Justice Denied

Holy cow, how did this happen?

I've been careful since Batman v Superman... and probably since before that, to champion movies where the outcome wasn't entirely guaranteed to be positive. I've felt guilty doing so, and would rather not, but in the wake of F4ntastic Four, Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad, you can understand if I feel somewhat of a jinx.

Whether you're a DC/Warners fan or not, this movie should not have 'failed' as soundly as it did; and yet the numbers are damning - and now I've seen it for myself. And, knowing I should prepare for disappointment, I went in with medium expectations. My paragraph above notwithstanding, I left before the credits came up -  in part because it was a daytime screening on the last week and I had a life to get back to; but it was hardly like being torn from my seat. This movie is a bewildering disappointment.

The fault is not with the characters; the Justice League should sell the movie themselves, most being recognisable now for over fifty years. I do believe Whedon at least worked to rule, if he didn't quite bat his best. 

The back story should be known well enough by now - initially helmed by Zack Snyder, this movie was to be in part a culmination of his three (or five?) story arc, but for a family tragedy which saw him stand down from the production, and Warners to swiftly helicopter in Joss Whedon in to finish the job. The history of trilogies being finished by a new director has been patchy at best - and in the superhero genre you can look easily at the Christopher Reeve Superman movies and Bryan Singer's X Men franchise to see clear and cautionary examples of what happens where there's a disjoint. Whedon had a brief: cut down the run-time to enable more screenings; add more humour; convert the doomladen Snyder vision into an audience friendly Marvel-like one. It doesn't work.

Many of the jokes don't land or just don't fit (an alien anal probe gag would struggle past the Nineties, let alone the Twenty-teens) , scraps of Whedon's script for his unfilmedWonder Woman have been reused, and there's an odd disjoint where scenes which feature in the two trailers have obviously been reshot for the movie. Timing? Grading? Mood? It can't be to add to the story, because al signs point to the Whedon version drastically cutting Snyder's story down to a more chewable (or boltable) size. Like its principal (well, only) villain.

As a threat Steppenwolf comes across as vague and somewhat undersold. He comes to Earth after Mother Boxes, but with no clear motivation after that - is it terraforming? Is it conquest? Who is this 'Mother' he refers to? And who is he talking to?

The frustration lies in knowing at least some of what there could have - or should have been, fed in tantalising scraps  by Snyder's friends and allies.  So what we're left with is this cut-down could-have-been - which has inevitably been compared to the Marvel model and Whedon's bigger, brighter, more confident and much more loved Avengers. But this is not good, and after the mixed batman v Superman, and the financially successful but critically thumped Suicide Squad, this will be a tough move to come back from.

And so is the plight of the DC movies fan: a wild pendulum between moderate success and painful failure. Cynicism and ridicule. I don't know what Zack Snyder's vision might have been outside this botched remix, but it could at least have been a little more complete, and a lot better looking. 

The fans deserved better.  

Bat bricks

Junior and I made a Batcave.  He dictated, and I sourced the bricks and made sure things stayed together and worked.  Come with us for a tour!

The Batcave took six to eight weeks to build, as it filled a number of evenings and wet weekend days, with constant revision, experimentation and checking with the Foreman on whether this was what he had in mind (he slept, mainly.)  We were never going to be able to afford a modern - or even retro set, so we made our own, a combination of what we'd seen in other sets, and what we wanted to have in our own (the toilet was an early addition.)  It took ages, and drove me a little crazy sometimes, but having tried and failed on at least three occasions before, I persevered for the last big push. The breakthrough? When I realised that unlike all the other AMAZING Batcaves across the internet, ours didn't need to be all-black or all-grey,and could use the same '66 Batman hypercolour approach if we wanted. From then on, I realised we could colour code the set for different activity zones, and we were off!

The Batcave is now in repose, back in bits and pieces in the usual Lego boxes. More recently, Jet Jr has expressed his desire for a Lego TARDIS. Hmm... I wonder...

Every Batcave needs a power source, so here's Two Face next to the 66-inspired Atomic Pile

Bat-Toilet! No other Lego Batcave set has one. I checked.

The core of our Batcave is Junior's old Lego Juniors Batcave. One day: batpoles.

In the meantime, Wayne Manor's outside walls make for good climbing practice, old chum!

A Mighty Micros Batcopter pimped out '66-style, with turbos and wings. The helipad rotates, of course!

Batsuits, Batwings and Batarangs in '89 colour scheme. The rungs lead to the helipad

The garage. We made our own '66 Batmobile out of an old Lego Jr Spider-Man car. Take that, Marvel!

