not so new 52

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League vs. Teen Titans (2016)

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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 feel like I just said this about Justice League: Gods and Monsters, but it’s nice to know that here at about the halfway point of this project, I can still be surprised. Despite having a pretty basic title that promises little more than two teams being thrown at one another like action figures, Justice League vs. Teen Titans breaks out of its role as just another smash-’em-up in this interconnected narrative. You also wouldn’t think it from the very generic promo images that are associated with the film either, but this is a horror movie, and despite being animated, it manages to be a pretty effective one. 

Damian’s up to his normal shenanigans, again. Some second stringers like Weather Wizard are causing a ruckus, and the League is there to pound everyone into submission like it’s gear night and the lights are about to come on. Damian’s on crowd control duty, which means he’s standing in a single place and pointing in the direction that fleeing people should use to evacuate. Understandably bored at being given the superhero job equivalent of holding the sign that says “SLOW” on one side and “STOP” on the other at a road construction site, he gets involved when he sees the opportunity to go after the aforementioned climate-based villain. Unbeknownst to the boy, the Weather Wizard is possessed by some four-eyed space demon, and Damian’s brutal takedown forces the demon vapor out of his body, leaving no one to question. Bruce has, once again, had it up the metaphorical here, so Nightwing takes the kid to stay with the Titans, a team run by his ladyfriend, Starfire (Kari Wahlgren). She’s playing den mother to: Jaime Reyes (Jake T. Austin), aka Blue Beetle, a kid with an alien “scarab” on his back that transforms into weaponry and such; Garfield “Beast Boy” Logan (Brandon Soo Hoo), a green boy who can shapeshift into animals; and goth-girl-who’s-sort-of-the-devil’s-daughter Raven (Taissa Farminga, in an inspired bit of casting).  

It’s Raven and her backstory on which this film hangs. Her mother was a teen runaway who got involved with a cult, and when said organization did a little ceremony to see what would happen, they summoned an extra-dimensional entity known as Trigon (Jon Bernthal). Raven’s mother was the naive but willing Rosemary in this situation, and her baby, Raven was to be the vessel through which Trigon would permanently enter our plane of existence to conquer the earth and turn it into a hell-like place. His time is nigh, as it turns out, and he’s stepping up his astral gaslighting to get her to open up the portal. Helping his cause is a possessed Superman, through whom Trigon’s minions are able to dig what can only be described as a stargate out of the desert, in preparation for his coming. When the Titans are attacked by Trigon’s henchmen while on an outing to a carnival for some mandatory team-building fun, Raven spills this backstory, and tells them about how she was raised in a magic utopia until she was about eleven, when Trigon found their little hidden fairyland and turned it into hell; this is not an exaggeration, as pits of molten lava erupt, everything is turned to ashes, and every living thing evaporates in a puff, except Raven. She pretended to join him, she sealed him in a crystal that she hid in another dimension, but apparently he’s out and trying to get a stranglehold on our dimension. The Titans can’t be possessed since Raven is protecting them, but nothing is stopping Trigon’s forces from taking over the League . . .

There are a lot of great teen horror elements in here, mostly put to good use. The carnival is such an iconic location for a horror movie and doubly so when the characters are teens, so that whole sequence is a lot of fun. There’s also something about Raven’s pale emo girl aesthetic that’s such a key element of the genre that it transcends decades, so much so that you can almost hear the performance that Winona Ryder would have given as this character if the movie was made in the 80s, or the one that Fairuza Balk would have given if this had been made in the era of The Craft. Her borderline fanfiction backstory—demon daddy didn’t love me and also he is actually essentially the devil—is actually fun here, so I have no complaints. I’ve never really cared all that much about this character in any other media, not even Titans (2018), which I watched all the way through along with dozens of others worldwide, but this is the perfect length to condense everything down into a digestible package. But what really sells this as a horror story is just how awful and gross things get. 

We eventually go all the way to (similar to but legally distinct from) Hell, but even before we get there, there’s enough to disturb us here in our own dimension. Raven’s recap of her origin story includes a scene in which Raven’s willing mother is frightened out of her mind when the glamour on her lover fades and she finds herself facing his true demonic form, complete with jet black horns that sprout and grow with a disgusting sound effect, and with additional points popping out like antlers as they elongate. Superman finds himself alone in his apartment laundry room, and not only is the sequence drawn with a lot of spookiness, he tries to get the image out of his head by beating it against a wall for what may have been hours, which is difficult to watch. Once the group does get to the place where the crystal should be, everything for as far as the eye can see just looks like exposed, flayed muscle tissue, with tumorous bones and teeth popping out randomly. At one point, a wall of corpses comes alive and pulls a villain into itself, tearing it apart, all while a giant metal rhombus hovers above the landscape like Leviathan in Hellraiser 2. Beast Boy undergoes a full-on Cronenbergian/Akira tumorous body horror transformation upon exposure to Hell’s energy. Punches are not being pulled in this movie, and its animation lets it get away with a lot.

This isn’t a perfect movie. For one thing, the pace at which they were putting these out and the strains that this would put on any animation team are starting to show, as there are quite a few obvious animation errors that I’m surprised weren’t caught prior to release, mostly in the carnival sequence. One of these is a misspelled sign that advertises “Salloons” [sic] instead of balloons, and another is when Raven and Damian end up dropping their respective guards around each other as they see their dual reflections in some funhouse mirrors, which reflects a sign that says “Smoothies” but doesn’t mirror the text. This sequence, while fun, also goes for that Final Destination vibe with the inclusion of an emo ballad that I believe was written specifically for this release, plays in its entirety over a montage of the Titans bonding, and which is one of the worst things that I have ever heard, genuinely. If you must hear it for yourself, it’s here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. But if you can make it through that, you’ll be rewarded with something really fun, like a kaiju-sized Trigon making a beeline toward a city to destroy it while Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash are completely powerless against it, or dimensions made of meat. That soundtrack is knocking this one back a few pegs, but don’t let that make you skip this one (maybe just mute it during the carnival montage).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Bad Blood (2016)

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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. 

We’ve talked a little bit about the CW’s “Arrowverse” series of shows in this feature, but there’s one name that hasn’t really come up here yet, and that’s Batwoman (no, not that one). The interconnectedness of the so-called “Bat Family” is already a tangled web, and it gets more tangled every year, so I’m not going to get into that, but suffice it to say that the current Batwoman, aka Kate Kane, was introduced in 2006 as an updated version of an earlier character, one who was introduced for the sole purpose of showing how super not-gay Batman was in the wake of Frederic Wertham’s infamous censorship call-to-arms, The Seduction of the Innocent. As a way of thumbing the industry’s collective nose at Wertham and his regressive quackery, Kate was explicitly made a lesbian. This was a big deal at the time (as someone who was reading Young Avengers, which featured a gay couple in the form of Wiccan and Hulkling, I can tell you that the contemporary comic letter pages were a fiery, brimstone-y place), and in some ways still was at the time that Batwoman, the 2019 TV series, premiered – at least, if the neanderthal braying of online agitators in the wake of the show’s airing is anything to go by. In the series, which follows the characterization of Kate/Batwoman that was introduced by our old friend The New 52, Bruce Wayne’s cousin Kate returns to Gotham some time after the abdication of the city by its Dark Knight, and she discovers the Batcave and all the gadgets, retrofits them to suit her needs, and then sets out to clean up the city. Tale as old as time, right? 

Among the DC CW shows, Batwoman was the most … cursed, one could say. The first season never completed filming because of COVID, the lead performer (Ruby Rose) left between seasons one and two, and the show’s mixed messaging about the role of the “Crows,” a private security firm headed by Kate’s father, was questionable even before BLM and has only grown more tone deaf over time. Reports have been mixed for years as to whether Rose was fired (for alleged behavior on set) or quit (due to being pretty badly injured during some stunt filming and not taking adequate recuperation time), and although we’ll probably never know for certain, I can say that I think Rose leaving was to the show’s benefit. That tone deafness regarding “non-police” police was rampant all over the first season, to the point where, although I would never agree with the bigots who hated the show on principle about why, they weren’t wrong that it … kinda sucked. 

Rose’s exit allowed for the show to go in a different direction. Javicia Leslie was cast as Ryan Wilder, an ex-con out on parole following a short term she served following some poor police work (redundant, I know) on the part of the Crows; when Kate’s plane crashes near where Ryan has parked for the night in the van that she’s living in, Ryan finds the batsuit and puts it to work right away. She was a completely fresh take on the character, and that allowed for new and interesting developments. In the first season, the romantic conflict comes from the fact that Kate and her love interest, Meagan Good’s Sophie Moore, were in military training together before Kate was given the boot for failing to follow “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” while Sophie didn’t speak up for Kate or herself and is still deeply closeted by the time of the pilot. Batwoman’s archnemesis, Alice (as in “of Wonderland”), is also tied to Kate because—spoiler alert—she’s actually the long presumed dead twin sister that Kate hasn’t seen since her supposed death when they were in elementary school. It didn’t help that Rachel Skarsten’s not-quite-Joker performance was the most interesting thing about the series, either, making her more engaging and magnetic than our purported hero. 

So, as season two begins, you have a whole supporting cast who not only don’t know if Kate’s dead or alive, but who also have no idea who this new person in Kate’s costume is. Skarsten’s Alice has to find something new to obsess over now that she can’t just keep pestering the sister she blames for never finding her, and her attempts to play on the guilt of that become a no-sell for Ryan, who grew up in the foster system. To their credit, the CW DC shows often tried to address social issues, and even when their heart was in the right place, it did so pretty clumsily (Black Lightning did it best, obviously, while Supergirl was a real roller-coaster of comrade/allyship). When it was made a selling point of the show, it was often to the show’s detriment. For me, this comes through most clearly in Batwoman’s first season treatment of Sophie, where filthy rich white woman Kate Kane lives in constant judgment of Sophie’s past choices. Kate’s constant exhortations that Sophie should come out of the closet are pure Western neoliberalism, dictating the lives of others without real knowledge of their lived experiences and dangers. But, because it had to pull a soft reboot before it ever really got going, Batwoman was able to do more and be a more interesting text for discourse because it wasn’t a “message” show, or it was at least no longer trying to send the same message that it was from its initial conception. Over time, Ryan and Sophie grow closer without all the emotional baggage of what Kate and Sophie had in the past, and this is the only show that I can think of offhand which had a queer relationship between two Black women as its primary romance storyline. It ended up being a lot better than it had a right to be. 

This is all yet another long lead up to me talking about an animated DC film, because this one introduces the Kate Kane Batwoman to this continuity. Batman: Bad Blood opens some six months after Batman vs. Robin, in a pretty cool sequence in which several C-tier Bat-nemeses are gathered in a warehouse and a familiar cloaked figure starts to take them out from the shadows—except, as the firing of a handgun from the darkness reveals—this isn’t Batman (Jason O’Mara), but Batwoman (Yvonne Strahovski). Batman soon intervenes himself, but in so doing, he ends up being blown to bits when the warehouse explodes. The absence of Batman, highlighted by the fact that the Bat-signal is going unanswered and the public has started to notice, leads to Bruce’s son Damian (Stuart Allen) being drawn home, and prompts the return of Nightwing/Dick Grayson (Sean Maher) as well, while Kate enlists her father’s help in trying to find any evidence that Bruce is still alive. Dick finds himself forced to take on the mantle of Batman—something that was his greatest dream as a child before it morphed into the thing that he wanted to escape from most as he matured—but when he recognizes Kate, he unmasks himself to her and takes her on as a probationary member of the team. They’re further joined by yet another new Bat-hero, Batwing (Gaius Charles), who is the son of Wayne Enterprises’ Lucius Fox. 

The villain this time around is someone called “The Heretic,” whom Batman seemed to recognize despite his mask in the moments before his death. We in the audience even get a glimpse of the man beneath when he does, but this franchise’s aforementioned difficulty in differentiating the faces of its square-jawed manly men ensures that it means nothing to us. It turns out that he’s operating under the direction of Damian’s mother and Bruce’s ex-lover, Talia al-Ghul (Morena Baccarin), who also has the Mad Hatter and his mind control tech as integral parts of her plan. The Bat Brigade invades her hideout and manages a rescue of Bruce before the fifty-minute mark, and then the real evil plot kicks in: Talia’s turned him into a Batmanchurian Candidate, with the intention of using Hatter’s tech to take over Gotham City (and then, of course, the world). From there, the film dissolves into a series of (admittedly well-executed) cliches, with the finale taking place aboard a floating tech summit. We get our designated girl fight between Talia and Batwoman, Batman’s brainwashing is broken by one of those “I know you’re in there somewhere” speeches, and a floating base is prevented from colliding with Wayne Tower at juuuuuuuust the last second. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s fun, and sufficiently exciting. I got a real kick out of watching all of these folks flying around in their costumes; it gave me flashbacks to watching G-Force/Gatchaman in my youth. 

It’s telling that I had more to say about the Batwoman TV series than I did about this movie. Funnily enough, this one goes back to basics with its Kate Kane, as she is decidedly not Bruce’s cousin here. The most interesting thing about this one is that it gives us a chance to see how these characters play off of each other when the title character is missing, where we have a void in the center of this narrative that creates an opportunity for us to spend more time with the others. Dick and Damian are the most fun together that they have ever been here, and the backstory that Dick and Kate knew each other because of cotillions and such is a nice detail. That still highlights some of the film’s weaknesses. These have become self-perpetuating now, so there’s no need to think too hard about certain details; for example, it would have been much more fun if Dick-as-Batman had gotten a little too acrobatic with his fighting, and if this had been the thing to tip off Damian and Kate that he wasn’t the “real” Batman. Instead, they just know when they see him. The dialogue here is a bit more fun than normal too, since Batman isn’t around glooming up the place, and that’s a nice change, but it doesn’t reach the level of being truly special.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League – Gods and Monsters (2015)

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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 would be very easy for this film’s setting, in which we see a “different” or “morally inverted/skewed” twist on the Justice League, to be very tired at this point. We’ve had good heroes framed as evil, seen a true hero face off against a team of morally questionable “heroes” who act as his foil(s), and visited both an alternate dimension with evil versions of our heroes and an alternate timeline with morally “unchained” versions of our heroes. I’ve seen part of the big Crisis on Infinite Earths animated film that DC is currently in the process of releasing at this very moment, and spoiler alert, we’re not out of the woods yet. Surprisingly, by going full “Elseworlds” with this one, it feels fresh and inventive, rather than like we’re trodding all-too-familiar ground. 

In the world of Justice League: Gods and Monsters, the titular team is composed of only three people: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Except that this Wonder Woman isn’t Diana, Princess of Themyscira or Paradise Island, but a humanoid extraterrestrial warrior woman named Bekka who hails from the planet of New Genesis. Batman isn’t Bruce Wayne, but is instead Dr. Kirk Langstrom, who appears in the comics and its adaptations as B-tier (if you’re feeling generous) Batman villain Man-Bat, a giant bat creature who was once a man. Here, Langstrom is reimagined as a kind of vampiric anti-hero in the vein of Morbius. Superman is still the last son of Krypton, but we eschew the traditional baby-in-the-space-bulrushes story, and instead Jor-El and Lara are just going to dump some DNA into a rocket and send off a theoretical child they neither know nor love, like in Man of Steel. At the last moment, however, General Zod storms into the laboratory and sticks his finger into the machine (not a euphemism), so that the child that arrives after space gestation is genetically his and Lara’s son. Upon reaching the earth, instead of being discovered by the Kents, who are able to adopt the space child and hide his spaceship on their farm, he is instead first discovered by migrant workers who must flee from government agents, causing this Superman to grow up with no knowledge of his heritage while the government has possession of his pod and access to its technology. 

It’s an interesting set-up that allows us to actually examine who these characters are, how they maintain relationships with each other and people on the outside, and how we perceive them as icons through a new lens, darkly. Superman (Benjamin Bratt) here has a more complicated relationship with humanity at large, and at one point idly comments that it might be easier to enforce peace through conquest. Is this a matter of nature or nurture? If it’s the latter, is it possible that there is some genetic predisposition toward egomania that he inherited from his militaristic father? If it’s nurture, is this the result of his identity being deliberately kept from him, or perhaps the result of more direct interaction with the ineptitude (and danger) of the status quo, having seen the way that the American government and people treated his undocumented adopted parents? His relationship with Lois Lane (Paget Brewster) is more adversarial here, and that’s a lot of fun to watch. Like mainstream Wonder Woman, Bekka (Tamara Taylor) is royalty, but instead of coming to “man’s world” as an ambassador of peace, she’s a refugee with nowhere to go after entering into an arranged marriage that was secretly an assassination/coup plot by her father. She’s carrying around a greater burden than Wonder Woman normally does, but she’s nonetheless still paired with Steve Trevor (Tahmoh Penikett) who is now the liaison between President Amanda Waller (Penny Johnson Jerald!) and the League. 

As with most things in DC animation, however, Batman is still the star of the show. Michael C. Hall brings a lot of gravitas and pathos to Kirk Langstrom, which is good news, since he’s in a “these super scientists all knew each other in college and there was a terrible accident” plot. The film has to have a pretty strong emotional center if you’re aiming for a demographic that, if they’re at all interested in your product, has probably already seen this exact thing lampooned on The Venture Brothers; I’ve never seen Dexter, so my primary Hall touchpoint is Six Feet Under, and there’s a lot of the vulnerability and introversion that Hall brought to David Fisher there that’s coming through in this performance, perhaps making it slightly better than it has a right to be. See, he was one of the hand-picked graduates of a select group of students overseen by this world’s benevolent(ish) Lex Luthor (Jason Isaacs), although he’s only really remained close to his former best bud and nanomachine specialist Will Magnus (C. Thomas Howell) and Will’s wife Tina (Grey Griffin). Flashbacks to their college days reveal that Tina was always more in love with Kirk than Will, but that the former’s aloofness meant that she found herself in the arms of the latter, although Kirk’s social awkwardness partially stems from his desperate need to find a cure for a wasting disease with which he is afflicted. He’s researching the use of bat plasma, naturally, and when he hits upon the idea of incorporating Will’s research into his own as a hybrid treatment, they put their heads together on it, resulting in the unfortunate Hero Dracula state in which Kirk now finds himself. 

The backstory of all three characters takes up a good portion of this film’s runtime, but it never feels expositional. This also means that the main plot of the film is cut down to the bare essentials, which does wonders for the pacing. It’s essentially a mystery story, as we see several other members of the Luthor special program for geniuses killed off by dark, unrecognizable creatures. When the third of these murders occur, it becomes clear that someone is attempting to frame the Justice League for these killings by mimicking their powers and/or fighting techniques. What is “Project Fairplay,” and what does it have to do with the murders? And why take the extra step of making it seem like the Justice League has crossed the moral event horizon? It’s an effective little mystery, probably the first time that one of these movies has attempted a superwhodunit and managed to succeed, with multiple twists that lead up to the big reveal. 

It’s also worth noting that Gods and Monsters is done in the artistic style of Bruce Timm, which is to say that it echoes the design aesthetics of Batman: The Animated Series and its associated properties, including Justice League and Justice League: Unlimited. What’s interesting about that is that one of the occasional complaints about those series was that the character designs were too static, specifically that it could be hard to tell the difference between characters when they were unmasked, and that all the female characters in particular were almost identical. I didn’t bring it up in Batman vs. Robin, but that inability to differentiate between characters is becoming an issue over in that ongoing franchise. The big reveal scene of Talon’s identity in that movie (and that he was sleeping with Bruce’s love interest) was completely undercut by the fact that, with the shadowing choices used in the scene to evoke the light of a city skyline at night meant that I initially thought we were finding out that Talon was Nightwing, since they had the exact same jawline, cheekbones, and haircut. Later scenes in normal lighting reveal that he’s a brunet, which helps us tell them apart from that point on in the film when they are out of costume, but that’s not the kind of character modeling you want in an animated film. Here, even though they have the same hair color and are in a lot of scenes together during their college flashbacks, even in the relatively simplified Bruce Timm style, Magnus and Langstrom have sufficiently different features that it’s never an issue, and that’s worth praising here. It’s a small thing, but it’s important. 

I enjoyed this one as a nice, refreshing break, and as an interesting spin on the whole “through a lens, darkly” thing that shows us our characters in a different context. The animation style feels like coming home after a long time away, and the plot zips along at a great pace between legitimately interesting backstory reveals. This one gets an unequivocal recommendation.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman vs. Robin (2015)

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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 follow-up to Son of Batman, the titular Batman and son butt heads over (sigh) the use of deadly force. It’s more complicated than that this time around, luckily, but that’s once again the dead horse we’re beating, still. It was hard to get my enthusiasm up for this one, since it not only features Damian, whom I’m mostly apathetic about, but also introduces the Court of Owls, a Gotham secret society introduced shortly after I stopped reading comics and which I don’t find particularly interesting. This ended up being a bit more interesting than expected, though, and helped me push through. 

The film opens with Batman (Jason O’Mara) following Robin/Damian (Stuart Allen) to the hideout of the evil Dollmaker (Weird Al(!)), where the latter has traced a series of kidnappings. The ten-year-old Boy Wonder has impulsively gone ahead and forced Batman to follow him instead of going together. By the time he catches up, he starts freeing the children while his son and sidekick pursues Dollmaker, leaving an opportunity for the mysterious Talon (Jeremy Sisto) to introduce himself (mysteriously, of course), give Damian a little speech about how murder is sometimes necessary, and then kill Dollmaker, leaving the scene so that it appears Damian did it. Bruce is quick to believe that this is the case, even if Alfred (David McCallum) and Dick/Nightwing (Sean Maher) are more willing to believe the boy. Alfred, rather irresponsibly, fiddles with the home security system to allow Robin the chance to go roaming about the city at night—remember, trained assassin or not, he is ten—which allows Talon to continue to try and lure the kid to the dark side. For his part, Bruce isn’t doing such a hot job at being a father, given that he hasn’t even mentioned Damian to the woman that he’s currently dating, Samantha (Grey DeLisle), let alone introduced them, and he’s having a hard time adjusting to suddenly being a father. Luckily, this leads easily into flashbacks to his own childhood, including his hearing about a secret society known as “the Court of Owls” that rule Gotham from the shadows, and his father’s gentle bedtime promises that there was no such thing. In the present, it’s clear that they do, and that they’re pulling some strings; in fact, their Grandmaster is unwittingly working away at him from two angles, as the Court is attempting to flush out Batman before he can end their criminal activities and court (no pun intended) Bruce Wayne into joining their ranks after his father had rejected them decades before. Talon is their enforcer, and his loyalty is based upon their promise to make him into one of their immortal soldiers (with the caveat that they haven’t really perfected the process, and it seems to always be a little bit of a failure). 

The fight scenes in this one are pretty good, which is always true, but there’s a little more variety in this outing. There’s sparring earlier on between Damian and other characters, and it’s fine and all, but there’s a clear difference in the body language of the characters later in the film when Damian has gone rogue. In his first fight with Batman, it’s clear that Bruce is just trying to let his son tire himself out with his spin kicks and acrobatics so that he doesn’t actually have to punch his child in the face, but eventually realizes he’s going to have to, and that was sufficiently dynamic visually that it’s worth noting upon. The big invasion of Wayne Manor by the Court’s “Owls” made for a satisfactory climactic set piece, albeit I’m very bored with Batmechs, I can tell you that much. What really makes this one stand out is Bruce getting dosed with hallucinogenic gas; he basically has a bad acid trip in which he foresees Damian becoming a killer, wearing the cape and cowl, and that makes him want to be a better father. In his hallucination, the child version of himself/Damian (their similarity to one another having previously been underscored by using the same character model with different eye colors in the earlier film is carried over into this one) tells him that, in his grief, he had allowed himself to become little better than the “dark forces” that killed his parents, and that his unwillingness to listen to his son would cause Damian to become something even worse. 

These movies are rarely this psychologically mature or complex, so I like that what drives the emotional story for the two main adult characters here, Talon and Bruce, is what each of them is projecting about themselves onto Damian. You know Batman’s backstory, and Talon’s is a kind of dark mirror of both Bruce’s and Damian’s. An orphan like Bruce, Talon was taken in by a thief who taught him how the finer points of burglary in a kind of criminal reflection of Bruce’s mentorship of Dick and Damian, but Talon was mercilessly beaten for his failures. This led to him becoming a vigilante as an adult as well, but under the guidance of the Court of Owls, his activity always has the flavor of violent vengeance, while Bruce (ostensibly) values justice over revenge. Bruce hallucinates Damian as a mass-murderer on an unimaginable scale because he fears this darkness in himself. Talon, for his part, sees a great deal of himself in Damian, and perhaps also sees the possibility of making up for what was done to him, turning the boy into a killer like himself but also making sure that the generational abusive trauma stops with him, as twisted as that might be. When it becomes the best option for the Court’s end goals to kill Damian, Talon ultimately refuses, looking into the boy’s face and seeing his own, just as Bruce had, and being unwilling to continue the cycle of violence, revolting against the Court instead. The ultimate conflict comes down to two different men projecting their traumas onto a little boy, and what they do when that trigger is brushed. It’s thoughtful, and elevates this one a little bit over some others in this franchise. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League – Throne of Atlantis (2015)

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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 been a bit since our heroes first met and all of that during Justice League: War, and they’re not exactly keeping in touch. When a U.S. submarine carrying nuclear warheads is sunk, Cyborg is tasked with investigating, and as he examines the wreckage, he uncovers that the nukes have been stolen, before he is attacked by unseen enemies. Back at headquarters, he manages to get the team to assemble to watch a holographic recreation of his investigation, which reveals the form of his assailants; Wonder Woman recognizes them as the sea-dwelling Atlanteans. Elsewhere, new character Arthur Curry is drinking his grief over his recently deceased father at a seaside bar and expositing about his woes to a lobster in a tank. When said crustacean is selected to be another patron’s dinner, this escalates to an altercation in which Arthur finds himself squaring off against four other men, and emerging victorious – even having an attempted stabbing fail as the blade breaks in his attacker’s hand. This is reported to Queen Atlanna, the widowed ruler of Atlantis and Arthur’s mother, who sends her lieutenant Mera to bring Arthur home. As the child of two worlds—Atlantis and the surface—she hopes that his ascension to the throne will build a bridge of peaceful coexistence. Unfortunately, her younger son Orm has his sights set on becoming king, and he’s willing to fly as many false flags as needed (and commit matricide) to get there. 

After a little bit of a rocky start, this franchise is operating like a well-oiled machine at this point: functional and reliable. And when we’re talking about machinery, that’s what we’re hoping for: that our car starts when we’re ready to go somewhere, that our coffee mugs and spoons come out of the dishwasher free of debris, that our oscillating fans both fan and oscillate. We don’t really pay attention to those things until the car doesn’t start, your drinking glasses have crud on them, or you wake up in the middle of the night and you’ve sweat through your pillow (again). There’s nothing bad to say about Throne of Atlantis, but I’m trying to think of adjectives other than “serviceable” and “adequate.” I didn’t see the live-action Aquaman (I have my limits), but I’m positive it’s better than that – no offense to Nicole Kidman, who I’m sure had a bit of fun and could hardly be bothered to care about the film’s reception in this here swamp.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing that stands out. Mera’s “hard water” powerset is fun and is used in a lot of fun ways, and her slaying of swathes of enemy combatants and sea monsters of approximate sapience is fun to watch, especially given how grisly it is. There’s a Lovecraftian monster down in the deeps that our heroes have to fight; that’s pretty neat. Arthur even gets to throw in a declaration of “Outrageous,” which was the catchphrase of Aquaman in The Brave and the Bold, the characterization that, alongside his appearances on Justice League, credited with “saving” the character from the sillier version of him that appeared in Superfriends and became the primary image of him in pop culture. If you cared about that fact, you would probably already know it, but heaven help me if I don’t mention it. The humor mostly lands, especially with regards to Hal Jordan’s ongoing rivalry with Batman; in this one, he responds to the Caped Crusader’s delay in responding to a memo by going straight to Gotham and helping him take down the goons he’s tailing, except now he’s ruined the fifth step in a ten step investigation with his showboating. These little character touches are what are most pleasant about these films overall, and is the thing that most makes them feel worthwhile.

This one’s good. It’s not going to be anybody’s favorite (other than dyed-in-the-wool Aquafans), but it’s violent, colorful, funny, and seventy-two minutes long. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Assault on Arkham (2014)

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

For the first time since Superman: Unbound, we’ve got one of these movies that’s not part of the “DCAMU.” It’s not untethered from a pre-existing continuity altogether, however, as this one is, for all intents and purposes, deliberately invoked synergy between the animated direct-to-video films and the Batman: Arkham video game franchise. I’m not really familiar with those; I played through about 20% of the first game, decided it wasn’t really the kind of gameplay that I’m into, and never really returned to it. They’re popular games, critically and commercially, but I’m just not that into that much sneaking and stealthing. With that admission, I have no idea how this movie is supposed to fit into that continuity (Wikipedia has that covered for you, if you’re interested), and if there’s something I’m supposed to be annoyed about here because it contradicts this or that here and there, you’ve come to the wrong place for that bit of criticism. But as you can already tell from the star rating above, this one turned out a lot better than the last couple of times the studio plopped out a cross-promotional tie-in. 

The Riddler (Matthew Gray Gubler) is up to shenanigans, and Amanda Waller (CCH Pounder) has one of her black ops teams on murder duty, but Batman (Kevin Conroy) takes care of the situation and remands Riddler back to Arkham Asylum. This prompts Waller to put together—you guessed it—a Suicide Squad, to infiltrate the facility and reclaim a thumb drive in Riddler’s cane. Her recruits are Deadshot (Neal McDonough), Captain Boomerang (Greg Ellis), Black Spider (Giancarlo Esposito), King Shark (John DiMaggio), and Killer Frost (Jennifer Hale). Oh, and Harley Quinn (Hynden Walch), of course, and our sacrificial goon who gets his head blown off to prove Waller’s sincerity to the others is KGBeast, if you’re playing bingo at home. Harley lets herself get caught and taken to Arkham as part of the infiltration plan, but things are complicated by the fact that she and a thoroughly locked-down Joker end up interacting. This triggers her rage and ends up with her attempting to shoot him through the holes in his Hannibal Lecter-esque cell, which is only effective insofar as creating a tear on the inside of his cell that will allow him to escape later. There are plans within plans, of course, as one or more of the draftees may be there to “take care” of Riddler, and their competing agendas mean that there are going to be some changing loyalties throughout. 

This isn’t a Batman movie – not really. I’m not all that shocked that this falls under the “Batman” label, however, and not just because it’s extended universe (sigh) stuff for the Arkham games. There are (roughly) 52 of these, as noted in the introduction, and within those titles, “Wonder Woman” appears all of twice (3.8%), “Superman” ten times (19.2%), and “Justice League” thirteen times (25%). “Batman” appears in twenty titles (38.5%), and that’s all down to the fact that WB marketing knows what side of the batbread is batbuttered. Batman is around but this isn’t about him. This is a Suicide Squad movie, through and through, with a plot that, in some ways, both presages the much-maligned 2016 feature and pre-emptively improves upon it. There’s bound to be character overlap, of course, but the premise of this one is a lot more sensible; instead of sending a crew of mostly-mortal criminals who happen to have good aim to try and stop a magical apocalypse, here we’ve got a few different skill sets that are tasked to work together to pull off a heist, and some of them also have “assassination” in their specific dossier. When he does appear, Batman is working his own parallel investigation that periodically overlaps or interacts with the Squad pulling an Ocean’s to get into a vault. 

As when she voiced the character before in Public Enemies, Pounder once again proves that she was born to play Waller, although the character is reduced to being a bit more one-note and villainous than more nuanced portrayals since, in case you forgot, this is a video game tie-in. Walch is fun as Harley Quinn, who’s played comedically in this deadly serious world, which makes for a nice touch. Other characters get in on it, too, with the odd romance that grows between Killer Frost and King Shark drawing a few chuckles. Shark himself looks a lot like Venture Bros. character Baron Underbheit, which adds to the comedy, and when his head explodes, it seems that direct visual inspiration is taken from the goombas in the Super Mario Bros. movie. It’s a tad obvious from the outset that Joker will escape from his cell and complicate the plan, but there’s a lot of real tension in the helicopter escape scene. All of the fight scenes are decent, and the animation is nice and fluid. 

There should be no mistaking; this is a product first and a creative endeavor last, but it’s a product of good quality that ticks off all the right boxes. Conroy is Batman, forever (no pun intended) and always. If you’re looking for a fun little Suicide Squad story, this is well above the median. And the breakout scene where all of the villains get to show off a little is fun. There are worse Suicide Squads out there, even if this one only exists to milk a few extra dollars out of fans of the game series. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — War (2014)

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

Right off the bat, this one starts out a lot stronger than its predecessor, although its differences from it only further ask the question of why Flashpoint Paradox was made in the first place. The art design is miles better, with the character models looking much more slick and complete, and it has a pretty strong opening. Right off the bat (no pun intended), we are introduced to Green Lantern (Justin Kirk) as he pursues an apparent kidnapper that has been construed with the supposed Batman, who most believe to be an urban legend. Rescuing the kidnapping victim from her would-be captor, he unmasks what turns out to be some kind of alien monster, only to be joined by the real Batman (Jason O’Mara). The scene counterbalances exposition with some fun new character work as these two meet for the first time, showcasing Hal’s brashness and sarcasm while allowing him to demonstrate his powers and explain their function and form to Batman, who in turn demonstrates his own newly-playful mystique and the deftness that allows him to play in the same league (pun intended this time) as people with superpowers, when he manages to lift the Green Lantern ring without Hal’s knowledge. 

Elsewhere, we get our character introductions to others, some of which are intertwined. Young Billy Batson (Zach Callison) sneaks into a football game to see his hero, Vic Stone (Shemar Moore), ending up sitting in the seat reserved for Stone’s scientist father, Silas (Rocky Carroll). Dr. Stone, as usual, is too preoccupied with his work to take any interest in his son’s athletic achievements; his most recent object of obsession is a seemingly alien device that was delivered to him by the Flash (Christopher Gorham) sometime before the movie began. The device is identical to the one that Batman and Green Lantern were able to obtain from the alien that they pursued in the film’s opening, and which they have taken to Metropolis in order to get more information from the only other alien they know of, Superman (Alan Tudyk). Meanwhile, unconnected to anyone else, Wonder Woman (Michelle Monaghan) finds herself in Washington en route to meet the U.S. President when her motorcade encounters protesters; she initially offers to lend her support in taking action against the person that they are chanting about, only to discover they are carrying an effigy of her. Using her lasso, she compels the leader of the protest to explain why he really hates her, and he is forced to admit that he dresses up as her in lingerie to make himself feel powerful. After she tries some ice cream, she learns that the President will not be able to see her. 

This seems as good a time as any to point out that this film has a pretty decent sense of humor, and I appreciated that. Most of the time, when these movies have succeeded, it’s been because of the depth of their dramatic elements, and rarely because they were able to make me laugh. It’s interesting that this was the first real attempt by the DC animation division to create an MCU-style interconnected franchise and came out a few years prior to the 2017 cut of Justice League, and it shares some plot elements with that one – notably, that the villain is fromApokalips, uses Parademons as foot soldiers and Mother Boxes for his plans, and that we see Victor Stone turn into Cyborg over the course of the film as fallout from said Mother Box. Also like that film, it’s also attempting to echo some of that MCU-style jokey dialogue, but to much better effect than the live action adaptation. Not all the jokes land, and the ones that really don’t are mostly references to contemporary pop culture, like Green Lantern initially japing/probing to see if Batman is a vampire by referencing the in-universe product from which True Blood took its title. There are even references to TMZ and World of Warcraft, with the latter invoked in order to tease Darkseid, the film’s villain, for his silly name. 

What does work are the interpersonal touches. Batman and GL get off on the wrong foot at the beginning of the movie, and their sniping at each other as they work together usually features the latter moaning about having to deal with the former. Later, when they are joined by Flash, GL immediately tries to ingratiate himself with the speedster, attempting to do an awkward series of secret handshake segments that Flash could not give less of a shit about. When Flash then fanboys upon learning that Batman is real, Lantern tries to play off that the guy is a tool, only for Batman to recognize Flash as a peer, telling him that he does “tight, efficient work” and that shaking his hand, much to GL’s consternation. It’s not groundbreaking intercharacter work, but it is fun. Cyborg’s puzzlement over why the Shazam (Sean Astin) is so interested in partnering with him, in conjunction with Shazam’s apparently adult form fawning over his child alter ego’s hero, also makes for a nice dynamic. There’s also a fair amount of decent physical comedy as well, with one particular standout being the sequence in which an overzealous Lantern is backhanded by an unimpressed Darkseid, then is immediately jumped by a couple of Parademons, who just start kicking him like he went down in a schoolyard fight. 

And now for a few one-off notes that I took while watching this one. It’s funny to think of this one as being considered to be a direct continuation of Flashpoint Paradox, taking place in the new timeline created by all the tiny ripple effects left over after Barry tried to fix the timeline in that one. For one thing, Barack Obama was definitively the POTUS in the timeline where Atlantis and the Amazons were at war, with the implication he was president before Flash went back in time, but in this new timeline, he’s replaced by a generic white prez. It’s also funny to me that Diana gets so bored of waiting to meet him that she decides to just bail and get ice cream, given the current president’s fondness for it (he loves it almost as much as genocide and rolling over to show the GOP his soft underbelly). I also really enjoyed the way that Superman and Batman first meet here, with their fight being about as one-sided as you’d expect before the latter stops his god-tier opponent by simply whispering “Clark,” showing immediately that he’s not to be trifled with. 

Overall, I enjoyed this one a lot more than I was expecting to. There are parts of it that are so familiar that I can’t help but wonder if I already saw this one or just consumed the comic it adapts or the movie with which it shares so many narrative elements. I can say that I don’t love that the threat that they team up to defeat is Darkseid. I know that’s an artifact of Justice League: Origin, the comic on which this is based, but hitting the ground running with Darkseid as your primary villain still doesn’t quite sit right with me. That’s the kind of thing that you should build up to. Still, this one was actually quite a lot of fun, which was a nice surprise after Flashpoint Paradox. I’m hoping the quality holds.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — The Flashpoint Paradox (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. 

Well … it’s come to this. This feature takes its name from the 2011 reboot of DC comics, The New 52, and if you’ve learned anything from reading these “issues,” it’s that each reboot of the comics requires a “crisis” event in order to reset everything and create a new, “fresh” jumping on point. For The New 52, that crisis was called Flashpoint, and it involved Barry Allen’s version of The Flash traveling back in time to prevent the death of his mother, only to return to a present so altered from his experience that things are worse for everyone else. Sure, his mom is alive in the present, but his wife is married to and has had children with another man, he is without his powers, and several key players in the ongoing preservation of mankind are absent or so altered that they are barely recognizable. If this sounds familiar to you, then maybe you read this comic, or maybe you watched the third season of CW’s The Flash, which adapted parts of this story, or you saw the disastrous Warner Bros release of The Flash last year, which also featured parts of this plot. For something so recent, it’s been picked apart and reused in quite a few adaptational ways. And hey – that’s fine! The source material isn’t the problem with this movie, it’s just that I hate the animation in this one, and I really despise that this was the first step in DC’s attempt to create a more interconnected universe (sigh) among these DTV features, which had heretofore been standalones or duologies. You see, this is the first film in the “DC Animated Movie Universe™,” and that series will encompass sixteen of the next twenty-four of these movies, with up to three or four of them being released in succession before they throw in the occasional standalone to break things up. I have a feeling we’ll be desperate for them when the time comes. On your mark, get set, I guess. 

We open with a brief prologue in which we establish the relationship between child Barry Allen and his mother, including her teaching him the so-called “serenity prayer” as a kind of proverb, followed by him discovering her murdered body after school one day. From this, we transition to present day, where Barry (Justin Chambers), accompanied by his wife Iris (Jennifer Hale), leaves flowers on his mother’s grave and says that he wishes he could have been fast enough to save her that day; Iris reminds him that he was only a boy, and if he had gotten home any earlier, it’s likely that he would have been murdered as well. This discussion is interrupted by news that several of Flash’s rogues have gathered at the Flash Museum in order to destroy his legacy; he arrives to face off against the Top, Mirror Master, Heat Wave, and Captains Boomerang and Cold. He handles them all with relative ease until the arrival of Eobard Thawne (C. Thomas Howell), aka the Reverse Flash, who manages to cement him onto a wall and attach a bomb to him. He also reveals that he’s put bombs on all of the other rogues present, and that’s when the rest of the Justice League arrive, and boy oh boy, are they ugly as shit. Their proportions are all out of whack in a way that I think is aiming to be anime-esque but is really just hideous. I mean, look at Superman here: 

His insignia is three times the width of his face, and his shoulders are 8.5 times as wide as the widest part of his jawline. For comparison, when drawing the human figure in proportion, most artistic instruction tells the artist to draw the shoulder line as twice the length of the height of the head, or three times as wide. Superman’s shoulders here are almost double that, at 3.75 times his head height and 6.92 times his head width. I know that some of this is a matter of artistic license or preference, but I would prefer not to look at this; it’s fucking hideous. If we’re being charitable, we can say that this is probably to provide greater contrast to how emaciated and weak his alternate self will appear in the other timeline (spoiler alert), but I hate it, and it puts as much of a sour taste in my mouth about his new film “series” right from the get-go, both the first time I saw it and this time as well. 

Anyway, after they disarm the bombs and Thawne is taken into custody, he says some creepy shit and we head into the opening credits. When we re-emerge into the film proper, Barry wakes up at his desk to find that things are not quite as he remembered them; his boss asks him for an update on the case of the Elongated Kid being murdered rather than the Elongated Man, a TV news report shows a “Citizen” Cold fighting off Captain Boomerang at the Cold Museum, and oh, yeah, he doesn’t have his powers, and his mother is alive. He tries to tell his mom that he’s the Flash, but she doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about. Elsewhere, a more grizzled Batman (Kevin McKidd) has no problem using guns or throwing his enemies off of buildings to their deaths, although his attempted murder of a villainess is interrupted by Cyborg (Michael B. Jordan, wasted in this role). The younger hero attempts to recruit the Bat into joining the squad that the former is attempting to put together—and in so doing exposits the greater context of what’s happening in this new reality—in order to end the war between Atlantis, as led by Aquaman (Cary Elwes) and the Amazons, with Queen Diana (Vanessa Marshall) as their leader. These two plotlines intersect when Barry, desperate to find someone to help him figure everything out, slips into Wayne Manor, where he finds that this world’s Batman is Thomas Wayne, who became a vigilante when his young son was gunned down in an alley, rather than the other way around. From here, it’s all about figuring out how to get Barry’s powers back and set right what once went wrong. 

There’s fun to be wrung here from some of the little twists of fate and characterization on the darker side of the mirror. It’s so corny that Martha Wayne becomes the Joker in the same moment that Thomas decides to become Batman that it loops all the way back around to being kind of cool, actually. The idea of the “Shazam Kids,” a group of kids to all merge into one hero in the form of Captain Marvel/Shazam is also a neat little touch. Otherwise, though this is a real slog to get through. My problem with the animation isn’t just that the new character designs are awful (although they are, just terrible, really), but also that some of the designs that are clearly reused from other projects look bizarre alongside these bulging hulks; this is most noticeable with the contingent of Atlanteans who are clearly just copied over from Young Justice (Kaldur is especially obvious), who look like carefully carved Greek statues next to the blown-out Aquaman. It also looks cheap, and it has the unfortunate problem of looking cheaper the longer the movie goes on, as if they were running out of budget with every minute. The seams show most close to the end when a newly-repowered Barry is running at superspeed, and the figure of him running on screen looks like an incompletely rendered animatic, like they didn’t actually bother to give the animation team time to finish rendering the CG elements for the final release. One would think that, with the launch of a new ongoing film franchise following this movie that some of the budget would be spent on creating, for instance, a CGI running Flash that looks top-notch, so that they could then use that same model for future films in the series, but this just looks like shit. Furthermore, although it isn’t this film’s fault, both other adaptations of this story for TV and film include the fact that Barry sets out to save his mother from being killed as the catalyst for the plot, meaning that the mystery in this adaptation—who changed the past and why—is utterly moot if you’re coming to this film after interacting with either of those pieces of media. 

I hate this one, and it doesn’t even really need to exist. In a meta sense, I understand the impulse to make one last movie under the Warner Premier label (which dissolved in 2013 and was absorbed into Warner Bros Home Entertainment and Warner Bros Animation; the next film will be released with solely the latter in its production logos), and to find it clever to do a rebooting crisis as the finale. That doesn’t make me feel more fondly toward it, however. Almost all of these movies so far have been completely standalone, with no connection to one another. So what continuity do you need to reboot in order to start telling a new story from the ground up? None! Just start your DTV interconnected franchise with the next movie! There was no tract of land here that needed to be cleared to build a new house, just open space, and they stuck this hideous movie in here for no good reason.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Superman — Unbound (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. 

Superman: Unbound is a breath of fresh air after what feels like way too many of these animated DC movies in a row that were centered around the morality of killing. Under the Red Hood had, as its central feature, that the Red Hood’s vendetta against Batman wasn’t because the latter let Jason Todd die, but because he let Jason’s killer, Joker, live. Superman vs. The Elite focused on the importance of Superman’s intractable moral code and how his rule that he never uses deadly force ensures that he is a benevolent force in contrast to the “modern” Elite. Dark Knight Returns has Batman’s refusal to break his no-killing rule in order to put Joker down for good also be a major plot point, as his almost doing so and then being framed for the Joker’s murder is the primary axis on which the second part turns. Although all of these movies were adaptations of source material that was spread out across decades of comics, having all of them adapted within such a short time was beginning to feel stale and uncreative. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the next film from this studio, Flashpoint Paradox, will also feature this as a plot point (in the form of an alternate timeline Batman who is willing to murder), it’s nice to get a break from that, if only for one movie. 

That Unbound is a little different is a nice change of pace, even if it creates a bit of a snarl regarding which of these movies are related to each other, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given how often this is a problem in the originating medium. Remember when we talked about Superman/Batman: Apocalypse, and how that was an adaptation of the “Supergirl from Krypton” story arc in that book that led into the 2005 relaunch of the Supergirl comic, which was itself created to reintroduce the character after the most recent reboot of the company’s continuity with 2005-6’s Infinite Crisis (not to be confused with 1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths)? Long-running Superman foe Brainiac hadn’t been seen since that crossover event, and was reintroduced in 2008 with a storyline in the “Brainiac” storyline from Superman’s main comic, Action Comics, upon which Unbound is based. That comic plot heavily featured the involvement of the new Kara Zor-El Supergirl that we all now know and love, and threads left over from both “Supergirl from Krypton” and her own ongoing series are part of the “Brainaic” arc. So, to recap, this film is an adaptation of a storyline that follows closely upon and directly tied to the storyline that was adapted into Apocalypse, but Unbound is, for some reason, not a sequel to Apocalypse in its film form. It’s okay if you need to take a break or a drink after that, I promise. It’s not really relevant, but has to be mentioned because, in case you’ve never noticed, comic book pedantry is the lifeblood of the internet, where you’re reading this right now. 

Unbound opens in the middle of a hostage situation, as Lois Lane (Stana Katic) has been taken by armed men after volunteering to be their captive in lieu of other, less Superman-adjacent people who might otherwise be at higher risk, per her logic. It’s not him who comes to her assistance initially, however, as the first hero to arrive on scene is Supergirl (Molly Quinn), whose recent appearance in this fictional world is given some lip service based on the fact that Lane’s captors don’t recognize her. Superman (Matt Bomer) eventually arrives on the scene, and our unrelated-to-the-plot action cold open comes to a conclusion. Back at the offices of The Daily Planet, one of Lois’s co-workers hits on her piggishly while insinuating that he “knows” Clark and Lois aren’t together because there can be only one reason that Kent is forever disappearing without explanation and is ostensibly single despite being built like a brick house, and it starts with “in” and ends with “the closet.” Clark walks in while this is happening and uses his heat vision to cause the man to take a harmless but humiliating tumble out of his chair, which sets up our emotional conflict for this film: Clark and Lois are dating, she knows his secret identity, she does count on him to rescue her from terrorists but not the office misogynist, she thinks that there’s no reason to keep their relationship a secret while he keeps her at emotional arm’s length with that tired old canard about how their dating as civilians would somehow endanger her, and so on and so forth. 

As a side note, for each of these movies that has focused on Superman as the primary character (rather than just as a member of the Justice League), whether as a result of what source material is chosen for adaptation or through deliberate choice, the most traditional Clark/Lois relationships (she adores Superman and either sees Clark as just a friend or is obsessed with proving that he’s secretly the big blue boy scout) has either been excised or used as part of the narrative and then dismissed. In Doomsday, Lois and Superman are openly dating but he refuses to “come out” to her as Clark until the end of the film, when his (temporary) death at the hands of the titular villain put things into perspective for him. In Public Enemies, she’s absent completely, other than an unvoiced cameo at the end of the film, and she’s likewise not present in the entirety of Apocalypse. All Star Superman featured their relationship as a major part of the plot, with Superman and Lois having been an item for some time and him again “coming out” to her as Clark as he nears the end of his life. Most recently, in Superman vs. The Elite, their relationship was as intimate as it could be, with her already being aware of both of his identities and the two of them at least cohabitating and possibly being married already. Here, the formula is a little different: she’s aware of both of his identities, the two are dating, but they’ve kept their relationship (as Clark and Lois) a secret; even still, based on the recurring story elements we’ve mentioned, it’s not exactly a surprise that the events of the film cause Clark to (sing along if you know the words) re-evaluate his position and decide to come around to Lois’s more open way of thinking. 

Back to the narrative, Clark must dash out of a staff meeting when there’s news of a meteorite that’s headed toward Arizona. When he gets there, however, he learns that the meteorite is actually a probe that can transform into a humanoid robot that he puts down after some difficulty. Bringing the ‘bot back to his Fortress of Solitude, Kara joins him and identifies the probe as a herald of Brainiac (John Noble), a spacefaring cyborg who roams the galaxy in an effort to collect all knowledge in the universe. It’s not a bad goal, but his methods are genocidal: he finds planets with sentient life, “collects” one of said planet’s major cities and shrinks it down to bell jar size and keeps it in his menagerie, then destroys the planet. It’s the result of a flaw in his programming; once he’s “studied” a planet, he can’t let it grow and change from that point forward because then his knowledge would be incomplete, so he must ensure that his database remains inerrant by freezing the planet in time via total annihilation. Kara saw him in action when she was a child, as he came to Krypton and “collected” the planet’s Argo City; the only reason anyone lived to tell the tale was because Brainiac didn’t see the logic in wasting the energy to blow up a planet that was already on the precipice of destruction. Having learned this, Superman heads into space aboard a Kryptonian ship to face Brainiac head-on and, if possible, restore the shrunken cities that the cyborg has captured. 

I like how straightforward this one is, and as these movies go, this is possibly one of the ones with the lowest barrier to entry. You don’t really need to know anything about Brainiac since it’s all explained over the course of the film. There are a lot of nifty setpieces, like Supes’s early desert battle with the Brainiac probe, Superman’s time spent shrunken down and placed into Argo City, and the final swampy battle between Superman and Brainiac proper. This film also approaches the series’ mandate for more adult storytelling from a different angle, as it doesn’t rely solely on more violence to hit a PG-13 rating, and instead uses more adult humor (Lois is surprised that Clark didn’t think of pretending to be gay years ago, as it’s “the perfect cover,” made more on-the-nose given that this is the first time that the character has been voiced by an out gay man). There’s also some horror on display here, too, of the overt body horror variety on display with all of the upgrades Brainiac has made to his body and the way that all of his weird prehensile tubes attach to him, as well as the terror of more subtle moments. This is best evidenced when Superman is horrified to learn that the people in Brainiac’s shrunken cities are alive but essentially in stasis, meaning that one of the children who is excited to see him has been a toddler for decades. It’s good stuff, and reminds me of the simplicity of the old Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons of the 1940s: straightforward, cleanly animated, and digestible. Not necessarily the best of the lot, but a perfect low-commitment animated movie for a rainy weekend afternoon. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond