dc comics

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: Superman vs. The Elite (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. 

It’s funny that Batman: Year One is the shortest of these films, faithfully adapting a brief four-issue comic run, while this follow-up is about ten minutes longer despite adapting a single issue, Action Comics #775, titled “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?” But let’s back up a bit; remember when we talked about All Star Superman and I mentioned in passing that DC Comics had a habit not just of rebooting, but also of buying out other comic book companies and then grafting that company’s line up onto their own as a new universe in their big multiversal complex? We didn’t get into it at the time, but that wasn’t just a thing that they did back in the golden era, it’s something that they still do, or at least they were still doing up until the turn of the millennium. You see, discussion of Superman vs. the Elite requires a little bit of discussion about The Authority, a comic published by Wildstorm, shortly after DC’s acquisition of said organization, and buckle up, because this is a wild one – no pun intended. Jim Lee, already a widely beloved and known comic book artist, founded WildStorm in 1992 as one of the initial studios working under Image Comics, starting out with two Lee-drawn series, WildC.A.T.S. and Stormwatch (hence “WildStorm”). Stormwatch saw sales and interest stagnate as the nineties continued, and in 1997, Warren Ellis was brought on to helm the series’ second volume; he used this opportunity to inspect comics as a medium, and he slowly introduced a couple of his original characters to the series. 

First up was Jenny Sparks (intro’d in 1996 in issue #37 of the first volume of Stormwatch), an electrical lady (let’s leave it at that, if you’re a fan, you know, but let’s not drag this down or out), followed by Apollo and Midnighter in February 1998’s Stormwatch vol. 2 #4. These two are obvious pastiches of more famous heroes, with the sun god representing Superman and the violent vigilante standing in for Batma; and they’re a couple, although this isn’t confirmed for a few years. Now, going back to WildStorm for a minute, it’s worth noting that they didn’t just publish entries in their own little superhero universe, but they also licensed other properties like The X-Files, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th. So, uh, in August of 1998, virtually all of the characters not created by Ellis were killed off … by xenomorphs … in an intracompany one-shot entitled WildC.A.T.s/Aliens. This let Ellis pick his favorites and start a new team with them, so that’s good news for him, right? Except, sometime late that year, Lee sold WildStorm to DC Comics, with the deal going into effect in January of 1999. In yet another plot twist, however, DC still gave Ellis the go-ahead to proceed with the planned comic The Authority, which was headed by Jenny Sparks and featured Superman Apollo and Batman Midnighter, as well as Hawkgirl Swift and Doctor Fate the Doctor, alongside characters like The Engineer and Jack Hawksmoor, whose analogues are less straightforward. The first issue of The Authority hit the newsstands in May of 1999, and it was already clearly a different kind of comic — one in which the “heroes” weren’t afraid to kill their enemies, with the issue’s final pages showing panels of Midnighter breaking necks and Jack Hawksmoor punching a man in the face so hard that his head explodes. Then issue #2 starts with this image:

Or at least it does in the reprints. That was what I read, lo these many years ago, when a friend loaned me his trade paperbacks when I was a freshman in college, a half decade or so after these were originally published. I really enjoyed them at the time, although I remember them with the same sort of “I can’t believe I’ve never read something like this before” awe that I felt about some other things which, looking back, have aged terribly (Garth Ennis’s Preacher comes to mind). A quick review of the comics themselves on a few sites of ill repute alongside the publication information among a frighteningly high number of tabs that were created since I started writing this document tells me that what I liked mostly came from the Ellis era, while what left a bad taste in my mouth (like the character of Seth Cowie) came later, when the comic was handed off to Mark Millar. In general, The Authority was a book about, essentially, a team of empowered people who were willing not just to kill, but to murder. 

Which brings us back to Superman vs. The Elite. The film is based, as previously mentioned, on the Authority Elite, a new team of “heroes,” who appear on the scene shortly after a bit of a mixed PR issue for Superman (George Newbern). Supervillain Atomic Skull escapes from his imprisonment and goes on a rampage in Metropolis, killing dozens of people and causing the standard evil amount of property damage, before the Kryptonian arrives on the scene and apprehends the Skull, remanding him once again to the custody of the authorities (no relation). But the public isn’t fully satisfied by this resolution, as Supes finds himself questioned by several members of the populace about why he doesn’t just execute the Skull there on the spot, since he has the power to do so, and if he did, it would ensure that he won’t escape to do it again. Called to account for this before the UN, under the lead of Secretary Efrain Baxter (Henry Simmons), Superman is asked point blank, right at the nine-and-a-half minute mark: “Are you the Superman that the 21st Century needs?” Superman starts to give one of his speeches about how he isn’t an executioner, but he’s called away due to escalating tensions between the recurring fictional DC Middle Eastern nations of Bialya and Pokolistan. When he arrives on the scene, the Pokolistani military unleashes a new bio-weapon in the form of a big bug monster thing, that Superman fights for a bit before splitting in half; unfortunately, each half regenerates into its own separate entity, and Supes is assisted in putting them both down by the titular Elite, led by Manchester Black (Robin Atkin Downes). Afterwards, the starstruck neophyte heroes teleport away before they can embarrass themselves. 

People are excited by these new figures, at least initially. Unfortunately, after they work with Superman to save a high number of civilians from becoming casualties of terrorism, they set out to prove themselves to be the kind of heroes that “the world needs” for the modern world, including executing Atomic Skull in the street after another prison break and assassinating the leaders of Bialya and Pokolistan to end the conflict abroad. Kal-El, disquieted by the speed at which the citizenry turn on him and embrace superpowered beings dealing out summary executions, spends some time out of the public eye with Lois (Pauley Perrette), but is ultimately drawn back into the conflict and shows the world just how scary he can be without his unflinching adherence to his own moral code, killing the Elite one by one and forcing Manchester to watch and await his own murder . . . Until, of course, the curtain is pulled back to reveal that Superman has killed no one, and that all of this was a bit of pageantry to remind everyone that mercy is a virtue, especially in the face of an alien god. 

Writing this review has been a pain, to be honest. I got through that first batch of reviews for the first quarter of the year and told myself that I’d keep on powering through and keep my nice publication buffer in place, but this one was a real speed bump in that plan. The fact of that matter is that this one isn’t bad; it would be hard pressed to be less than decent given that the story on which it’s based is considered top tier. There was a solid year and a half (and three other movies) between All Star Superman and this one, which is sufficient time between releases (and expected viewings) for the immediate comparisons to one another to be less obvious, but when you watch them within a couple of weeks of one another, it becomes hard not to. I dislike the animation and character designs in this one quite a lot, with special attention to Manchester Black’s severely angular face and the exaggeration of Superman’s chin to the point of making his face pear shaped a lot of the time. Again, it’s not “bad” in any objective way like some of these that had extremely cheap looking character designs (Public Enemies comes to mind), but I’m not a fan. At other times, the action can look quite good, with Superman’s de-escalation of the Pokolistani and Bialyan conflict without the loss of life being a nice bit of fun, but it adds up to an experience that’s a little bit less than the sum of its parts. I think I would have liked this one a little more if we were further removed from All Star. Both of them are stories that examine the classic character through the lens of viewing him as a humble god living amongst mortals, more powerful than they but in awe of their potential; their shepherd, their servant, their steward … their Superman. But whereas the previous film does so by showing us an aloof omniscient being spending his last days making sure that his work will continue after his death, and in so doing creating a peaceful parable about choosing to be the best versions of ourselves, this one turns it back around on us and is about recognizing that might does not make right and that Superman (and perhaps, by extension, God)’s deification isn’t because of his omnipotence, but because of his mercifulness.

There’s a lot to really enjoy here, from the intentionally comedic (there’s an in-universe cartoon about Superman that features an even more kid-friendly version of the character) to the meaningful (Superman’s solemn crisis after his super-hearing causes him to overhear a child who has fallen under the sway of the Elite’s media influencer campaign to talk about how it would be “fun to kill,” even in a backyard game), to the heartfelt (the revelation that the note he left behind for Lois prior to his final showdown with the Elite saying simply “Believe, always believe”). I’m going to chalk it up to its proximity to All Star Superman as the reason that it failed to connect with me, even as I can admire parts of it. It probably works a lot better with a little breathing room. 

-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: Green Lantern — Emerald Knights (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. 

This one … it’s fine. Ok? It’s fine. This is an anthology film that centers around the first days of training of the Green Lantern Corps’ newest recruit, Arisia Rrab (Elisabeth Moss), with her induction into the group coinciding with a major crisis—naturally—that threatens the Corps’ founders, the Guardians, and the planet on which the organization is based, Oa. Things start out easy enough, as she meets her mentor Hal Jordan (Nathan Fillion, in the first of many portrayals of the character), learns about some of the Corps’ most legendary heroes of past and present, and ultimately proves her mettle by figuring out how to defeat the wraparound story’s big bad. And it’s fine! 

The meat of the story lies in its vignettes, which are perfectly suitable. Together, both we and Arisia learn about the origins of the Green Lanterns, the forging of their rings and those rings’ selection of the first four bearers, including one unlikely candidate in the form of the Guardians’ scribe, who—naturally—winds up defying all expectations. When Arisia worries about how her boot camp with the hulking Kilowog (Henry Rollins) will go, Hal recounts Kilowog’s own brutal training under a previous veteran, who came to see the potential in his pupil when the younger man demonstrated exceptional heroism. When Hal and Arisia encounter Laira (Kelly Hu) and she delivers a prophecy to them, we learn about Laira’s backstory as a princess whose father was saved from death at the hands of an army by the sacrifice of their area’s Green Lantern, and how his ring chose Laira as his successor; years later, she is forced to intervene when her father seeks revenge against his previous oppressors. The following recitation is the best of the bunch, which is fitting, as it’s an adaptation of one of the best stories in the extended GL universe, “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize,” and although it’s a pretty famous one, I won’t spoil it here on the off chance that you’d have any interest in this movie without already having read it. Finally, the still-a-Green-Lantern Sinestro (Jason Isaacs) reveals that his late friend Abin Sur (Arnold Vosloo) was a great believer in fate, unlike Sinestro, until he learned of a prophecy that Sinestro would fall to the dark side and create a Corps that was powered by fear, and rejected the concept of destiny. All that having been wrapped up, the framing device gets wrapped up when the combined might of the Green Lanterns are able to enact Arisia’s crazy/inspired plan and defeat the film’s villain, and a new era dawns. 

This movie is fine. It’s a little thin, which is ironic considering that this one is actually the longest of these films to date, clocking in at 83 minutes; the franchise wouldn’t break the 80 minute mark again for six years, and that’s not even taking into consideration that the title sequence for Emerald Knights is the shortest of them so far as well, not counting Wonder Woman, which consisted solely of a title card. Public Enemies, for example, had a 2:10 title sequence, First Flight’s was two minutes long, and Doomsday clocked in with a whopping three minutes, which is a lot of screen time for something that’s barely more than 75 minutes long. This one is more packed with story than any of the others have been, but that’s not a huge mark in its favor. Although every single one of these things is a corporate product, this one feels the most like it was made with its brand name in mind. This came out the same year as the ill-fated live action Green Lantern starring Ryan Reynolds, and Emerald Knights positively smacks of an attempt to coax some easy money out of a gullible public through synergistic marketing. It’s not badly made—Lauren Montgomery and the other directors on the project are doing good work—but none of these segments are better than the stories from which they’re adapted. Only the first vignette (and the wraparound) is new material, and while it’s fine, that’s all that it is. That same sense of corporate oversight and aftertaste is present in how this film mostly pulls its punches. Compare any of the scenes of action in this one to, for instance, the casual cruelty of Sinestro and the brutal violence of Boodikka’s death in First Flight, or the Amazon battles of Wonder Woman, or even the threat of death by immolation at the hands of the Joker in Under the Red Hood, and this one has more of a Saturday morning feel. It has to if we’re going to be able to package it in a multi-disc set alongside the surefire hit live action feature in time for Christmas! Except it didn’t happen that way, and this film suffers for having been destined (haha) to not only be forgotten because of that movie, but worse because of it, too. 