Alfred uses his Butler's entrance to the Bat Computer Lab to inform Master Wayne he has a visitor in the kitchen.

The Joker - that Nefarious Knave of Notoriety is loose in the Bat Laboratory!

Gassing Up.

'I've Got to Go to Work...'

...meanwhile, in Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon strikes up the Batsignal

basing some of the Cave on the Lego Batman '66 model, we made out own Manor floor with sliding bookcase.

Bricklite switch for the Bat Toilet!

The sloping roof is hinged for Batpole access.

One of Jr's favourite bits, the non-canonical Moosehead.

Villains' Rock! Another made-up bit on a shelf of stone.

In his study in Stately Wayne Manor Bruce Wayne looks out the window...

The full thing. Pretty moveable, in case you were wondering!

Loo's Wayne

Because even the man who has everything needs a little something more...

1966 And All That

The true strength of a pop cultural icon lies in their resilience. Heroes and villains come and go, but the greatest of them endure through generations and interpretations. Yes, there may be periods when they are considered out of vogue, but being strong figures they are bound to return - perhaps as a farce, or a revisionist retelling, or as a mirror to contemporary society's travails.

I speak of the big ones: Robin Hood. King Arthur. Sherlock Holmes. Batman. The Sixties version.

No, come back, I'm not mad. I wasn't even mad in 1989 when I sniffed at this rare product of high camp and sixties psychedelia and walked away. Tim Burton's reinvention of the character was just around the corner and the big bad Nineties introduced a less colourful, more serious take on the character. The Dark Knight was the order of the day, and the Caped Crusader had quickly become For Selected Audiences Only. I eschewed the series' self-knowing silliness and cheap later episodes, and those misspent afternoons screwing my youthful freckled schoolboy nose at the hyper kinetic hi-jinks our neighbours' colour TV provided every same Bat-time same Bat-channel.

So what changed for me to rediscover the West and Ward Batman? Well it wasn't the TV show, though I do want to 'reconnect' with it in some form - the Blu Rays look mighty tempting. Of course the car I rediscovered to my surprise in the Dark Knight Rises extras. It was also the Bat-history, dutifully documented, directed and delivered by that doyen of the Detective Comics dynamo, Mr Jim Moon that got my attention. And it was the comic strip.

Yes, again, the Wellington City Library has done itself proud and has a pretty decent collection of the recent Batman '66 anthology series, being a set of new Batman tales told with the energy, the enthusiasm and the tongue-in-cheek aesthetic of the 1966 series. When they're good they're very very good- not since Lego's Batman '66 set have I been so relieved to see Caesar Romero's painted moustache so faithfully rendered beneath his Joker makeup. And Burgess Meredith's Penguin, Frank Gorshin's Riddler (who owes his reputation purely to the TV series and Gorshin's talents), the triumvirate of Catwomen in Kitt, Merriwether and Newmar plus other TV-only villains, like Egghead, Bookworm, Louie the Lilac, Ma Parker, Shame, King Tut and Marsha Queen of Diamonds. The captions recall the exclamations of the show's cliffhanger closers, the title fonts are perfect, and over all there's a spirit of fun in the series, even in recent years with its canon-bending introduction of anachronistic characters like Harley Quin and Bane.

For the most part the series sticks close to its roots, even with occasional crossovers to contemporary TV series (Green Hornet, Man From Uncle, The Avengers) and shout outs to the future (including a seemingly irresistable nod to a certain Seal song during a Poison Ivy outing). In case you're wondering, Batgirl gets as good as she gave, and there are some intriguing stylistic ventures also - notably a meta trip to Japan for the Bat trio where an encounter with Sixties comic villain Lord Death man. Trippy.

And trippy is as it should be. The '66 series is something to be celebrated, particularly amidst the sturm und drang of the Snyder films and Arkham video games. There was a time when Batman was fun, and was in on the joke, and those days did more for the survival of the Bat brand than anything in its comics. At The Warehouse in Whanganui recently I picked up a copy of the West and Ward Batman movie - until recently all you could get of the original series. Jet Jr and I watched it when it came home with me and we had a blast.

All of this presumably comes from a relaxing by Fox on its grip on the old TV series, leading to a minor snowstorm of retro products. The final release of the full series is the obvious jewel in the crown (those extras!), and the comic follows  of course. Batman 66 Lego is utterly adorable:

But no Batgirl minifigure? For shame!

And after the success of West, Ward and Newmar's animated reunion in Return of the Caped Crusaders there's now a follow-up in the works, featuring Two-Face voiced by - who else? William Shatner. Holy Dream Casting!

Suicide is Painless

This month I had a stop-over in Gisborne for work. It was wet, I don't know anybody there and was a bit anxious about what was in store for me the following day, so rather than cooling my heels in a motel room with bad telly I took in a movie. I saw Suicide Squad in a small-town cinema at a late session with six other people including three of the local youths - loud voices, confident swagger, armfuls of candy bar popcorn and selfies galore. What the hell I thought, they may be more the movie's dynamic than I am.

But in the end I didn't mind Suicide Squad and some parts and characters I quite dug. It's certainly not the ultraviolent hoodlum gangster flick I feared it would be, and is more likeable than Batman v  Superman, and though it fell a little drunkenly between stools (namely the grimy urban vision of David Ayer's original shoot and the dayglo gonzo of Trailer Parks' reworking) it falls just short of recalling some mid 80s B movie fare in giddy pleasures. Perhaps I responded to this movie from a background in comics like 2000AD's Strontium Dog and Bad Company, where motley bands of outcasts find their honour in the spurned work of normal men, and redemption the insurmountable odds of doomed battle. Truly, Squad is to date the most comic-strip looking of the modern superhero movies, relishing in its colourful grotesques.

I find my reactions are frustratingly akin to those of others. - yes Margot Robbie, Will Smith and Viola Davis carry the movie. But yes also Jay Hernandez deserves more recognition for his doomed Diablo, and Joel Kiniman does a lot with his character Rick Flagg's character - enough, in fact, that I'm sorry the movie didn't make more of Flagg and Deadshot's grudging alliance seen through his eyes; the normal man amidst Amanda Waller's crew of deadly circus turns. Jared Leto is hard to gauge - he's simply not in the movie enough, and could have been edited out for the most part, which isn't to say I wouldn't want to see his Joker return, it's just that Squad is not a Joker movie whatever the marketing and trailer might have led everyone to believe. 

But, like Batman v Superman before it, Suicide Squad has turned out to be a different beast from the slick production the trailers promised. It is a little lumpy in places, and the third act looks like it's had some chops that would make F4ntastic Four snigger. The musical cues are all up the wop in places and in others are about as blurty and welcome as the soundtrack to a DIY programme. Cara Delevigne dances about as well as I do in her big scene, and there are other casualties along the way. Katana and Killer Croc hardly get out of the gate and are timidly underused, the former especially as Flagg's hired muscle. Boomerang has to feature in the Flash movie if there's any justice. We just see too little of him, and a comic foil with his rough unrepentant charm would to my mind be more fitting than Harley's "irksome" self-aware needling. 

But Jeez - it's not the end of the world, and it's not cinematic trash. It's guilt-free gung-ho hooligan heroism, with a powerful foil in Davis' Amanda Waller (essentially the true villain of the piece.) Its part in the DC cinematic universe is well-earned with some fun and effective cameos by two Justic League members, and its graphics are awesome. It's by no means perfect, but I can't help liking it. Let justice be served - let's see them again. 

Postscript: Justice has of course come to this movie, weirdly enough. The critics have been effectively silenced, and Squad has become the Little Blockbuster That Improbably Did. It's out-grossed Captain America : The Winter Soldier without a Chinese release, and out-profited Iron Man, its soundtrack has just gone gold, and it's Will Smith's most profitable movie. It's made a star of Margot Robbie and Harley Quinn into a future movie lead. This despite a lingering well-below-par critical score and acknowledged production and editing issues. The future for Suicide Squad looks bright, I'd say, though some of the above will assuredly make it an interesting one. And I can't wait to see what makes it onto the Blu Ray.

Out of the Blue and into the Black

Batman v Superman : Dawn of Justice

Thanks to Al I recently got to see Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Thanks, Al!

Wow. Complicated movie.

I'll try to be brief, as lots of words have already been expended on this film. It seems that even for a perceived failure, BvS has generated a LOT of discussion, and of course to call an $870M grossing movie a failure is to overlook a lot of first week interest in DC Warner's expanding Justice League franchise. As I say, it's complicated.

The movie itself to me immediately comes across in one word: existential. Even in its dream-fed Bruce Wayne-centric opening the film employs real world referencing, to sometimes uncomfortable levels - a climactic re-enactment from immediate predecessor Man of Steel recalls instead a plane cannoning into a skyscraper. The terrorists are cleaved from real world examples like Boko Haram; no criminal comes unarmed, most carry an automatic weapon, and they don't politely line up to be taken down in turn in hand-to-hnd combat by an outnumbered hero.
 Not even in Christopher Nolan's trilogy was the Dark Knight this dark, this brutal, and at times in this very unheroic superhero world you wonder if there's a point to it all.

