows 2000 ROM-based semi-animated point-and-clicker, and characters with more immediate impact on the plot appear in whatever the reimagined memory demands. Some of the film is some combination of several of these, and it’s often so poorly composited that it looks like it’s been cobbled together with excerpts from The Amazing Bulk, but that adds charm rather than taking away from it. I should warn that making the film “busy” in this way might not work for everyone; my viewing companion in particular said that the film’s constant jumps between styles did not mesh with his particular strain of ADHD, and this seems to have made the narrative less legible to him than to me. If you’re able to handle pastiche movies like the kinds put out by Everything is Terrible, you’ll be able to follow this. 

There’s a lot of heart here, especially when it’s clear that Vera is speaking through Joker, like when she admits that when she first arrived in the city she would sometimes call suicide hotlines that would automatically connect her to Kansas because of her area code, and she would use that experience to ground herself by asking how the weather was back home, even if that place had never really been “home.” It’s not all positive, however, as we also feel the biting sting of betrayal when Mr. J calls her by her deadname, the only time that it’s said clearly, in an argument; as she recalls, he had never even known her by that name, so it wasn’t an accident or a slip of the tongue but an intentional use to hurt her. It’s visceral and real, which feels like an odd thing to say about a movie that so provocatively calls attention to its artifice. 

One thing that this one has over the film that it’s parodying/satirizing/reimagining is that it’s actually funny. I’ll admit that I didn’t see the entirety of Todd Phillips’s Joker, but I can promise you that I saw enough. It’s not funny. And hey, not every joke in this one lands, but they come so fast and so furiously across a variety of spectrums that there’s going to be something for everyone here, except for the people who refuse to give the film a chance based purely on their ideologies. The anti-comedy stylings of several of the jokers are funny in their anti-humor with no real knowledge of comics, but there are obviously in-jokes and references, like the omnipresence of the TV-topping mind control device that Jim Carrey’s Riddler’s plan in Forever hinged upon and Catwoman’s complaint that Frank Miller always writes her as a sex worker (not that sex work is bad, she clarifies, but because it’s sexist of him to think that women can’t just be burglars). Most of these are funny even without the context, and some of the jokes that landed most with my theater crowd were oblique jokes about pop culture in general; the biggest laugh of the night came when the yet-unhatched Joker asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin for the first time and their Penguiny friend commenting on their femme attire and pointing out that drag, like comedy, had been outlawed, but only because of the fallout from the explosion at RuPaul’s fracking ranch. 

This is an unusual experience of a film, and I expect that whatever impact it might have been able to have on larger culture has been largely blunted by Warner Bros’ intensive scrutiny and attempts to prevent its release with (unsustainable) claims that it falls outside of fair use, and the overall silence about it (so far at least) from the dipshit side of the cultural divide means that it may not get the popularity bump that everything the right wing pundits complain about does, for better and for worse. I didn’t really know what to expect, and I got something that was unique in its presentation but universal in its examination of the way that (sigh) sometimes, it’s society that’s sick, or it’s our parents who make us sick by their reaction to curiosity and parts of the human experience that are repressed due to societal pressures. It’s an Adult Swim fever dream, and, in its final moments and with its final line, it brought tears to my eyes. You know if this is for you, and if it is, seek it out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: The Dark Knight Returns (2012, 2013)

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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. 

In this very special double-sized issue of The Not-So-New 52, we will be covering not one but two films (after a fashion). Even though it’s Marvel that’s better known for their double-sized special editions, I won’t let the fact that Warner Premiere released their adaptation of Frank Miller’s seminal 1986 work The Dark Knight Returns in two separate parts keep me from reviewing them together. Combined, they make up a run time of just about two-and-a-half hours, which is the length of a real movie and is shorter than any live action Batman movie has been since 2005, so let’s get to it.

The Dark Knight Returns is probably one of the best known stories in the Batman canon, right? It, alongside Watchmen, basically shattered the paradigm of comic books as a medium in the late 1980s, ushering in (for better and for worse) a whole new era of comics, one designed with a more mature reader in mind. For some, this meant more adult storytelling; for others, this meant more grounded, realistic stories; for still others, this meant more tits, guns, and swearing, none of which are bad things in their own right, but which were not used creatively. The comic version of Returns can be considered a bit of an original sin with regards to creating expectations of maturity in the medium that instead ushered in an era characterized by a lack of subtlety, artistically meritless storytelling, and so, so, so many pockets—more than anyone could ever want or need. But Returns can’t be blamed for that, since other than a few poorly aged elements (as in Year One, Frank Miller’s depiction of Selena is once again as a sex worker, although she’s graduated to madame in her old age), there’s nothing that stands out. It was groundbreaking in its time and for good reason. Even reading it today, it’s hard not to be impressed with the unconventional use of the medium, from the way that political talking heads are presented in little boxes that capture the not-quite-square edges of a cathode ray tube TV, the way that simultaneous action is depicted not from simple panel-to-panel cutaways but in the way that a splash page might be boxed in by a series of smaller squares and errant dialogue boxes. Its place in the canon is well-deserved, and while I understand the critical backlash when it’s viewed through the lens of its (il)legacy, I see this for the landmark that it is. 

This is the story of an aged Bruce Wayne, forced out of retirement just as Jim Gordon is forced into it, back on the prowl after watching his city fall into disrepair and dystopia under the Reagan administration (an element that the film keeps intact, making a product of its time into a period piece). As more innocent civilians fall victim to the ever-expanding gang calling themselves The Mutants, Bruce once again dons the cowl in order to fight the rising tide of crime in Gotham. Along the way, he finds himself aided by Carrie Kelly, a teenage tomboy who christens herself the new Robin and refuses to be left out of things. Unfortunately, although the wounds of the past may scar and heal, they can also run deep. The supposedly reformed Harvey Dent, now having undergone extensive reconstruction of the side of his face that scarred him and made him Two-Face, is unable to avoid the temptations of recidivism and his own alter ego, while the Joker, catatonic (and thus harmless) for decades, awakens out of his waking sleep as soon as his nemesis returns to public attention. 

This ends Part 1 of the films, while Part 2 spends some time with the long-delayed final dance between Batman and Joker, which ends in a way that brings down the wrath of Gotham’s new commissioner, Ellen Yindel, who wants Batman brought down, dead or alive. Outside of the context of all of this, there’s Cold War shenanigans afoot, which finally intersects with our main story when the Gipper starts a nuclear war with the USSR via conflict with the fictional nation of Corto Maltese. Superman, reduced to little more than an errand boy for the White House, manages to divert the missiles that are bound for the US, but only just, and the resultant EMP blast causes chaos in Gotham. Through the respect that he commands from the Mutants gang—some of whom have already rechristened themselves “Sons of Batman” following his hard-won defeat of the Mutant leader—he conscripts them to help get people out of harm’s way in the forms of various fires and other disasters. In one memorable image, the shadow of an airplane that is falling out of the sky grows larger as people scream in terror below. And in the midst of all of this, Reagan sends Superman in to “handle” his old friend.

Frank Miller, who wrote both Year One and The Dark Knight Rises in a short period of time in the back half of the 1980s, is a polarizing figure, and there are elements of his political … “eccentricities” all over the original work and, as a result of being a pretty faithful adaptation, this film. Don’t be confused by the fact that Reagan is presented as a bumbling fool playing dice with the so-called free world in the name of his ego and the corporations that own him; this is a story that deeply reflects the right-wing views of its creator. It’s tricky, because Miller’s oeuvre often reflects a staunch anti-authoritarian bent, insofar as he depicts all politicians as either puppets or puppeteers, all police (other than Jim Gordon) as rotten and violent, and all authority as inherently corrupt. On the other hand, his heroes are usually somewhere on a narrow spectrum between the Randian hero (individualistic, suited to his life through intelligence and aptitude, characterized by moral fortitude — at least in the eyes of the author) and the Great Man Theory (that great leaders, like Batman and Jim Gordon, are born with the instinct to lead when the need for them to emerge is greatest, and that history is founded upon the acts of such men); the latter of these two is a pillar of fascism, and the former could charitably be called fascism-curious. Miller’s Batman is the libertarian Batman, for better or for worse, but in a way that feels so quaint that it’s almost comforting in its simplicity in comparison to whatever the fuck is happening today. 

So, yeah, Reagan is the overarching villain of this piece, but not because of any of the reasons that he was in real life (scratch just about any social problem in our country and Reagan bleeds), but because his cowboy aw-shucks approach to international conflict wrote a check that his ass couldn’t cash. All the other targets of ridicule are strawman sock puppets through whom Miller can verbalize a reductive caricature of bleeding hearts who get their comeuppance, always painfully and frequently fatally; they espouse the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to getting gassed to death. Carrie Kelley’s parents are burnouts too stoned to notice that their teenage daughter isn’t in her room at night, let alone that she’s become the protege of the local vigilante that they consider a fascist (a bit of pre-emptive mocking of any reader who might have the same criticism). All mainstream media TV anchors (other than Lana Lang) are empty-headed, spineless gigglepusses spouting glib puns while delivering devastating, life-changing news. A man-on-the-street interview features one man praising Batman’s defeat of the Mutant leader and expressing that he hopes the Dark Knight takes out the landlords next, and we’re supposed to disagree with him. The (then) newer, gentler approach to psychiatric treatment is painted as an elaborate pantomime of rendering individual responsibility irrelevant through the construction of a narrative of victimhood, which is a reactionary position to a reductive view of some mental health. 

The last of these is personified in Dr. Bartholomew Wolper, a fame-seeking psychiatrist who also identifies Batman as a “fascist vigilante,” and who first gains attention in the narrative as the doctor treating Harvey Dent. Wolper’s argument is that all of the rogues gallery of Gotham are all victims of Batman, you see, acting out horrific crimes because the Batman is so menacing that he creates his own villains. After three years of rehabilitation and extensive reconstructive surgery that restores him to his pre-Two-Face face, Wolper is successful in getting Dent paroled, only for Dent to disappear within hours and return to his old habits immediately, with his mantra of “both sides match” given a darker meaning as we see that he hallucinates himself as fully scarred now. Despite this clear error in judgment, when Joker is inspired out of his withdrawal from the world, Wolper is given the opportunity to treat him as well, and once again advocates for the release of a dangerous murderer. The irony, of course, is that Wolper is actually right this time, as the narrative makes it clear that Joker truly had no will to live without a
Batman to face, and he probably would have remained in his catatonia until he died of old age if Bruce hadn’t been forced to take up the cowl again and wake him up out of his stupor. Any kudos we could give Wolper for his insight here is immediately irrelevant, as he is the Joker’s first victim almost immediately, getting his throat slit live on television while on a thinly veiled late night show (in the original comic, the host is “Dave Endocrine” and clearly modeled on Letterman, while in the film he’s just a generic brunet voiced by the actual Conan O’Brien). 

This is a fundamentally conservative work in many ways, but more than that, it’s reactionary. The media, the peace movement, psychiatry as whole: it’s all quackery in Miller’s eyes and is therefore the same under his pen. In this most recent viewing, my second, I was struck by some of the similarities to a semi-contemporary work that we had recently discussed on the podcast, Tightrope, which was also right-of-center in its relationship with 80s urban crime. Even if you’ve never really identified it as such, you know the kind of thing that I’m talking about when you see it. Everything’s always grimy, the city is a place where it’s not safe to go out at night or in the day, as upstanding citizens are in constant mortal danger at the hands of violent addicts and remorseless sociopaths, and the only thing standing between life and death for the next victim is a morally gray cop who’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. It bears a lot in common with Returns, down to the Reagan cameo (in Tightrope, this is in the form of a papier-mâché head of the Gipp in a parade float storage facility). Returns takes place in a similarly dangerous locale, but with a societal order whose edges are more frayed and a greater sense of hopelessness, but it’s impossible to separate it from its regressive elements; that man on the street who wanted Batman to take care of landlords that I mentioned a few paragraphs back? In Miller’s original text, it’s homosexuals that he hopes Batman eradicates with violence. Even when the words are changed, that spirit of bone-deep right-wing meanness permeates everything. 

But the fact of the matter is this: The Dark Knight Returns is a great narrative. Truly one of the best. All through the first half of the story, I kept thinking about how it’s impossible to really translate the way that the comic used its form as part of its storytelling device into a feature for the screen, and grousing about the things that I didn’t like about it. Some of the 80s slang that the Mutants and Carrie use is like, totally radical, so razor, utterly fetch, but sounds artificial when actually spoken aloud instead of read on the page, and the casting of Ariel Winter (of Modern Family fame) as Carrie was also dissonant to me in a way that was distracting. But once the meat of the story gets going, it takes off and doesn’t stop, and I was won over by it. Peter Weller endows the aged Wayne with so much pathos that it’s impossible not to be moved by it, which feels silly to say about one of these little direct to video products, but there’s a great attention to detail here that’s worth the time, even if it’s twice what’s normal for one of these. It’s not perfect, but it’s so damn good that you forgive it for its shortcomings. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — Doom (2012)

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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. 

A direct sequel to Crisis on Two Earths, Justice League: Doom does not follow up on the apparent membership drive that ended the previous film. It seems that only one new recruit has joined the team since that movie’s finale, but it’s still a continuation, if one knows that this is the case and what to look for. This was another one that I had seen a few times even before beginning this project, not so much out of any particular fondness for it, but because it was the last one that was released before I finished grad school and moved back to Baton Rouge, so it was an easy one to put on in the background and do some unpacking or chores. It’s not as strong a film as Crisis was, but it still has some of the same magic, and it’s pretty good, even if it’s a little thinner than its predecessor. 

The Royal Flush gang, a villainous group that is characterized by their costumes taking inspiration from the highest point cards for the suit of spades, has been engaging in a series of break-ins, and Batman is on the case. He discovers that they have been using a piece of technology that allows them to pass through walls in order to complete their crimes, and when he engages them, the rest of the Justice League gets involved. During this distraction, Flash villain Mirror Master is able to use his ability to hide in reflections to surreptitiously enter the Batcave via the Batmobile’s rear view mirror, where he downloads files from the main computer. Some time later, each member of the League is attacked while they are alone. The man behind the attacks is Vandal Savage, an immortal who has been alive since the dawn of mankind, and he offers each of the League’s individual nemeses the opportunity to finish off their archenemy once and for all. While in his civilian guise, Martian Manhunter is given a drink by an attractive woman who turns out to be his enemy Ma’alefa’ak (another shapeshifting Martian and, depending on the continuity, J’onn’s brother), and the drink turns out to contain a compound that will result in the Manhunter sweating out highly flammable magnesium. Wonder Woman faces off against Cheetah, who manages to land a cut on the Amazon, resulting in an infection that causes her to see everyone around her as Cheetah, so that she will fight until her heart gives out. Superman is lured to the top of the Daily Planet building because a downsized reporter is planning to jump off of the roof, but is in fact a disguised Metallo, who is armed with a gun with a kryptonite bullet. Flash ends up with a bomb drilled into his wrist which will explode if he goes under a certain speed, Green Lantern is lured to an apparent hostage situation that goes south in a way that leaves him feeling unworthy of his powers, and Batman is tricked out of his home by the apparent disterment of his parents’ graves, only to find himself taken off guard by Bane, who knocks him out and stuffs him in his father’s casket (with the late Thomas Wayne’s skeletal remains) and reburies them in Thomas’s grave. 

It’s the darkest hour for the Justice League, but Batman breaks free first by digging himself out of his father’s grave and then finding Green Lantern and showing him that the people who were presumably killed by his failure were animatronics designed to shake his confidence, and along with newest ally Cyborg, they are able to rescue the others from their various traps. Batman reveals that all of these plans were actually his, that they were his failsafes should any of the other members of the League go rogue (or fall under brainwashing or magic compulsion, or any other manner of things that can and do happen in these four color fantasies). The others are not pleased with this revelation, but they still have to work together to face off against Vandal Savage, whose current plan is nothing short of genocidal: induce a solar flare that will ravage half of the planet’s surface and rewind the clock on mankind’s technological level to that of the Industrial Revolution. 

As a movie, this one doesn’t really feel like a sequel to the film that preceded it. While that one began life as a part of the Justice animated series, it had an entirely new voice cast that relied on some of the stunt casting that this series was known for, while this one mostly brings back the voice cast of that show. Kevin Conroy is back as Batman (as it should ever be), Tim Daly returns to voice Superman, Susan Eisenberg again voices Wonder Woman, Carl Lumbly is once again Martian Manhunter, and Michael Rosenbaum also returns to play Flash (albeit a different Flash). The only major casting change is that this film has Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern, as it features the Hal Jordan version of the character rather than the John Stewart version (voiced by Phil LaMarr). This is Fillion’s second time playing the character following his appearance in Emerald Knights. The character designs are a little different, too, and I watched this one several times without ever realizing it was supposed to be connected to Crisis, despite that one being one of my favorites. This time around, the connections were a little more apparent, especially in the musical choices; the opening title theme for this one very clearly incorporates the distinctive notation from the first. You can hear the exact same motif when the title appears here in Crisis and here, but I don’t think I’ve ever watched them close enough together to notice that before. There’s also fun new voice talent in this one, and it falls to me as one of the carriers of the Farscape fandom flame to call special attention to Claudia Black’s performance as Cheetah, which is absolutely delightful. The scene where Wonder Woman sees everyone as Cheetah gives Black the chance to do some neat little work as different variations on the same voice, which I liked a lot. 

Speaking of villains, however, this one falls a little flat in that department. Whereas Crisis had two interesting villains in the form of the nihilistic Owlman and the unhinged Superwoman, this is one of the thinner portrayals of Vandal Savage. Phil Morris’s voice acting is strong, but the characterization is a bit light, especially when you compare him here to his presence as the overall big bad of Young Justice, which admittedly had a lot more time to flesh him out. While both Owlman’s plan to destroy all universes and Vandal’s here to rule by reducing the population to a manageable half are very much schlocky comic book evil plans, the former had a sense of reality to it based on character motivation, while the latter feels broad and out of proportion for the motivation, like taking a bulldozer to a hangnail. Doom hinges on two major axes: the emotional core of the League’s feelings of betrayal due to Batman’s distrust, and the narrative plot point of the doomsday plan. The climax of the first is much more interesting and comes fairly early on, while the evil plot itself—despite being smaller in scale than in the preceding film—feels very cackly, Saturday morning cartoony. 

It’s unfortunate that this one is a bit of a dull note to end our time with Lauren Montgomery, who directed this film and several previous, starting with Superman Doomsday, when she was only twenty-seven years old(!). She was also a storyboard artist for that one, before she directed Wonder Woman, First Flight, Crisis on Two Earths, Apocalypse, and Year One. She was a storyboard artist on virtually all of the others, and she would continue to do this up through Batman: Bad Blood, at which point she became very heavily involved with a series called Voltron: Legendary Defender. These days, it looks like she’s gearing up to direct an as-yet-untitled animated film that is being released by Avatar Studios (she had previously been a storyboard artist on eight episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender and was a supervising producer on The Legend of Korra in addition to doing some storyboard work for that program), so she’s still working, but this will be her last feature for this franchise. I wish her well! If they ever do another follow-up in this sub-series, I would love to see her return. For now, though, we say goodbye, and choose to remember her work at its best.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman — Year One (2011)

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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. 

Right here on the cusp of the twelfth film of this project, I hit the first snag; Batman: Year One is not available on HBO Max, or whatever it’s called these days. Heretofore, every single one of these movies was on the service, and from what I can tell, all of the remaining ones are as well. With the high number of premium subscription service material that has started to migrate over to free services (Lovecraft Country is on Tubi, the people’s streaming service) or more widely accessed ones (Six Feet Under is on Netflix) while David Zaslav plunders and pillages HBO and Warner Brothers, I checked to see if it was on one of those, and it was not. In fact, it’s only available as a rental. So, while I wait to acquire it through the library, I figured I’d talk a little bit about the recent history of these movies as they relate to streaming and the Warner Bros. conglomeration. It hasn’t come up here before, but Warner got into it pretty heavy with Netflix some years back, and it was because of these movies. 

Well, it was technically mostly because of Warner Premiere, but considering that Warner Premiere consisted almost entirely of these films, cheapy cash-ins on legacy animated properties (Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown; Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes; A Miser Brothers’ Christmas), even cheaper long-distant sequels to Warner properties (Return to House on Haunted Hill, The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning, The Lost Boys: The Tribe), eleven separate Scooby-Doo movies, and—inexplicably—Trick ‘r Treat, let’s be honest, these DC flicks were the real reason this happened. In 2010, Netflix and Warner agreed that the former, which was still largely a DVD-by-mail service and had not pivoted to streaming as their primary market, would allow for a 28-day gap between the retail release of a DVD and the date that it would be allowed to be sent out to subscribers. This was under pressure from Warner, who cited at the time that they make approximately 75% of their retail sales for all physical media within that time frame. By 2012, this window had increased to 56 days; to put that time frame into perspective, the first film to be affected by the 28-day window would have been Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, and the last to be mailed out within the first month would be this film, before the next one (Justice League: Doom) would be delayed to two months. 

All of this is, of course, moot now, as Netflix ended its DVD service as of September of last year. A half decade ago, however, DC had the idea to create their own streaming service. It would not only host every DC-related series and movie ever produced, but it would also provide unfettered access to the company’s digital comic vault that contained every story ever published, and would produce a few original series, notably the previously mentioned Titans, the Doom Patrol adaptation, and (most excitingly for me and the reason that I signed up for it) the third season of the prematurely canceled Young Justice series, which was originally supposed to be a Netflix production. DC Universe, as the service was called, didn’t last long, launching in September of 2018 and being discontinued in less than three years in January of 2021, when its programming was folded into the then-new HBO Max service, which had replaced HBO Go in September of 2020, and even as HBO Max was rebranded Max in May of 2023. This didn’t include everything that DC Universe had hosted (obscure TV series like the 1980s Superboy didn’t migrate over), but it has, to my knowledge, always included these animated movies, and the fact that Batman: Year One seems to be missing is another indicator, perhaps, that the overall quality of the service has declined. 

Batman: Year One is a fairly faithful adaptation of its source material, perhaps the most true-to-the-text one we have seen so far. Said comic is also the oldest one that has been tackled in this franchise as well. The Year One comic was released in 1986, following on the heels of the previously discussed crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earths, and was intended to cement what would now be the character’s new origin canon, although the Dark Knight’s was one of the least changed backstories under the new reboot. An adaptation of the comic languished in development for decades. In fact, the legends tell us that it was even considered for adaptation as the third film in the Burton Batman franchise, before the reins were turned over to Joel Schumacher in order to move in a more “kid-friendly” direction and away from the gritty reality of this narrative. Years later, when Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins was first announced, I seem to remember early trade publications citing that it would be a direct adaptation of Year One, but I don’t feel like fighting with the pathetic shell of a useful search engine that Google has become in order to confirm that one way or another. Even without that confirmation, the 2005 film does bear many similarities to the comic, with two major direct lifts from it; the first is the scene in which Batman summons a huge flock of bats that darken the sky using a supersonic device, and the second a sequence in which Jim Gordon tells Batman, his new ally, about the impending appearance of a clown-like villain who calls himself “Joker,” which is the final scene in both movies. 

This is a short one, but it’s got meat on its bones. On the same January day, Gotham City’s “prodigal son” Bruce Wayne (The OC’s Benjamin McKenzie) returns home, musing from his high vantage point as he flies into the city that it almost looks calm from the air, despite being a seedy place of misery at ground level, while Internal Affairs Lieutenant James Gordon (Bryan Cranston) arrives in the city by train, fretting about the place’s high crime rates and his concerns about bringing his pregnant wife to such a place. Bruce plans to rid Gotham of crime from the ground up, demonstrating that he has spent his eight year absence training physically to do so. Elsewhere, Gordon is “welcomed” to the GCPD by corrupt Commissioner Loeb (frequent Cohen Brothers collaborator Jon Polito), reckless and bloodthirsty SWAT lieutenant Brendon (Stephen Root), and Gordon’s new partner, the violent and hair-triggered Flass (Fred Tatasciore). Loeb hints at some dark part of Gordon’s past that makes him think that he’ll be easy to extort, but Gordon’s plan is the same as Bruce’s: making Gotham a place worth living in. Bruce’s first night out as an attempted crime fighter goes very poorly, as he attempts to rescue an underage sex worker from her pimp, only to be stabbed by the girl herself and being severely beaten by the crowd that gathers. The person who deals him the most damage is a prostitute named Selena Kyle (Eliza Dushku, in a pretty thankless role overall considering what she’s capable of). Although he manages to evade police and drag his way into his home, Bruce sits facing a bust of his father and planning to let himself bleed out if he doesn’t receive a sign that he should go on, which arrives in the form of a bat that crashes through the window. We don’t get to hear the line about “criminals [being] a cowardly and superstitious lot” in his internal monologue, but this is a very straightforward reenactment of the same scene in the comics, which emulates the first appearance of the character all the way back in 1939. 

Inspired, Bruce takes on the costumed alter ego of “Batman,” and although he starts out hassling a trio of teenagers boosting a television set, he eventually works his way up to threatening Loeb and his associate, the mobster Carmine Falcone (Alex Rocco), during a dinner at one of their homes. Gordon is the mythological one good apple in the GCPD, but Loeb’s fury about Batman’s threats leads him to assign Gordon to finding the Batman, all while Jim faces off against his own department — up to and including his fellow detectives beating him with a baseball bat in a parking garage while wearing masks because he refuses to get dirty and join the grift like they did. Inspired by the Bat, Selena Kyle decides to become a masked denizen of the night herself, but in pursuit of theft instead of justice, and models her costume on a cat motif. 

At barely more than an hour, this one just barely qualifies as a feature, but it’s a pretty good one. It’s economically paced, even if the parts with Selena feel like dead weight. In contrast, the original comic had a bit more plot having to do with Harvey Dent (the future Two-Face) as the third face of the fight for justice in Gotham, from within the DA’s office, with the added wrinkle that his overt derring-do made him one of Gordon’s suspects for the true identity of Batman. The Selena stuff is also everything that has aged most poorly about the source material, as it was one of those things where Frank Miller just couldn’t help himself but make Catwoman a sex worker (this was retconned almost immediately and is, for all intents and purposes, the only thing considered non-canonical in the comic to this day). The film’s biggest weakness, however, is that everything great about it has already been adapted in some form. Batman: The Animated Series depicted the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne almost exactly as it was retold in Year One, down to angle and perspectives from the comic. An uninformed viewer would likely see this one and think that it was ripping off Batman Begins by centering the narrative around the antics of Carmine Falcone or having Batman be saved by the appearance of hundreds of bats, but both that character and that sequence originated in this film’s source material. As a whole, I can’t see it having much reason to exist other than for its own sake and for the interest of people who are already familiar with and fans of the comic, which doesn’t seem to add up to much. Cranston is great as Gordon, and it’s great that what feels like the entire second half of the film is just Batman vs. cops, but I’m not sure it’s enough, especially given the number of hoops you have to jump through to find this one. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it does feel … vestigial.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Superman/Batman — Apocalypse (2010)

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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. 

I love Supergirl. Kara Zor-El is such a favorite character of mine that, even when I sold almost all of my comics half a decade ago, I couldn’t bear to part with the Supergirl issues that I had bought way back when I was a college freshman, the ones written by Jeph Loeb, penciled by Ian Churchill, and inked by Norm Rapmund (among others; for those who are interested in the minutiae, I’m talking about Volume 5). I spent hours practicing my own art by redrawing panels from that comic book run, and was completely fascinated by the comic run’s upending of the Supergirl narrative. Ever since her inception, Kara had always been treated as Clark/Kal/Superman’s younger cousin, who had been born on (essentially) a refugee colony before finding her way to Earth to meet the older relative who had so inspired her; that Kara (in)famously not only died but was retconned out of existence as part of the major 1986 comic event Crisis on Infinite Earths. I’ve never seen this discussed anywhere, but I have a feeling that part of that decision was the fact that the 1984 Supergirl film starring Helen Slater bombed so hard critically and commercially (calling it “not great” is charitable, but for a Supergirl fan like me it’s not without its charms). 

This Kara was a bold and fresh new direction for the character in the new millennium: instead of being the younger of the last two survivors of Krypton, the Kara introduced in 2005 was the older of the pair, at least chronologically, as she was already a teenager when their planet was destroyed. In fact, she had been sent specifically to become the guardian and caretaker for her baby cousin, but because her pod was caught up in a chunk of Kryptonian debris, she remained in suspended animation for several decades, arriving on Earth to meet a Kal who had already grown into an adult and become Superman. Now she was not only one of the last children of Krypton, but she was specifically more of a fish out of water, alienated both from the new world on which she found herself but also from the only person she could have reasonably expected to have an automatic connection to, as he had been raised in a completely different culture. Without a mission, without an anchor, Kara was a brand new character with a brand new angle to explore. Before the launch of her own title, the character was reintroduced in the Superman/Batman storyline “The Supergirl from Krypton,” which itself came on the heels of that same comic’s “Public Enemies” arc, which featured the titular duo having to stop an asteroid of Kryptonite from crashing into the Earth. If that sounds familiar, it should! That comic was adapted into Public Enemies, which we’ve already discussed. That means that we’ve come to the first direct sequel within this project, Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. 

The plot here adheres pretty closely to the source material. The kryptonite asteroid that Lex Luthor spent the previous film/arc underplaying has been destroyed, but not without leaving behind some debris, which includes a Kryptonian pod containing a young woman. She lands in Gotham Bay and is rescued by Batman before being taken under the wing of her cousin, whom she is surprised to learn is an adult and a hero, but he relinquishes custody of her to Wonder Woman and the Amazons when they arrive in Metropolis and insist that Kara is too powerful to live in such a populous location and “offer” to train her on Paradise Island. While there, Kara develops a close friendship with the precognitive blonde Lyla, who is wracked by visions of Clark pulling Kara’s lifeless corpse out of a body of water. Elsewhere, on the planet Apokolips, imperialist dictator Darkseid has decided that the girl who fell to Earth is the perfect candidate to become the new leader of his honor guard after the abdication and defection of his previous lieutenant, Big Barda. He arranges for the kidnapping of Kara from Themyscira, with the crossfire resulting in Lyla’s death, her vision fulfilled as we see it was her body that Superman cradles on the beach after the attack, not Kara’s. The trio of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman (joined by Big Barda) take the fight to Darkseid in order to retrieve the Girl of Steel and bring her home. 

One of the things that people mock most about the ‘84 Supergirl is that it’s not content to really be a story about Kara Zor-El the way that the preceding Christopher Reeve movies (the good ones, anyway) were stories about Superman. What I mean by that is that Supergirl isn’t just about a fish out of water superhero who happens to be a young woman, it’s about a young woman who occasionally gets involved in magical/superheroing shenanigans. It feels very much like what a board room full of men think young girls would want to see in a movie about a super girl: girls boarding school hooliganism, flying around horses, trying on a bunch of outfits, etc. Instead of Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor hatching a giant real estate plot that will result in cataclysmic death as collateral, Faye Dunaway’s Serena almost destroys a small town (and its Popeyes) because she’s obsessed with a groundskeeper who goes on a couple of dates with Kara and she saw him first (no offense to the actor, he’s a reasonably attractive man, but not exactly fight-an-alien hot). The problem with Apocalypse is that this film far too closely resembles that earlier film about Supergirl, up to and including the fact that her first interaction with humans is that a couple of blue-collar men make threatening sexual comments and then get their asses handed to them—these movies are twenty-five years apart, and that’s still the best that there is on offer here. Plus, this one has the addition of an extremely typical shopping montage that starts with Kara saying “Teach me everything there is to know about being an Earth girl!” and ends with “I think I’m going to love being an Earth girl!” It’s just so … I hate to use the word “uninspired,” but it really is. By the time the film tries to wring some pathos out of Kara’s concerns about whether her brief time as a villain in Darkseid’s employ was because of some darkness within her, it’s too little, too late; compared to the similar ambiguity about whether her darkness was internal or brought about through outside manipulation that we just saw in Under the Red Hood, this one falls very flat. 

That having been said, this movie is a major improvement over some parts of the previous installment in other ways. Gone are the ugly character designs that made Public Enemies an anti-aesthetic experience, replaced with the beautiful designs seen in Mike Turner’s on-page work, the same art that was so inspirational to me lo these many years ago. Although the relegation of Batman to more of a supporting role (despite what the title of the movie might suggest) means that the positive element of the easy friendship between him and Supes is absent, there’s still a lot to love here. Summer Glau was the adoration object of straight male nerds of the late aughts and early ‘10s, coming in hot off of her roles in Firefly and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and she does good work here, and the late Andre Braugher is fantastic as Darkseid. And although I normally find my mind wandering during a lot of the action sequences in these movies, this one has several good ones, with the final showstopper battle with Darkseid at the Kent farm in Smallville being a real standout, not just in this movie, but for all of them. It’s brutal, and although it’s much smaller scale than most of the “urban population center” fights that populate this franchise, it has real punch. 

The first time I saw this one, back when it was released, I had no idea that it was a sequel to Public Enemies, a movie that I hadn’t seen, and I appreciated it for no other reason than because my (super)girl was in it. It functions just fine in that regard, even if it is middling in a lot of ways. When Supergirl was reintroduced in comics back in 2005, it had been nineteen years since the character was last seen, which seemed like such a triumphant return after an incredibly long time. It’s now been nineteen years since then, which is a nice piece of symmetry, but I wish that I had more to say about that other than express how much I loved those comics compared to how lukewarm I am on this adaptation. Really only of interest to fans of Kara Zor-El, and even then, it’s not the most interesting story with her that you can find. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman — Under the Red Hood (2010)

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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. 

I wasn’t totally sure that I would have something new to say about this movie. Of all of the movies in this project, this is the one that I’ve seen the most (I think; Crisis on Two Earths is another that I watched over and over again during a time when I didn’t have the internet at home), and we’ve already discussed it here on Swampflix as a Movie of the Month, alllll the way back in May of 2018. What I said in my intro there, that this is my favorite Batman movie—not just in animation, but in general—remains true. There’s nothing quite like it, and although there was a very brief moment when I considered skipping over this one since it had already been a subject here, I immediately realized that I would be depriving myself of a reason to watch one of my favorites again, so I dove right in. 

In case you don’t care to read our MotM about it (how dare you), the plot is this: after the bloody death of Jason Todd (Jensen Ackles), the second boy to wear the Robin costume, the lives of everyone involved are forever changed. Joker (John DiMaggio), who delivered the beating that clipped the Boy Wonder’s wings, is in jail; Batman (Bruce Greenwood) has taken on no new proteges and is even averse to teaming up with the first Robin, Dick Grayson, who now works on his own as the hero Nightwing (Neil Patrick Harris); and Ra’s al Ghul (Jason Isaacs), who initially teamed with the Joker so that the clown would distract Batman while he went about his world-changing shenanigans, was so disgusted by the sheer brutality of what happened that he has stopped minding the Caped Crusader’s business altogether, and attempted to make things right in a way that only served to make things worse. It’s now been several years, and a mysterious new vigilante has appeared in Gotham City, one who—unlike Batman—has no rule against killing his enemies and is more than willing to become a de facto crime boss in his pursuit of toppling the criminal empire of Black Mask (Wade Williams). Who is this new player, the Red Hood, and what does he want? 

There have been so many attempts to make comic book movies that are “darker,” or “edgier,” or “grittier,” but they almost universally go about this in ways that are aimed at seeming more dark to a certain demographic. Perhaps the most well known example of this was in one of the earliest trailers for the 2018 DC series Titans, which featured God’s prettiest angel Brenton Thwaites as Dick “Robin” Grayson growling “fuck Batman” (it’s at 0:55, if you’re interested), which immediately became the subject of much mockery online; for my money, it’s not nearly as cringe-inducing as every single thing about Jared Leto’s Joker, but that’s neither here nor there. Under the Red Hood manages to be the more adult story that people are always saying that they want, not through sheer violence (although there definitely is that) or nonsensical swearing (there’s nothing more blue than the occasional “damn” here), but just by honestly and earnestly portraying the loneliness and grief of loss and the resistance to accepting that someone you loved could return to you, transmogrified into a monster that you don’t recognize. This isn’t a story about a Batman who, at his core, is a scared little boy lashing out at the darkness that took his family from him; this is a story about a Batman who was a father, who saw that there was darkness in his son and tried to encourage him to refocus that energy into something that could affect positive change and then losing that son, twice. 

There’s a moment in this where Batman delivers one, six word line that floats to the top of my mind every time I think about this movie. It comes at the end of an exchange that Bruce has with Alfred over the radio:

Alfred: Sir, please take this to heart. Who Jason was before, how we lost him, and this dark miracle or curse that has brought about his return… it is not your fault. l know you view his death as your greatest failure but–

Bruce: His life and his death are my greatest failure. Do you remember how he was when I found him?

Alfred: Of course, sir.

Bruce: Fearless, arrogant, brash and gifted. Different [from] Dick in so many ways, but still so full of potential and power.But I knew, even from the beginning, he was dangerous. lf I hadn’t made him into Robin, he would have grown to do wrong. Then I got him killed.

And then—

Bruce: My partner. My soldier. My fault.

There’s no one who can hold a candle to Kevin Conroy when it comes to portrayals of Batman, but Greenwood comes very close here, infusing those simple words with meaning that far exceed the silliness of this whole animated endeavor. Greenwood’s Bruce is carrying the weight of the world in a way that only someone who recognizes the extent of the devastation that he has wrought can convey, the gravitas that can only be mustered by someone who suddenly finds themselves at the gates of Hell only to look back and see how much of highway they’ve paved with their good intentions. It’s stunning; I would honestly pay good money to watch ten seconds of footage of Bruce Greenwood delivering this brief monologue. He’s haunted, quite literally—at its core, this is a ghost story. Everywhere he goes, Bruce sees the echoes of the past, his occasional moments of joy but most often his failures and regrets: the flashback to the night that the Joker was born, a shadowplay of the day that he first met Jason as a street kid in the process of trying to boost the tires off of the Batmobile, a recollection of one of the many fights in which Jason’s aggression ran counter to their mission and which, in retrospect, question whether Jason’s fall to the dark side was inevitable. 

Of course Red Hood is Jason—who else could he be? No DC property treats this like a spoiler anymore; when the aforementioned Titans did a variation on the Red Hood plot in its third season, the fact that Jason was under the helmet was a kind of internal reveal, but wasn’t played for shock for the audience, and now that the character has appeared in video games without any attempts to keep his identity a secret. I’m not even sure that this film intends to obscure this fact, given that the law of conservation of detail means that anyone who’s ever seen a movie before has already done the math long before Bruce figures it out. Reading the film this way, the lengths that Bruce goes to in order to try and convince himself that his adopted son can’t possibly be the murdering psychopath stalking the streets are all the more heartbreaking. He knows that Red Hood is Jason the moment that he hears Jason’s voice saying his name, but he still has to try and disprove it, even going so far as to dig up the boy’s (supposed) grave, all while we all already know the truth. He’s already lost Jason once, and now he has to grieve for him again, not because his son is dead, but because he’s too far gone to be saved. The hits don’t stop coming even when the two are face to face, when Jason tells Bruce that he doesn’t blame the older man for failing to save him, but he can’t stand living with the fact that Bruce let Joker live afterward. And why? “Because he took me away from you,” Jason says, softly. At the core of his grief, and his rage, is the belief that his father didn’t love him enough to avenge him. It’s devastating. 

Even though I like the brows on my culture to be both high and low in equal measure, I would never pretend that anything I’ve watched so far in this project would be adequately described as “cinema” even when the elements themselves can be cinematic (I’m still thinking about Anne Heche’s performance in Doomsday, even all these weeks later), but this one is really a cut above. If you were to watch only one of these movies, this is the one.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — Crisis on Two Earths (2010)

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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. 

After the personal disappointment that was Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, I was pleasantly surprised to see that not only was the next movie on the docket one that I had seen before, but that it was one that I unabashedly love: Crisis on Two Earths. This one and the film that follows, Under the Red Hood (which I love so much it was the Movie of the Month for May 2018), are back-to-back great films, and the perfect way to wash out the lingering bad taste of Wonder Woman and Public Enemies. An interesting bit of trivia is that this narrative was originally supposed to be produced years earlier as a film that would bridge the gap between Justice League and its follow-up/continuation Justice League Unlimited, both of which I’m fond of. At the end of the former, longtime teammate Hawkgirl was revealed to be a mole for an invasion of Earth by her people, the Thanagarians, before she ultimately chooses to side with the people she was sent to spy upon, and the final arc saw the destruction of the JL’s “Watchtower” headquarters. At the beginning of the latter, the titular team of titans have a newly expanded roster (hence the “unlimited” moniker) and a new Watchtower base, the design of which is the same as the one that appears under construction at the end of this film. From this and other details, it’s easy to see where this would slot in between those TV seasons, but there’s enough that’s different that the viewer is still in for some surprises. 

Our film opens with two men we know as villains, Lex Luthor and the Joker (here known as The Jester) breaking into a facility and stealing a small piece of equipment, pursued by two shadowy figures. The Jester sacrifices himself to give Luthor time to escape, giving himself up to two silhouetted figures who appear to be Hawkgirl and Martian Manhunter, but who are revealed as twisted versions of the same. Luthor then transports himself to “our” world, where he immediately turns himself over to the police and demands to speak to Superman. We quickly learn that this version of Luthor comes from a world where the characters we know as heroes are instead replaced by villainous versions: in place of Superman (Mark Harmon), Ultraman (Brian Bloom) runs the Crime Syndicate, an organized crime outfit that he leads with Owlman (James Woods) as his lieutenant instead of Batman (William Baldwin) alongside Superwoman (Gina Torres) rather than Wonder Woman (Vanessa Marshall), Johnny Quick (James Patrick Stuart) in place of the Flash (Josh Keaton), and Power Ring instead of Green Lantern (both Nolan North). Luthor (Chris Noth) has come to beg for the help of the Justice League in order to defeat their evil counterparts and save his world. When they do join him in his crusade, they find themselves in conflict with that world’s U.S. president, a non-evil version of Wade “Deathstroke” Wilson (Bruce Davison), and Martian Manhunter (Jonathan Adams) finds himself falling in love with the president’s daughter, Rose (Freddi Rogers). 

This one is a lot of fun, and one of my top favorites of this franchise, even before beginning this watch project. One of the most compelling elements is the relationship between Owlman and Superwoman, who is not a version of Wonder Woman in this world but is instead a twisted mirror of longtime character Mary Marvel, as evidenced by the fact that her crew of “made men” consists of other Shazam-related characters. James Woods may be a name we only speak in soft whispers now in order to avoid catching his attention like the Eye of Sauron now that he’s gone completely fascist, but he gives a great vocal performance as a soft-spoken nihilist in comparison to the normal gruff brusqueness that we have come to expect from the Caped Crusader, and he becomes the true villain of this piece when his philosophy leads to him attempting to wipe out all Earths in every dimension. Convinced that all decisions are meaningless due to the fact that every choice made everywhere creates a new parallel dimension, leading to an exponentially large number of worlds, the number of which is so vast it is indistinguishable from infinity, he decides that the only “true” decision anyone can make is to destroy all of them. For her part, Superwoman, who is at first motivated solely by the desire to conquer and accumulate wealth, is completely on board with this idea once he explains it to her, and Gina Torres sells her ruthless fanaticism beautifully. The fact that she is, in reality, a teenage girl who has simply chosen to live as her adult superhero alter ego at all times makes the whole thing that much creepier and more fun to watch. 

The action scenes in this one are very exciting too, in a way that hasn’t been as memorable for me in several of these movies. The level of destruction wrought in Superman: Doomsday was impressive, but it was ultimately a lot of punching back and forth. Wonder Woman had the action as one of its high points, between the monsters vs. Amazons fight at the beginning and the rematch at the end (which included the raising of the dead and forcing the Amazons to fight the corpses of their own reanimated sisters), but this one is chock full, and some of the moments are fascinating in just how small they actually are. Batman, who initially stays behind when the rest of the League goes to the Crime Syndicate dimension as he thinks it falls outside of their purview and that they need to get their own house in order first, ends up facing off against the evil Marvel family on his own, and it’s just our luck as viewers that they appear on the Watchtower at a time when he’s in an Aliens-esque power loader, which makes the fight dynamic more interesting. Once it’s down to just him and Superwoman, he attempts to throw a punch while she has him pinned down, and she calmly tells him that this move will cost him a rib, and she casually breaks one of his by simply applying a tiny bit of pressure with her thumb. It’s deeply unsettling, and I love it. 

If there is one plot element that I’m not fully sold on, it’s the relationship between Martian Manhunter and Rose Wilson. There’s something to be said for Rose’s character’s refusal to lie down and roll over for the Crime Syndicate the same way that her father has, at the threat of great danger to her life. That Martian Manhunter conceals himself among her secret service detail and is forced to reveal himself in order to prevent her from assassination at the hands of that world’s evil version of Green Arrow is a fine narrative choice, but the romance that blossoms between them feels a bit tacked-on, even if its presence is supposed to serve as a reflection of what a love based on mutual admiration and fondness looks like, in contrast to the “love” between Owlman and Superwoman. I don’t love that Martian Manhunter mind melds with her after a single kiss (she tells him that this is how they show affection on Earth, and he demonstrates that on Mars they do the same through telepathic contact) and they share all of their thoughts with one another. It’s not merely that he doesn’t really explain this to her before doing so — and, in so doing, gives her a lifetime of his memories and gets all of hers, which makes it feel … less than consensual, especially since she now has firsthand memories of the genocide of the Martians from the point of view of their last survivor. It’s also that his memories include the death of what appears to be his wife and child, which makes the age gap between them feel weirder. I’m not really interested in weighing in on the current obsession with age gap discourse (other than to say that anyone who doesn’t see that the malicious adoption of this discussion by bad faith actors is a ploy to eventually move from “Eighteen-year-old women’s brains are still developing!” to “A woman can’t make rational decisions until she’s 25!” with the ultimate goal of getting to “Women shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions!” is a fool, and the insufficiently critical young leftists who are participating in this campaign are doing damage that will take decades to undo), but it does feel a little gross, given that we never really know how old Rose is supposed to be. 

I really want to call out Lauren Montgomery here, who shares directing credit with Sam Liu. Montgomery helmed Doomsday, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern: First Flight, and she’s doing excellent work here as well. Liu’s previous work in this particular franchise was on Public Enemies, which also was nothing to scoff at, especially since I don’t blame him for that film’s egregious art style, any more than I blame Montgomery for the sexist elements of 2009’s Wonder Woman. This one is the best looking of all of them, with the tightest storytelling and the most interesting premise, which manages to feel fully realized despite this film having the same 75-ish minute runtime as all of the other movies so far. In some cases, that’s been the sole positive selling point for these movies, that with their minimal time investment, there’s no reason not to give it a shot. This one feels complete and unrushed in that time while still telling a full and compelling story, and I love that about it. This one gets the biggest recommendation from me yet. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Superman/Batman — Public Enemies (2009)

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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. 

The creators of Justice League Unlimited had a real stroke of genius in casting CCH Pounder as Amanda Waller in that animated series. Since then, she’s reprised that role five more times: thrice for the Arkham video games, once for an adaptation thereof, and once, here, in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies. She’s not the only returning player, either, as Kevin Conroy returns to once again voice Batman, Tim Daly is back as Superman (having voiced him in the self-titled Superman animated series but not the Justice League shows), and the inimitable Clancy Brown once again gives voice to supervillain Lex Luthor. One could almost mistake this as a continuation of that franchise, given the high amount of character crossover, but there are certain elements that make that impossible (most notably the presence of Power Girl, here voiced by Smallville alum and cult leader Allison Mack, when the equivalent in JLU was a Supergirl clone named Galatea), although no one can stop you if that’s what you want to believe. 

This animated film, which is the first of the movies in this project that was a first time watch for me, loosely follows the plot of the 2003 comic arc of the same name. In the comics, that arc began the end of an ongoing DC comics story, namely the ascendancy of Lex Luthor to the presidency (starting in Action Comics #773 in November 2000) and the resultant fallout. This movie wisely skips over his election and inauguration and skips through a montage of unrest that gives way to order as Luthor enacts his agenda. One facet of said plan was to deputize several superpowered people to act as his national response squad, while other heroes with good reason not to trust him refuse to join up with his enforcers, notably the two named in the movie’s title. They’re still out there doing what they do, of course, simply without the spotlight. This becomes more complicated when astronomers observe an inbound city-sized meteor made of Kryptonite on a collision course with Earth. Lex makes a show of extending an olive branch to Superman, only to use their meeting as a trap to force an altercation between Supes and Metallo, here imagined as a Terminator with a Kryptonite heart. Outmatched, Superman is rescued by Bats and they escape into the sewers, but Luthor uses doctored footage of his meeting with the Man of Steel to make it look like Superman attacked the president, with Lex not only framing him but blaming the inbound meteor’s effects as the cause for Superman’s sudden change in morality and putting out a bounty on the hero, driving him and Batman completely underground, where they must try to figure out a solution to prevent the apocalypse raining down on them should Lex fail. 

With that stacked cast and a fairly decent plot outline, this one had a lot of potential, but unfortunately, it’s ugly as shit. No offense to anyone who worked on this movie; I know that this is a corporate product that required strict adherence to the approved character design (and in this case I do mean design, singular – the current page image for the TV Tropes page for “Heroic Build” is a still from this movie, in which three men have essentially identical bodies to one another, which are also identical to those of every other man on screen), but it looks awful. One thing you could never say about the other movies before this one was that they never looked or felt cheap, but this one more than any of the others I’ve seen, before or after this one in production, looks like such garbage. There appears to be an insistence on maintaining consistent lighting/shadow on certain characters’ faces in order to make their faces dynamic (this is particularly evident on Luthor; I think they’re trying to create the impression of cheekbones, but I can’t be sure), but those light/shade spots remain the same no matter how the angle or lighting changes within the scene. The giant faces, combined with exaggerated musculature on a body that’s not quite proportionate as a result of said exaggeration, makes this look like it took design inspiration from The Super Hero Squad Show – a series aimed at preschoolers based upon a toy line of the same name, wherein Marvel heroes had deformed bodies that were easy to grab with little dexterity and difficult to choke on (think Fisher-Price Little People). It’s not the aesthetic that you really want your audience to think about when you’re trying to get adults on board with your little direct-to-video for-a-more-mature-audience mandate. In the film’s defense, this is pretty similar to the comic from which it takes inspiration, but this is proof positive that what works on the page won’t necessarily translate to the screen. 

If you can get past that (or just get used to it), there’s a decent enough story here, although the throughline with Power Girl transition from working for Lex’s government squad to working with Superman and Batman is the weakest element. Mack was riding high at the time of release; Smallville was still on the air, and Chloe Sullivan was the show’s breakout character (at least until Justin Hartley’s Green Arrow came along), and the comic had enough time to devote to showing her questioning her allegiances that it didn’t feel rushed. Here, the decision to keep this unsure loyalty as an element of the narrative while sprinting towards getting her on the side of our heroes makes the whole thing feel rushed and cheap, just like the rest of the plot. Amanda Waller is a welcome presence, but she’s given almost nothing to do, other than to try and convince Luthor to come up with a backup plan in case his plan to detonate the Kryptonite meteor with nukes fails (it does). The most interesting thing about his movie ends up being the relationship between its two leads, who genuinely feel like friends—very different people, obviously, but with a casual easiness between them that speaks to years of caring about each other deep down—in a way that’s usually absent from most adaptations, and most comics, if we’re being honest. Their banter, which at times is so familiar that it borders on loving, is rather fun, and will be the only positive thing that I remember about this movie when all of the chaff of its failures is burned away. 

The “Lex loses his mind because he’s juicing himself with Kryptonite steroids” angle is goofy, but once he’s ‘roided out and in that green and purple mech suit, he’s still pretty scary. I will say that this movie has been largely forgotten (as have a lot of these earlier animated flicks from Warner Premiere), but unlike the others we’ve discussed, its tangential connection to real world politics means that this one does still generate some interest and friction in certain corners of the internet. Lex’s ascension to the U.S presidency predated the 2016 election by over a decade and a half, but there are people online who can’t help but bring up the “evil businessman becomes President” connection even when the comparison is vapid and facile. It’s not that there’s not a long history of Luthor/Trump correlations that goes back to even before I was born; Luthor’s reimagination as a businessman instead of his traditional “mad scientist” persona came about in 1986 as a response to real life anxiety about corporate power, with Trump as the model. 

For most of these movies, edits of the pages relating to them on the aforementioned TV Tropes are all but ancient; for instance, the “Your Mileage May Vary” tab for First Flight was last edited in May of 2022 for grammar reasons. In comparison, the same tab on the article for this film was last edited eleven days ago as of this writing, which is bananas for a fourteen-year-old movie with such little public awareness, but there are still ongoing editing wars about whether or not this movie is “Harsher in Hindsight” because a supervillain did become our president for a while. Comparing Trump to this Luthor is a mistake, though, as this one only descends into madness after introducing a period of relative pax Romana, improving the economy and, in the words of one of the characters, he “put that formidable intellect to work doing such a good job [that] no one will have a choice but to respect him.” Although that statement is immediately followed up with “It’s all about ego now,” which is true about the former president, one would be hard pressed to identify him with the first statement. The comparison here does a disservice to Lex Luthor and paints a real person who struggles to rise to the level of “competence” as some kind of talented mogul. 

Compare this to the presentation of Luthor in the series Young Justice, where the Lex of the first two seasons (which aired in 2010 and 2012) is a formidable enemy because he’s always several steps ahead of the protagonists, to seasons three and four (which aired 2019-2022), where he becomes much less of a threat at the same time that he starts paraphrasing and/or quoting Trump, including soundbites about “fake news” and “good people on both sides” and tweeting “SAD!” I didn’t like that plot development there at all, not because I have any sympathy for the orange bastard, but because it turned a well-developed character into an SNL parody. For what it’s worth, the currently running Harley Quinn series’ choice to play Lex as more of a parody of Elon Musk—a businessman whose “inventions” are just ideas he purchased from others and whose self-proclaimed supergenius is a facade that only fools morons—is a much funnier bit. That having been said, the Lex of Public Enemies does turn into a madman at the end, more interested in allowing the extinction level event to occur so that he can rule over the ashes than preventing the meteor from hitting the Earth, which is something that I can see 45 doing, so there’s that. 

That’s enough discourse for one day. This one has a pretty good narrative, but if you’re following these movies for frenetic action and dynamic animation, you can skip it. You’ll spare yourself some trouble. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman — Gotham Knight (2008)

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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