In its defense, none of these are bad stories. They’re just not as interesting here as they are in the comics, and none of them stands out as an adaptation that improves upon the original text. I can see David Gibbons’s art for “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” so clearly in my mind (and, at least at the time of writing, you can find it here in its entirety), and although this film does dabble in different art styles for each segment like Gotham Knight, the differences between vignettes is not as extreme, so this one isn’t as exciting as the original comic story. As an intro to the greater Green Lantern mythos for newbies, this one might be perfectly suitable, but it’s very middle of the road for this direct-to-video project, and a little too much of a Green Lantern-shaped corporate project to really lose oneself in.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: All-Star Superman (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. 

One of the purposes of DC’s “New 52” project when it first released was to create a new entry point for readers. This is an eternal problem for comic books, especially those with as long a history as many characters have. Superman’s been around since 1938 with Batman following just a year later and Wonder Woman hitting newsstands in 1941, and that kind of archive creates a barrier for a lot of potential new readers who don’t want to have to deal with nearly a century of backstory and history before diving into the most recent adventures of characters. DC has been trying to correct this perceived problem for almost half of its existence now, with the aforementioned Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986 intended to “reset” the timeline and start afresh; even further back, however, they were faced with the problem that a character introduced around the time of WWII should have aged quite a lot by the era of the Silver Age of comics that began in the mid-fifties. At that time, DC introduced several more modern versions of their older heroes, with the two biggest examples being the creation of the Barry Allen version of the Flash, the iconic red speedsuit with the lightning bolt replacing the older, unmasked version of the character who wore a helmet, and the modern Green Lantern, with test pilot Hal Jordan serving as the face of an intergalactic organization on Earth, rather than the older version of Alan Scott, with his red outfit and green cape. 

This presented a conundrum, however, as readers were now expected to follow a contemporary Justice League, in which the big three teamed up with the new Flash and Green Lantern in the then-present, while also knowing that the same trinity had teamed up with Jay Garrick’s Flash and Alan Scott’s Green Lantern during and after WWII. In an attempt to cut through this Gordian Knot, DC decreed that all JSA stories took place in an alternate dimension on “Earth Two,” and that their contemporary products were taking place on a primary Earth. This lasted a while, but that bandage couldn’t cover everything as DC continued to expand, either because their writers introduced another dimension to this multiverse or because they had bought out another comic company and needed to integrate those characters into their own books. This was the impetus behind Crisis on Infinite Earths, to take that infinity back down to a manageable single continuity. But nothing’s ever really gone, as comic continuities blew back out to intracosmic proportions, and had to be whittled back down again. 

Fourteen years after Crisis, DC rival Marvel was facing a similar problem. Instead of the Crisis-to-reboot pipeline that would become DC’s favorite plot device, they took a different approach, through the creation of the “Ultimate” sub-print. Books with this label could take a ground-up approach to telling stories from a new beginning (Peter Parker’s earliest days as Spider-Man, a new first/original class of X-Men, a Black Widow whose backstory didn’t rely on the Soviet Union, etc.) while setting stories in the present day (for better and for worse, as the Avengers equivalent The Ultimates is one of the most immediately post-9/11 things that you’re likely to read). This was a huge success for Marvel, as it ensured that longtime fans with an investment in the classic continuity got what they wanted, and new and old readers alike could check out newer comics that didn’t require you to keep track of how many Xorns there are or understand the finer points of Genoshan law. You may have never heard of the Ultimate imprint, but you’ve definitely seen its influence: it was in the pages of The Ultimates that Nick Fury was first portrayed as a Black man (and drawn to look like Samuel L. Jackson to boot), and Miles Morales was created as a character in Ultimate Spider-Man. A few year later, DC was still about half a decade away from doing what it always does—reboot everything, all at once, and use the same building blocks to create a new, singular continuity—and they decided to give their own version of an ultimate continuity a chance with their All Star imprint. 

It was, unfortunately and in many ways, dead on arrival. Frank Miller’s flagship series All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder was widely anticipated but was the immediate target of well-deserved mockery and disdain. It infamously featured a panel in which Batman asks young Dick Grayson “Are you [slur for disabled people] or something?” that you’ve no doubt seen as a meme floating around and perhaps even dismissed as edited, but which I can assure you is very real. It would be an easy metric to compare the success of the Ultimate line versus the All Star line by just comparing their lengths; the former ran from 2000 to 2015, while the latter only managed to eke out an existence from 2005 to 2008. Even that isn’t a good metric, however, as that entire three year run only covers All Star Batman, which ran for a mere ten issues with an absurdly erratic schedule; notably, Issue #4 released in March of 2006 and Issue #5 didn’t hit shelves for over a year, releasing in July of 2007. Although several other titles under the imprint were announced, including All Star Wonder Woman, All Star Green Lantern, and All Star Batgirl, the only other title that was released was All Star Superman, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely. Although this one had some schedule slippage like its counterpart, with new issues released about every two months other than a six month gap between issues 5 and 6, it was much better received (DC even divorced it from the rest of the All Star continuity at some point, trying to put some distance between the prestige and the stink). I don’t think that discontinuity was initially intended, but it’s been a long time since I read that run so I can’t be certain of my hypothesis—that Morrison intended for this to be an ongoing book and, when he read the writing on the wall, decided to shift course and aim toward a more definitive, rewarding finale. Still, given how widely popular the All Star Superman run became, it’s no surprise that DC and Warner Premiere would want to adapt it into one of their animated films, and with the entire story complete, they were able to condense it some and better foreshadow the ending. 

Released in 2011, All Star Superman is, essentially, a story about a god who walks among mortals resolving his final business before he dies. As the story opens, the titular big blue boy scout (James Deaton) must fly to the sun and rescue some scientists whose research mission has been sabotaged. In the process, he absorbs an extraordinary amount of solar radiation, which leaves him supercharged (no pun intended) but also dying. He sets out to complete any remaining work that he can and ensure that anything that must continue after he dies is left in the hands of a worthy successor. This includes confessing his secret identity to his love, Lois Lane (Christina Hendricks), and depositing a city of shrunken Kryptonians on a new planet that they can live on, among other things. In the comics, there was a rough correlation between the issues and the individual feats of strength of Hercules, and while this film doesn’t have time to adapt every single one, it does encapsulate the best of them, and shows us what a Superman story made by someone who loves the character can really achieve. 

After revealing his identity to Lois, he takes her back to his selenite clubhouse and gives her the grand tour, where we learn that his life is otherworldly in ways that we don’t normally see; he keeps an extraterrestrial being called a “sun-eater” as a pet and feeds it tiny stars that he creates on his “cosmic anvil,” for instance. It’s goofy Golden Age nonsense, but it’s treated with such sincerity that it works. He has a host of humanoid robots that he created to maintain the place as well as countless other gadgets that he uses for his various missions to help humanity: curing diseases, ending hunger, ensuring peace. And, behind the door that he forbids Lois to enter like some kind of well-meaning Bluebeard, he’s creating a serum that she can drink and have his powers for a day. After their day of superheroing and adventuring together, he takes off for a while to deal with the aforementioned shrunken city, only to return and discover that two Kryptonian astronauts have come to Earth with the intent of colonizing it; Superman stands up to them emphatically despite their greater strength and power, and when they turn out to be dying, still treats them with empathy and kindness. Finally, in his guise as Clark Kent, he visits Lex Luthor (Anthony LaPaglia) in prison, where he learns that the incarcerated super genius was behind the earlier solar mission failure, as a means to ensure that even after he is executed for his crimes, he will have finally killed Superman. Lex’s final defeat comes when, after using a similar serum to give himself powers, he sees the world as last son of Krypton does, down to the forces that bind matter together, and realizes that all of his justifications about why he couldn’t save the world because of Superman standing in his way were self-defeating, and that he could have changed everything if he had allowed himself to be inspired rather than enraged. 