The answer is yes, and it's not initially from Batman himself, but it is about him and his alter ego. Ben Affleck's Batman is as far from the Caped Crusader as you could have, and yet the Bruce Wayne-to-Batman story here, reiterated once more, is core to the movie. Wayne narrates the film's opening, and the first line of dialogue is (crucially) his mother's name, the very word that will towards the film's end become the lynchpin of Bruce's understanding of his believed enemy, a man he is unable to categorise as anything but an alien until the realisation that they both had a mother, a family, and are capable of calling this planet their home.

Superman meanwhile struggles under his burden, and his doubt and ability to be led is open to exploitation by madmen and cruel geniuses with father complexes. Were I a Superman fan (as my good friend Al is), this would upset me the most - and yet this is a movie where even in death Superman triumphs. He never loses his imperative, the trailers (which tell many lies about the movie) do not show that he approaches Batman addressing him by his real name, appealing for understanding.

To me, Batman v Superman is about the plotting of Bruce Wayne's recovery from his lowest state as an angry, hard-drinking loner with deadly vigilantism as his escape - a monster glowering under the disapproval of a cynical Alfred, to being the hero he once was, needing the help of others to achieve this. The film's message in one line could be: Superman saves Batman's soul, echoed in Bruce's last lines: "I failed him in life; I won't fail him in death", and crucially his resolve that "Men are still good ... we can do better. We will. We have to."


I didn't enjoy this movie. I saw it under a strict timeframe and was itching to leave the theatre before it ended. It was noisy, depressing in places and often without mercy. And yet, given space and time, and on a second viewing even the theatrical version (I've not yet seen the Ultimate Edition) falls more into place. There's a lot of work in this picture from direction and cinematography (Zack Snyder is  one of the best visual directors working in superhero cinema today) to score and casting. The criticisms of storytelling and pacing are fair, but the film is sumptuous.

Many of the themes from Man of Steel are continued here, and developed. One of the curious dichotomies of the Superman story is his Semitic origins (an intestellar Moses, the creation of two Jewish boys from New York) with a Christian iconography, and even in death and repose Krypton's last son is depicted with the same visual language of Michelangelo's Pieta among crooked crosses of twisted reinforcing steel. This is specifically Superman as God/god, while the earthly Luthor and Wayne are the John Gaults from a director whose next movie outside of Justice League set may well be The Fountainhead.

Ultimately Batman versus Superman has to be seen as a building block in the DC cinematic world. Contrary to expectations, it's not a Superman movie - although Superman will undoubtedly return, and one of the consequences of BvS' reception will surely point to a revision of this version of the Man of Steel. It has to happen. In the mean-time we have another Batman for our age, also reinvented and repurposed, and like it or not, another step in the road to DC's heroic vision.

Ed Games

This has been out a week now, so apologies for the dated-ness.

But, datedness is sort of the theme of this post! Iron maiden's new album is out next month, and in advance of this their new single 'Speed of Light' was released to the internet just over seven days ago.

The song is pretty cool - something of a throwback to early Nineties Maiden with Bruce Dickinson's growly voice, and a more rocking feel than the progfests of recent albums. That said, it's an opening track, and the band tend to have form on this tactic - 'El Dorado' was the taster for Final Frontier, 'A Different World' was AMOLAD's opener, and it's arguable whether either was indicative of their parent albums.

But hey, I like it. It's got a lovely Ritchie Blackmore style riff to kick things off, some nice leads from all three guitarists, Bruce sounds great (pre-cancer diagnosis, it must be said), and there's more cowbell working hard here than Waikato Stadium in a home game.

To be honest, though, it's the video that's the drawcard. I love a good video, and with Maiden I think they're something of a rarity: the early days are very much live performance-based with movie cutaways; in the Nineties these turned into slicker products that somehow didn't really sell the band or Eddie very well - some of them just tried too hard. On the whole, however, it's when Eddie'in the visuals that the videos work best, and 'Speed of Light' is a great example, being almost all about the history of Eddie and Maiden's most memorable album covers, as experienced through the medium of... video games! I have fond memories of mashing rubber ZX Spectrum keys to the background sounds of Number of the Beast and Maiden's debut album (point of fact: both games and music were likely loaded on the same tape deck.) Iron Maiden are around the same age as your common or garden home entertainment system, so the synergy of the band's evolution alongside that of digital gaming works really well. Eddie is back in his rightful punkish fright wig original form, it's witty, deferential, self-referential (count those nods!*) and, I think, more than a little essential.

A brief pause to reflect that this is not the first time the worlds of Maiden and video games have crosed paths, as the mid-Nineties compilation/video game Ed Hunter attests. Reception in the gaming mags was not kind, apparently, and it goes to show that despite heavy metal making an excellent gaming soundtrack, getting the right mix is a delicate art. I think they've cracked it this time, though. Hell, I'd buy it :)

UPDATED: Thanks to Dave R's observations, it appears I got my wish! 

*Visual references I noted:

Cape Expectations

This is a synched trailer review from a Batman perspective. You can read Kal-Al's Superman-oriented review here!

Over the past weekend I spent an inordinate amount of time online, trawling a handful of websites, pushing the Refresh button at intermittent intervals. Oh, and reading. I did this because I was never going to go to San Diego ComiCon – hell, I’d be hard-pressed to get to Armageddon this weekend, but virtually at least, SDCC was where it was at for me. And why? Because of this trailer specifically:

Yes, in Marvel’s absence, the weekend belonged to Warner Brothers and Fox Studios. And Disney – but dammit, every day is Disney day with or without Star Wars, so enough about that. Let’s talk about the Bat and the Boy Scout. And, also the Amazon! And the Villain – or the one we see here, at least.

The trailer was pretty much everything I’d hoped for, but most of all it’s impressed me with how smart it is. Directly referencing the climactic Battle of Metropolis from Man of Steel is a great start, and should immediately shut up the ‘concerned moviegoers’ who, three years on, are still bellyaching over the destruction wrought in Superman’s death-match with the physically superior and battle-ready General Zod. Moreso, it places Bruce Wayne in the middle of the battle, in a breath-taking sequence loaded with modern imagery. 2016 will see the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11; Zack Snyder’s choice to film the collapse of Wayne Financial’s tower from street level, and frame it from the experience of the average person in the street, can only reference one major recent real-life event. It’s brave, and it’s immediately resonating and it works. The sight of an un-costumed, quite human Bruce Wayne running into the debris cloud is jaw-dropping.

At ComicCon there was much made on both DC movie panels (for BvS and Suicide Squad) over how these movies are anchored in a real world context – yes, there are spandex(ish) suits, capes and super powers, but the real world reactions and impacts are, I think, a new addition to the genre. Super hero comics already work in a heightened version of reality, so this change down is a significant revision, and a smart move on the producers’ part to create points of difference for DC’s heroes and villains. These are deliberate images – the rooftop appeals for help from flood-bound families recalling Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, the familiar rainbow-coloured placards outside Kal El’s hearing in the Capitol deliberately recalling those of the Westboro Baptist Church demonstrations are another. Maybe more than that, they are touchstones of US culture, a trigger against what looks like Superman taking on a global work roster (saving a Russian rocket crew, appearing in a Day of the Dead gathering.) In response, Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor appears to be baiting his (unseen) audience's patriotism, resorting to a national xenophobia, recasting himself as a modern day Paul Revere in the droll “the red capes are coming!”

So this is the set-up, but there's still much to see – Jeremy Irons' Alfred in the flesh as Bruce's moral core, the Joker's handiwork over a fallen Robin costume, some nifty visual echoes of Frank Millar's iconic Dark Knight Returns cover. And, of course, Wonder Woman in action - at long last!

I'm still sold on this movie, even moreso than I was with the teaser trailer a few months back, and even moreso even after liking the casting of Ben Affleck. It seems we're stuck with a grim and gritty Batman for some time yet (thank god then for the 50th anniversary of Batman '66 next year and the animated movie tribute!) but while Christopher Nolan's similarly 'real world' Dark Knight trilogy left me cold in the end, I think Snyder's Batman will be the best Batman to date; and I think the injection of super powers and godlike heroes into his world will be for the betterment of Gotham's finest.

Next trailer will hopefully show even more. Roll on 2016!

That Trailer...

No! Not THAT one. Jeez, that's everywhere - what could I possibly add to all that? Nice trailer. Very exciting. There, done.

No, I mean this one . Here's the earlier-than-planned teaser for Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice,

I really hope you didn't actually look at the teaser in my small window and instead checked it out in HD with fullscreen loaded up, because visually it really is rather lovely to look at - especially now that we have the real deal and not some Brazillian shaky sneaky cinemacam (boo!)

So anyway, yep, it's a teaser and we're still over a year out from the movie. I say this because my first reaction was a quiet "uh-oh"  - to be honest, it looks like it plays directly into the hands and mouths of the vocal crowd who hoot the usual mantra about DC being "dark and gritty" and therefore not fun. Well, what did you expect?

The central premise of the movie is the first-ever cinematic head-to-head between the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight. It's happened in comics and in animated adaptations, but here it is in live action - a big deal, so of course you put it in the teaser.

Some positives, then: Affleck looks pretty good in the Bat-suit, and there's an obvious study of Frank Millar's Dark Knight comics in Zack Snyder's direction. Crikey - Henry Cavill looks like a TITAN in his costume (and most of it is him!), and the recognisable voices - Holly Hunter, Jeremy Irons, Jesse Eisenberg - Neil Degrasse Tyson, are really intriguing. Props for what looks to be Mexico in one crowd scene (the Day of the Dead one). If so, it's good to see some other non-US locations in a superhero movie these days.

And it's dark. Of course it's dark. It's always darkest before the Dawn - and guess what this movie's subtitle is? I think far from this being a hasty attempt to build a Justice League franchise inside a Superman movie, or a misguided muddying of a Superman sequel putting Batman front and centre, this looks to me more assured than that. Superman is front and centre here - the teaser is a direct callback to Jonathan Kent's warning to Clark in the first movie, so this story can only be a logical sequel, even if the first movie suggested a more optimistic ending. Millar's The Dark Knight has been shipped in, but it's intriguing to see the roles of the combatants reversed here - instead of Kal El being the government stooge sent to wipe out the renegade Batman, here we seem to have a Batman brought out of retirement and into some very heavy armour to neutralise the new Public Enemy Number One.

 And of course there are some notable omissions - no Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Aquaman and (maybe) Flash; Lex and Alfred are there in voice only. I can't wait to see them, but that's obviously being saved for further down the line. Really, if you're going to set up your stall around one of the biggest stand-offs in comic history, then this is a pretty good way of setting the scene. Roll on teaser number two!   

'It's the car, right?'

Last week the Simianmobile had a prang. Well, it got sideswiped by a friendly vehicle, and everything else is in the hands of the insurance company, but it was a week for the cars, seemingly.

Because... we have a new Batmobile. Yay! And wouldn't you know it? A new Batman sulking next to it - very good! Here's the photo that silenced a few thousand Battfleck quips:

Yes, very traditional costume-wise - take your pick as to whether it references Frank Millar's The Dark Knight Returns (most likely) or the Adam West TV series (less likely, but fun to pretend!) While I'm ambivalent to a little perturbed to see theories of TDKR being realised on the big screen edging toward confirmation, this is as nothing to the great relief I've felt over an actual change. No more black rubber - praise the Lord! It's a sign, I hope, of a movie franchise comfortable with pushing the traditional big screen depiction of Batman, and so it should. Nice one, Warners.

And that Batmobile in the background. Verry nice. The first image tweeted by Zach Snyder showed the rear of the vehicle and seemed to indicate a tailfin and big rocket booster, which references a lot of iterations of the car, from the TV series again (I do like that model as well), through to my current favourite, the 1989 Tim Burton model. Since that pic and the above more design shots have emerged which seem to show the new Batmobile as something of a hybrid of the Burton model with the Nolan era 'Tumbler' - big tyres, high wheel base, sorta clunky and not that streamlined (I like the streamlining, me). I'm not a fan of the Tumbler, but could see what it was likely intended to reference; every Batman seemingly has his ideal Batmobile, and the armoured, militaristic Tumbler, an urban assault vehicle for a violent Gotham, works. But let's move on. And this picture seems to be an indication of that, in part.

Speaking of the Burton Batmobile and others, we've recently has Eaglemoss' Batmobilia parts magazine debut down in NZ, and the standard cut-price first couple of issues feature lovely die-cast scale reproductions of the two vehicles I'd be happy to start and finish my collection with - the aforementioned 1989 and 1966 Batmobiles. Done and done, to Jet Jr's interest. Here's hoping they stay out of the way of fellow vehicles for a good while yet!

Doodle a Day: 1/10/2013

 For the past few weeks I’ve been hard at it most evenings finishing off some open-ended hobby work – a D&D adventure here, some miniature painting there, and all for my next wee blog theme.

‘Doodle a Day’ is a project I’ve promised myself for a few years now, and one which I intend to employ to kickstart a period of concentrated illustration work that (fingers crossed) will be coming up. I am an itinerant illustrator, really. Untrained outside high school, but an inveterate doodler, so I thought I should try to combine the two and see what happens.  The result will hopefully be an illustration blog for the duration of this month, with no set theme or style – I’m trusting that one or both will develop as time passes.

Here’s how this will work – the rules, if you will:

1.       I draw a fifteen-minute doodle - one per day, on any subject.

2.       I scan it and optimise it for public consumption - and no more

3.       I can colour it later if I want, but no more than that.

4.       I post it, with a brief explanation of its provenance.

Just to be sure I’d not be short of inspiration, some illustrations may be based on an earlier form of this project, ‘Doodle a Dream’, which ought to be self-explanatory. In 2010 I kept an irregular (in every sense) ‘dream diary’ – basically a bedside notebook on which to scrawl – sometimes literally, what I could recall from any dreams I’d woken from. Being then a parent of a young child with eccentric sleeping patterns helped the process, but I fear some themes crept in, and so I’ll space these out with more mundane subjects if I think things are getting a little bit ‘trippy’. Maybe I’ll explain which ones are the dream-based doodles, or maybe I won’t!

And so, here’s the doodle for today, the 1^st of October 2013:

This is one of my favourite buildings in the Wellington CBD. I like it because it has some key points of interest: it’s a clock tower, it has a frieze on top of it and a cool spike that might be useful for tethering passing zeppelins to, and being an Art Deco-era sandstone building surrounded by a mix of modern and older buildings, it’s pretty unique in the Wellington skyline. Not that it makes much of an impression, as it’s steadily being dwarfed by the office buildings around it – hence me being able to look down on it almost from my work! The best bit about this building? The clock doesn’t work because the building’s upper floors house a hotel, and the very clock tower structure is an apartment, with the clock faces as its windows. Now that’s cool!

Rebooting the Bat

A belated happy birthday to Mr Ben Affleck for Saturday. (I hope you spent your day off-line…)

Called it! Sort of.

Ben Affleck is to be the new iteration of the Caped Crusader, and right off the bat, as it were, I’m saying that I approve. A reboot was, it seems, always on the cards, contrary to a last-minute rumour over the past couple of weeks suggesting that both Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman were being courted in millions of post-Robert Downey Jr entitlements to continue their respective costumed hero roles. As it turns out, Batman as we’ve seen him within the frame of the Christopher Nolan movies is now affirmably as much a past incarnation as Tim Burton’s 80s/90s version. It’s all good, I think. Batman needs revision from time to time, and maybe more so because this is the same treatment he’s had in his near sixty year history in comics and on TV. Until then, we have the announcement of Affleck in the cowl (and, if rumour is to be believed, hot on its heels Bryan Cranston’s casting as Lex Luthor – fantastic!) But, hear the internet cry out, as if a great wrong has been done. Listen to the wisecracks born at least ten years ago and unleashed upon Affleck, poor sod (“they should have Matt Damon as Robin!” - ho ho. “Something something J-Lo!” - guffaw. “Indecipherable Good Will Hunting reference!” – titter). Well, enough for Stuff, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and the like. I’m actually surprised that some corners of the online communities I frequent – Outpost Gallifrey, 2000ADonline, seem to be pretty cool and balanced about the casting; even genuinely open-minded, if not already supportive in fact. Things might actually turn out okay. Even Comicbookmovie.com seems to have joined in the optimism.

I say this also as someone who doesn’t mind the Sony reboot – cynical though it may have been, of their Spider-Man series. I even liked quite a bit of it, and appreciated the attempts The Amazing Spider-Man made to actually seek out minor points of difference with the very well made and mostly superb Sam Raimi iteration. Yeah – mechanical webshooters like I wanted as a kid! Gwen Stacey in a non-cameo role! A new Spidey suit. Much of that might well have been a superficial attempt to cry ‘reboot’ rather than genuinely scare the horses by trying harder to reinvent the character, but I dunno – I’m not that schooled on the Marvel heroes. I am under the impression that – unlike Batman and his DC cohorts, the Marvel superheroes are altogether a little more in tune with one another and their own internal narrative continuity, so there’s less opportunity to look at different versions of the same man? That said, I got a real Nicholas Hammond vibe seeing the reflective lenses on Andrew Garfield’s mask (and I loved that movie when I was a kid!)

So, yes – a new Batman, by all means. And put him in a grey and black suit this time, please! Leave all-black costumes to ninjas and Bledisloe Cup champions. And yes – cast an actor who will play a more charismatic Bruce Wayne (as I believe Affleck will), in more stark contrast to his Batman than a road-metal voicebox. I also, albeit cautiously, approve of him sharing a double-head bill with Superman. Yes, I get the complaints about Batman versus Superman as a poor sequel idea to Man of Steel. As a sequel, no it isn’t a flattering idea to a franchise just out of the blocks. But then again, Batman versus Superman isn’t simply a MoS sequel anyway – we know that Warner Brothers are fast-tracking a cinematic universe to challenge Marvel Studio’s finely-crafted Avengers one, and with the clock ticking this is a smart move.

I say this also as a very infrequent moviegoer. You can talk all you like about superhero cinema being big now, but like its genre cousins Sci-Fi, Westerns and Fantasy, there’s the real world consideration that, unlike Comedy, Romance, Action or Horror, this is a genre which goes round in cycles, rather than hangs around indefinitely. WB are right to move quickly before superhero fatigue really sets in among moviegoers and they lose their audience (not the comic fans, I stress, but the mainstream audience.) Superhero movies are blockbusters by definition – they cost a lot of money to make and usually rely on something quite formulaic, which might be why the word ‘reboot’ is received with such dread by superhero fans. How many versions of the hero’s origin story do we need every time a film studio wants to reassert their rights to the franchise? Well, we won’t get that with Batman versus Superman, not unless Zach Snyder and David Goyer are absolute cretins. By combining DC comics’ two most recognisable and iconic characters in one movie, they’re making the wisest step they can towards building their Justice League onscreen. Safe hands. And hell, if Snyder and Goyer want to throw a few visual or verbal hints at one or two other DC heroes in the same movie without upsetting the balance, then good luck to them, too.

Bat to the Future

I believe as far as I can recall the earliest superhero I ever followed was Batman. I watched the repeated 1960s TV series with an increasing awareness with how silly it actually was, and courtesy of my friend Derek got to read the odd issue - Seventies Batman was different from the one on TV, but not too different sometimes.

Nevertheless, I was the Batman fan after that, while Derek was the Superman aficionado, knowing about all the different Kryptonites, the Earth Twos and whatnot, and even the bottle city of Kandor (see? I had to Google that one.) In time The Phantom and Marvel superheroes would arrive - Spiderman and Ghost Rider, but Batman was my first superhero. I had a Batman t-shirt (sadly not Googleable) with a cityscape, the hero and his floodlit signal behind him, and every time I wore it I thought I could be Batman. And one day at a school fair, I was him, complete with my Batbike! Oh, hey look - there's my t-shirt:

That all went by the wayside once Star Wars arrived, and 2000AD and my teens did the rest.

And yet, by my late teens the pendulum was swinging back. Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns was one of the crucial Three/Four graphic novels of the decade, and Tim Burton's first Batman movie expunged the 60s cringe factor and remade batman as a moody, brooding hero of darkness. Of course, in another ten years the Batman movie franchise would be d.e.a.d after Joel Schumaker either followed through on one of the worst-calculated franchise installments of modern history, or in a broader sense the public's love affair with Batman was over again. It happens.

Still, in that time my interest was piqued again. I saw all four Batman movies at the theatre (one I even saw twice), I read Miller's opus, as well as The Killing Joke and, er, the Dredd crossover Judgment on Gotham (terrible). And I did the drawing at the top of this article. Coming back to it now, it's a look for Batman I like again.

Christopher Nolan's trilogy is now over. I didn't see any of his Batman movies in the cinema, and I won't be seeing The Dark Knight Rises there either, because I'm busy, really. The massacre in Aurora may be forgotten sooner than we think, and with luck it won't overshadow the Batman movies, because although Nolan's movies are violent and nihilistic and increasingly challenging to their heroes on a moral level, all of that is tangential to the unfolding story behind a lot of real world tragedy. Having said all of that I feel like I have to be careful saying anything more about a fictional superhero, but that's what I chose to write this blog about, so here goes. Will there be a future for Batman movies after Nolan's trilogy? Yes, there will. After Aurora? I can't see otherwise, although with a new production team and with an eye to recent world events I wouldn't be surprised or (even in my very very peripheral childhood enthusiasm for the character) offended if the next iteration of the Caped Crusader is closer to Clooney than Bale.

In the days leading up to TDKR's premiere I reacquainted myself with the last hiatus of Batmania at the movies, Schumaker's Batman and Robin. It's still awful, but it's a movie that has been re-cut for die-hard fans and reassessed by less than die-hard fans, with surprising and intriguing effect. I think we could agree that the Joker as a character is even less likely to make an appearance in the next movie than he was post-Heath Ledger's death, and if the idea of a loner dispensing vigilante justice from the shadows is still a troubling image, then Batman might not be alone. As a Doctor Who fan I learned over many years that the ridiculous can exist alongside the serious; Star Trek and Star Wars fans have each learned this bittersweet lesson as well with hiccups in their franchises, and so Batman fans may take note that what sustains a cult hero in lean times can be adaptation for public tastes. I see change in the next Batman movie - maybe a dramatic reboot. And it might not be a bad thing.