The relationship between Superman and Lex is a beautiful nugget at the heart of this story. Morrison portrays the former as an all-loving god, who, even as his time grows short, still takes the time to appear to Lex as his clumsy, bumbling alter ego to implore the world’s richest man to see through the lies he has told himself and be better. Despite all his brilliance, Lex can’t see through the Clark Kent facade not because it’s such a good mask, but because when he looks at his foe, all Luthor is capable of feeling is diminished by his existence, rather than empowered by him. As Clark “accidentally” trips over a wire that was mere moments from electrocuting Luthor to death, Lex doesn’t see through his ruse because he simply can’t imagine that a being as powerful as Superman would ever bother with such sleight of hand, because Lex himself wouldn’t. It’s one of the best explorations of the relationship put on the page (and adapted to screen), and it’s fascinating to watch it play out. 

I have a mixed relationship with Frank Quitely’s artwork. It’s certainly distinctive, and among the pantheons of comic artists whose work is immediately recognizable, like Jim Lee, Jack Kirby, and even Rob Liefeld. His previous team up with Morrison on the turn-of-the-millennium run on New X-Men was widely praised at the time for its narrative, but I find it rather difficult to read based solely on how ugly it is. Around the same time, the two also worked together on the DC book JLA: Earth 2, and my criticism of that is the same. By the time of All Star Superman, however, he had matured a lot as an artist, and although his hallmarks are still very present, a random page from that comic shows a huge leap forward, showing characters with similar builds but distinct body language that differentiates them, as well as poses that aren’t just action and modeling posture but those that tell a story with their subtlety, like Lois’s coyness in the linked image. This film follows that same art style, and it ends up looking gorgeous on screen, and I’m glad that they followed Quitely’s designs. It makes this film feel distinct from the others in this series (similar to how New Frontier’s translation of Darwyn Cooke’s style still makes it stand out from the rest of the films), and it’s suited to this epically influenced narrative. This is one worth checking out. 

-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: 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: Green Lantern — First Flight (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. 

Rewatching these DC animated movies has been a strange ride so far. I remembered enjoying Superman: Doomsday as decent but not noteworthy, New Frontier as an unassailable masterpiece, Gotham Knight as forgettable, corporate-driven trash, and Wonder Woman as being quite good. It’s strange to come to such different conclusions now, with Doomsday as a memorable story of grief on the part of Lois Lane despite the film’s off-putting and occasionally ugly stylistic choices, Frontier as fun and novel but hampered but its sudden and overt jingoism, Knight as stylish and fascinating, and Wonder Woman in particular as being much grosser and more sexist than I remembered. The change in my perspective on this one, however, is perhaps the most extreme to date. Green Lantern: First Flight is truly adult in a way that the preceding films have attempted but not achieved. And it’s not simply about going grim and dark through violence (although that is present here, and it’s spectacular), but through a more nuanced approach to the narrative and a few genuine surprises. 

Hal Jordan is a modern-day test pilot for Ferris Aircraft whose simulation pod is forcibly drawn to the dying corpse of extraterrestrial humanoid Abin Sur, who explains that he is a member of an extraterrestrial police organization called the Green Lantern Corps, and that he has chosen Hal as his successor. Within a fairly short time, several other members of the Corps show up to take Hal back to Oa, the planet from which the Corps operates under the supervision of the Guardians, little floating blue guys with red robes and giant heads. These beings were the first intelligent life in the universe, and they created the giant lantern-shaped battery from which the many members of the Corps draw their power. As the rest of the galaxy considers Earth to be a backwards planet of smelly, greedy, crude brutes, the Guardians are resistant to the idea of letting a human join the ranks of the Green Lanterns, but highly decorated and trusted veteran Sinestro requests the opportunity to train Hal and, in so doing, test his worthiness. Their first order of business is tracking down the man who dealt Abin Sur his mortal blow, and use him to locate his employer, the warlord Kanjar Ro, who is rumored to be building his own powerful battery to rival that of the Guardians. 

If you thought Wonder Woman speedran through that character’s origin (it handles in 20 minutes what took an hour or so in the 70s pilot movie), this one really puts the pedal to the metal, with Hal getting the ring before the 5 minute mark and him en route to Oa within three minutes of that scene (not counting the credits). That’s not a bad thing; New Frontier had already covered much of the same territory (albeit in a different era) and the ill-fated Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern was in production already at this time and would cover the origin story yet again, so it was wise to breeze through all of that and get to the meat of the story so that it could spend more time developing the plot rather than the exposition. That may be why this feels the most like a proper movie of these first five, since it hits the ground running and gets to the point with enough time to explore the characters better. By fifteen minutes into the film, Hal is already on a mission with Sinestro that plays out like a scene from Training Day, wherein Sinestro tracks down the mistress of their suspect and, using an orb that produces a narcotic-like euphoric effect, tortures her to the point of nearly overdosing until Hal intervenes (a little too late for us to find him “heroic,” to be honest, but the narrative requires that Sinestro pushes the envelope, so I’ll allow it). 

The cast here is great, as it has been in all of these films. Christopher Meloni is an obvious choice to voice a cop, even one who operates across an entire sector of space rather than simply a unit for special victims. The real standout, however, is Victor Garber as Sinestro. You don’t even really have to be familiar with the comics or any of its adaptations to see his turn to the dark side coming—I mean, his name is Sinestro—but this is one of the more interesting versions of this character that we’ve seen. He’s the epitome of a cop: looking down on those he is supposed to serve and protect, an outsider in the communities that he is policing who thinks his badge ring gives him immunity to instigate and escalate violence with little regard for collateral. He’s trusted and respected by his superiors and peers, but he doesn’t hide this side of himself from Hal for long, immediately saying upon their arrival at the standard wretched hive of scum and villainy that he suggested that the place be destroyed via meteor shower, only for his leaders to laugh off his earnest suggestion. Sinestro is often a character that it is difficult to take seriously—again, his name is Sinestro—but Garber imbues his performance with such strong contempt that he sells the character’s malice completely. It’s really something to behold. Juliet Landau, probably best known either for being Martin Landau’s daughter or for portraying Drusilla in Buffy and Angel, gives a great performance as minor character Labella that sells the pathos of her position, but it’s another actress best known for her genre work, Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galactica, who deserves a call out here. As fellow Green Lantern Boodikka (I know), Helfer makes Boodikka vulnerable and trustworthy in a way that—spoilers for a fifteen year old movie incoming—make her betrayal of Hal all the more agonizing, even if the fact that it’s Helfer in the role means we should have seen that twist coming. 

When it comes to stakes and action/violence, this is the best of these films yet. Late in the film, Sinestro deactivates the lantern battery, preventing any Lanterns in the field from using their rings, so that any who were traveling through space or in a situation where they were protected by said ring are killed, with the rings then returning to Oa where they fall from the sky as thickly as rain in a raging storm. And that’s offscreen violence—characters die by falling into the walls of space transit tunnels and exploding into vapor, Sinestro temporarily reanimates the corpse of a fallen foe into a shambling semi-conscious undead thing in order to ask it some final questions, and one of Kanjar Ro’s men is sucked into space spine-first through a six-inch hole punched in the hull of a spaceship. It’s not simply darkness for the sake of being edgy, it’s often very inventive and integral to the plot. I’ve already given away too much, I fear, so I won’t spoil anything else, but I will say, this is the best one so far, and the most worthwhile one yet. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond