Christmas With The Super-Heroes C43

Santa’s Super Helpers

Christmas With The Super-Heroes 
DC Limited Collectors Edition C43
DC
ISBN 761942387284

I recently reviewed one of the new treasury sized facsimile editions of the various DC treasuries which have ben released over this last year (my understanding is that their next two releases will be the two Spider-Man VS Superman Marvel crossovers, which I still have from the 1970s but, I look forward to getting new foil cover variants). Their December release is yet another I didn’t have as a kid although, I have talked about two of the stories here as they were reprinted in A DC Universe Christmas (reviewed here) but, it’s nice to read them at the size they were reprinted at during the 1970s (both those tales are from the 1940s).

The first of those two starts off this volume and is an untitled Superman story. This is where he shows a spoiled, rich kid those worse off than him at Christmas and also gets involved in a scheme of two villains trying to sabotage Christmas at the North Pole, coming to both Santa and Lois Lane’s rescue. And it’s a nice, positive tale which re-enforces childrens’ ideas of Santa Claus and also sees the last son of Krypton replacing the gassed and unconscious reindeer, by transporting Santa on his sled on Christmas Eve. 

The Second story here, which is a really great and moving one, is The Silent Night Of The Batman, where Batman is approached by the spirit of the season as a hallucination of Commissioner Gordon and his fellow cops. While Batman is convinced to stay with them at the police station and sing Christmas carols with them, we see various crimes and tragedies taking place, with absolutely no dialogue... and then right themselves to a series of positive resolutions, all without the intervention of The Batman. It’s actually a pretty heart warming sequence of pages, relying solely on the artwork of both the great Neal Adams and industry veteran Dick Giordano. 

Then we have a short story from House Of Mystery called Night Prowler. It’s a three page quickie which doesn’t actually contain any horror, just a sense of threat before the obvious identity of said night prowler is revealed to one of the characters... it works really well. 

Next up is the first of the usual activity pages which were the blessing/curse of the treasury editions put out by DC. It’s a double page spread of 8 circular artworks of various DC characters and a Christmas message from each entitled Christmas Greetings From The Super-Heroes. 

Then the second of those stories I’d already read comes in and it’s the brilliant, untitled  1940s Wonder Woman tale where it’s all narrated from the point of view of a friendly Christmas tree, who helps Wonder Woman out by giving her the information necessary to save the lives of a family and find a Nazi base. Luckily, Diana Prince is able to talk tree speak and, obviously, saves the day. 

After that we have Santa’s Scrambled Super List wordsearch, which invites you to find a load of super-heroes hidden in the grid, along with the names of a few of the creators too.

Then we get the last strip in theis selection, The Sandman in Santa Fronts For The Mob. This is the 1970s version of The Sandman and his sidekick, both in yellow super-hero costumes and not really remembered by many comic book readers these days (is my guess). But it’s a nice story about a bunch of criminals using a shop Santa, played by a heavy weight boxer, to cover up for their crimes... but, of course, when the boxer finds out what’s going on, he saves The Sandman’s life and helps him break up the racket. 

After that we have a two page spread highlighting the lyrics of six Christmas carols called Sing Along with the Super-Heroes and then a maze page called Santa’s Super-Deliveries… where you have to find Santa’s route to each of the characters waiting in the maze for their presents. 

On the inside back cover we have Season’s Greetings From The DC Editors, with drawings of them and a little bit of promotional blurb for each and, on the back cover we have, not a cut out diorama this time but just a nice holiday scene. 

And that’s me done with Christmas With The Super-Heroes - DC Limited Collectors Edition C43, I think. I really enjoyed reading this one and, it has to be said, none of the tales were in any way a let down. Just good, wholesome holiday reading for kids and ‘young at heart’ adults alike. And a nice addition to the treasury shelf, it has to be said. 

The Batman

Knighthawks
And Pink Smoke

The Batman
USA  2022
Directed by Matt Reeves
UK cinema release print.

Okay, so despite some minor concerns, it seems the latest cinematic incarnation of the caped crusader, The Batman, is really not a bad film. It’s been compared to a horror movie in some respects but, it really isn’t... I suspect people are referring to the gruesome death traps in the movie which are similar in tone to the ones in the Saw franchise... which just goes to prove the point really. I’ve only ever seen the first Saw movie but, it’s totally not a horror film... it’s a thriller. And that’s what this new take on The Batman is... a thriller with the expected dark edges on show and the odd action sequence or three. Actually, the action sequences are kept to a minimum, it has to be said and, it’s a credit to the direction and editing of the piece, which is really a police procedural movie with Robert Pattinson’s take on Batman at its heart, that despite the overall lack of action the film never gets dull or draggy, at least on first watch. Perhaps because, if nothing else, the film is a big, eclectically post-modern melange of a movie which really isn’t subtle about hiding it’s various ‘influences’ throughout the picture.

Now, I don’t particularly connect with Robert Pattinson as an actor but, he really does very well here as a version of Batman torn from the comic book pages. Conversely, he doesn’t do a very good job at bringing the confident, playboy Bruce Wayne from the comics onto the screen but I’ll definitely cut him some slack here because a) I don’t think that’s his fault, its the way the character has been written here, as a damaged Bruce Wayne who has never gotten over the murder of his parents and b) it’s not a bad route to go in and Pattinson conjures the character as its supposed to work here pretty succinctly. And he’s not seen as Bruce Wayne too much anyway, mostly sticking with his Batman personae (and thankfully, his chin just about measures up).

He’s also surrounded by a tonne of great actors including such heavy weights as John Turturro as Carmine Falcone (yeah, their are some shout outs to the Batman comic book mini series The Long Halloween here), Zoë Kravitz playing Selina Kyle aka Catwoman (for the second time in her career as this character on the big screen), Jeffrey Wright as James Gordon and Paul Dano playing a very interesting version of The Riddler. About Dano... he’s not hamming it up for the majority of the movie but there is a point in at least one scene near the end where he definitely seems to be channeling the speech patterns of Frank Gorshin, who used ot play The Riddler in the 1966 TV show and movie. So that was nice because, it’s just such a grounded version of the character that I really wasn’t expecting it to come up but, he does go quite broad and large by the end. Also, the fact that certain modus operandi of both Riddler and Batman are identical, brings another question to the way their personalities work within society.

And I’m not going to talk about the plot of the movie at all, it’s not exactly original and you’ve seen it all before. This doesn’t invalidate it in any way and it’s very entertaining. And also very dark, not just in tone but, also, in that the majority of the film is set in darkness. There are very few daylight shots here. There’s also, thankfully, a realisation which seems to have been seeping through the current trend of comic book hero movies which this continues in that... you don’t have to show the origins of the character yet again with every new iteration, people know this stuff pretty well already. This is a Batman Year Two kind of story for sure.

Okay, I said the film is eclectic so, let me just talk you through a few things i noticed on my screening (I booked time off from work so I could go to a show with no Covid zombies in the audience and thankfully there were only three of us in total in the screening).

Okay, so there’s a nice shout out to Hopper’s famous painting Nighthawks which really is in your face in its on-screen rendering. I literally groaned to myself when I saw it pop up on screen. Also, the Bruce Wayne voice over narration to the audience seems like it’s been ripped straight out of Travis Bickle’s lips from Taxi Driver. Or, if you want a DC equivalent analogy... like it’s been filtered through Rorschach from the Watchmen comic book (and subsequent movie, if memory serves).

Another big thing which hit me straight away was, well, Mat Reeves is obviously a Kurosawa fan (as are we all, I suspect). There’s a scene where Dano is in a prison cell and Pattinson is talking to him as The Riddler reveals his character’s motivation. The sequence is like a mini version of a scene in Kurosawa’s High And Low, where Toshiro Mifune is talking to the kidnapper in his cell, to find his motivation... only to find his motivation is him, perceived as an upper class and highly successful businessman who lives in the high ground in the city and seems to look down on/at the working classes. It’s a direct steal, I think but, since I love that movie with its pink smoke and rendition of the psyche of the villain, it’s a big nod which I appreciated.

Another thing is the vigilantes. You have two sets of a kind of gang or cult of vigilantes in this movie and at least one set, its revealed, are as much inspired by Batman (who is as yet un-named in this version of the franchise and is generally just known as Vengeance) as they are by the villain who inspires their dress sense. Much to Batman's horror. And comic book fans will probably realise straight away that both this idea of thuggish motivation and the idea of a band of vigilantes being manipulated are straight out of Frank Miller’s influential The Dark Knight Returns comic book Batman mini series from the mid-80s. It’s not the first time this issue has been tackled in a Batman movie either.

About those villains. Asides from Falcone, who is a mafia inspired villain from some of the later comics (like the aforementioned The Long Halloween, I think that was the first time I came across the character)... there are actually four characters in this movie which would qualify as ‘super-villains’ in the comic. I won’t name them all here but the way they are portrayed here is really grounded and much less over the top than their original inspirations. The costumes, if they have any at all, are not haute couture but just things a poor, working class criminal could put together on the sly with a low budget. These costumes do not look great but, that’s kind of the point and, especially where The Riddler is concerned, sometimes lends the character an air of authenticity or menace which might be undercut by something slicker. So that was a nice touch.

The film looks great in shades of browns and dark palettes and even though the action scenes are few and far between, it all comes together very well on a visual level. It sounds pretty great too. Michael Giacchino, who has a long standing work relationship with this director, delivers an incredible score which is really the only reason I was keen to catch this before it hit the home market. Like many of my friends, I’ve become jaded by the exposure the character of Batman has gotten over the last ten years or so. Warner Brothers seem to be taking a page out of Disney’s book and running their franchises into the ground, diluting them constantly to the point where a lot of people are losing interest... like their Marvel and Star Wars franchises. It’s become the same way with Batman and some of my friends who are usually first in line for this sort of thing can’t even be bothered to go out and see this one. But Giacchino’s score, which I bought on CD before seeing the film because I like the composer’s work in general, is really a great piece of art and it hooked me into seeing how the visuals would mesh with score and, yeah, he’s the only reason I gave this movie a shot so soon.

There’s a Nirvana song featured twice in the movie and it’s not a group I know much about. But it seems to me the main Batman theme (at it’s best when woven against the Catwoman leitmotif) is based on the baseline of that song. It’s all over the score... but it doesn’t bother me and, as I said, Giacchino does a great job here.

And that’s me done on The Batman. It’s very much an old school detective movie which looks at the method and reasoning behind the various murders and plots of the film’s primary villain rather than focusing too much on the comic book action scenes. It still definitely feels like a comic book but it’s not all just about the flashy gadgets and fist fights often associated with the character. So, yeah, a little different to the usual take and, that could have gone either way, truth be told but... I think it worked out rather well here and I suspect most fans of the source should appreciate this one. Maybe give this one a chance if you’re one of those suffering from bat fatigue, for sure.

Batman - A Celebration Of The Classic TV Series

Don’t Deny Your
Eyes To Roam,
This Beautiful,
Bat-Jammed,
Titan Tome!

Batman -
A Celebration Of
The Classic TV Series
by Bob Garcia and Joe Desris
Titan Books ISBN: 9781781167885

Just a quick snip of a review to warble the praises of a beautiful book I received for my birthday this year, the wonderful 2016 publication, Batman - A Celebration Of The Classic TV Series (Thanks cousin Steve and Allison). Does what it says on the tin, for sure but, well that’s a good place to start actually, as the gorgeous ‘tin’ in question is a hard bound book presenting a picture of actors Adam West and Burt Ward in their Batman and Robin costumes, nicely spot varnished. Added to this, instead of a regular dust cover we have a dust belt. That is to say, a miniature Batman utility belt, also with some nice spot varnishing highlights on it, wraps around the covers from front to back instead of the traditional dust jacket.

Now, while I would have loved if the book was twice the size and had even more minutia of the show for me to ponder (a sign of a good book, for sure), it’s got a lot of stories, accounts and anecdotes about the production of the three seasons of the Batman TV show, not to mention the tie-in movie, that it certainly enlightened me about a lot of elements of the show I’d not known before.

Continuing the theme of the rhyming couplets of a typical Season 1 or 2 double episode set of titles (the show used to play two nights a week with a cliffhanger at the end of the first of the week’s shows)... such as Episode 21 The Penguin Goes Straight, Episode 22, Not Yet, He Ain’t or Episode 31 Death In Slow Motion, Episode 32 The Riddler’s False Notion...the book is split into lots of mini chapters detailing specific facets of the show and uses similar rhyming couplets for each section title, such as Catwoman Is A Wow, Julie Newmar Take A Bow or Bruce Lee Paid The Set A Visit, Showed Ward His Fighting Spirit. Which is a nice touch.

Following on from an introduction written by Adam West himself, it turns out there’s a lot of information to be found here, most of which is all first hand knowledge garnered from a lot of the show’s stars and production crew from when they were alive and, like I said, most of this is new to me. So you’ll get stuff on script development, screen tests, using discarded props and backgrounds from old Irvin Allen shows, dyeing all the clothes those bright colours, the onomatopoeic typography bursts over the fight scenes, the music of Neil Hefti’s theme and Nelson Riddles scoring. There’s loads of stuff here to please the most avid Batfan.

For instance, did you know that Lyle Wagonner, who people probably best remember for his portrayal of Steve Trevor in the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman and The New Adventures Of Wonder Woman TV shows, was actually one of the people shortlisted and screen tested for the role of Batman along with Adam West? Well, yeah okay, maybe you did but it was news to me. Thinking about it and knocking about ten years off of him (from how I remember him)... I can kind of see how that might have worked too. Although, of course, Adam West totally got the special style of the ‘camp’ humour from day one. 

Similar revelations were the fact that producer William Dozier (who you hear from a lot in this book), did the voice over narrations and cliff-hanger questions for the show. He interviewed a lot of people to do it and none of them could get it the way he needed it to be done... until some bright spark realised that Dozier should just do it for the deadline of the pilot and, after that was successful, should just keep doing it.

Another thing is some of the information on legendary martial artist Bruce Lee. Batman paved the way for a TV version of The Green Hornet and, of course, Bruce Lee stars as Kato in that TV incarnation, highlighting the grand nephew of The Lone Ranger (look it up if you don’t believe me, I’m constantly reminding people of this). Now, I’m sure most people know the story of how Bruce Lee colluded with the crew to wind up Burt Ward and make him fearful of his upcoming fight with Kato in the crossover show when Batman and Robin meet The Green Hornet and Kato, which was a well received joke and, yes, that story is confirmed here. However, what I didn’t know was that they’d been trying to get Lee into a TV show for a while and the show which was in development but ultimately turned down for him, while Batman was still being conceived, was Number One Son. This would feature Bruce Lee as, oh yes, Charlie Chan’s Number One Son but as a secret agent. So, yeah, that’s a show I wish they would have made, to be honest.

There is one big error in the book that I found... which always makes me worry in a tome about something I don’t know much about because, who knows what other errors I can’t identify which could have crept in? In a section about the actor playing The Joker in the show, the one and only Cesar Romero, it mentions that his debut feature was the 1933 production The Shadow Laughs, based on the pulp character The Shadow. Something didn’t ring true with that to me so I looked it up and, indeed, the film has nothing to do with the famous ‘Maxwell Grant’ character of The Shadow, from what I can find.

However, this was the only problem I had with this book and I now know cool stuff like the famous Bat-climbs, where various guest stars pop out of the windows and make funny remarks as The Dynamic Duo Bat-walk up the sides of buildings, were just another quick thing to shorten the queue of the ever rising tide of famous actors and actresses who wanted to appear in what was pretty much the hottest show on television. And, bear in mind, this was in the days (and we’re not all that far out of them) that TV was seen as a lesser media that  an actor could be doing and often a bit of a movie career killer. But what everyone forgets is that... with the deadpan humour, the bright colours, the fiendishly ridiculous devices and the leaps in deductive logic... the show was unlike anything ever seen on television before (or since). So they had actors lining up to play parts but, when the time schedules wouldn’t permit, people like Jerry Lewis would pop his head out of a window and deliver some lines, whereas celebrities with a less tight schedule... such as Vincent Price, George Sanders and even director Otto Preminger... would be given the expanded, guest villain of the week spots on the show.

And that’s that. Whether you’re familiar with the TV series and background detail on the show with its various spin offs or not, Batman - A Celebration Of The Classic TV Series is an absolutely great book to get acquainted (or reacquainted) with it. It even finishes with a detailed episode guide to the three seasons with short summaries of each episode, which is handy if you need to quickly find or refer to something. A great addition to any bat-lovers book shelf and a solid recommendation from me.

Tales Of The Shadowmen 16 - Voire Dire

 

 

If I Were A Richleau

Tales Of The Shadowmen
Volume 16 - Voire Dire
Edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press ISBN: 978-1612279107

For this very short look at the sixteenth volume in the Tales Of The Shadowmen collections, Voire Dire, I am once again about 16 months late in reviewing it. This is because of the December publication dates which leave me a year behind on these (I like to read them over the Christmas season). And, like all of them, this latest selection of short tales of famous fictional characters teaming up or crossing paths with one another is a bit of a hit and miss affair. For me, this year, it’s rather more of a miss but, well... we all have our favourites.

Of the fourteen stories that make up this year’s anthology, I will single out a few of which I was somewhat entertained by. The Peculiar Cats Of The Sea Of Dreams by Mathew Baugh is something which I would have found dull had it not been for my re-reading of the complete fiction of H. P. Lovecraft last year (reviewed here). I was quite up for it now, though, as a variety of characters are assisted by Randolph Carter in the dream kingdom in which he is known to be found... along with yet another incident with those powerful, battling cats which often come to the aid of their friend.

It’s often the case that I am most entertained by the stories about characters I know nothing of and I don’t know who the main protagonists from at least three sources in Nathan Cabaniss’ story Rage Of Terror are... so perhaps that’s why I enjoyed that one so much. I was, of course, familiar with the main antagonist of that story, as Fantômas makes his first (but by no means his last) appearance in this volume. It was also nice to spot a very young Kojak as a background character rookie cop (given his first lollipop in one of his two throw away appearances here) and also how the tale turned into an alternative origin story for Batman.

There’s a nice Rouletabbille tale by Martin Gately, which serves as a sequel/finale to some others which have appeared sporadically in the Tales Of The Shadowmen series and also a nice futuristic sequel story to one in another volume by Nigel Malcolm where, in a world modelled after Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, The Nyctalope and Sexton Blake hack wall street and offer an exit from under their foes for the Frankenstein monster and its wife, the replicant Rachel from the aforementioned film. There’s even a nice moment in this tale where we find out the sad, future fate of the source of Doc Savage’s gold.

Captain Nemo appears in two tales... one by Travis Hiltz opposite characters such as Captain Haddock (from the TinTin graphic albums) and the Dread Pirate Roberts (from The Princess Bride?) and another, much more interesting one which kind of breaks the rules of appearing in a volume of these specific collections in that it only features one set of characters. I’m guessing that they needed a story to make up the space for this volume because its also a tale which has been published before in a different collection. This one, by Jean-Pierre Laigle purports to be (and of course it’s not) a formerly unpublished chapter from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and it involves the good captain telling one of his new guests of the time that the Nautilus was teleported by accident out of the ruins of Atlantis and into deep space... and how the Captain managed to get himself, his crew and his vessel back to the safety of the waters of Earth.

There’s an interesting story by Joseph Gibson where The Falcon from the 1940s, set in the 1960s and fully aware of his ‘fictional’ on screen exploits, teams up with his brother, among others, to take on Fantômas but, I was somewhat confused by the whole affair because, though it was somewhat entertaining, it’s also a fact that The Falcon’s older brother met his death in one of the earliest movies and his brother took over. What the George Sanders version is doing still alive to seek the assistance of the Tom Conway version (who was also Sanders brother in real life) is anybody’s guess.

Two more I’ll mention... both somewhat problematic for different reasons.

One of these is the very short story The Replacement by Xavier Mauméjean. In it, Bruce Wayne goes to a meeting with Doc Savage and The Shadow to seek their blessing at the start of his crime fighting career. On the way out from his meeting in the Empire State Building, he bumps into Britt Reid (The Green Hornet) and Kato, who then go up to the 86th Floor for, presumably, a similar meeting and, I have to say, I really didn’t understand the implications of some of the comments made at this meeting.

The last one I’ll specifically mention is The Stone of Solomon by David L. Vineyard. This is an exciting tale of John Silence teaming up with Dennis Wheatley’s Duc de Richleau character but, alas, the regular introduction to the story tips its hat that the version of Richleau present for the majority of the story is not who he seems. Since the reveal at the end of the short is very protracted and teased out, one wonders why the writer should have bothered when we know which character the story is supposed to be about in the tale and that, since he’s not mentoned once in the narrative until the end of the story, it’s obviously him masquerading as Richleau in this one.

And that’s about it for Tales Of The Shadowmen 16 - Voire Dire. More characters abound and cross paths... some of whom I know very little such as Darkman and Gordon Gekko (I’ve not seen their respective movies) and others I am more familiar with such as Arsene Lupin or Anne Rice’s vampire character Lestat. There’s also a very entertaining and thorough version of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Jane Greystoke (formerly Jane Porter before she married Tarzan) and even a couple of relatives of famous characters, such as the sons of Professor Challenger and Robur The Conquerer.

Actually, I guess I was about 50/50 with this volume which, I guess is not a bad batting average considering the number of writers and the considerable number of character appearances and references which are scattered among the tales. Once again, I’ll look forward to receiving what would have been the December 2020 edition this coming Christmas release and hopefully, fingers crossed, get around to sharing my thoughts with you on that one in about a year from now.

A DC Universe Christmas

The Wonder Of Christmas

A DC Universe Christmas
by various writers and artists
DC Comics ISBN: 9781563896408

A DC Universe Christmas is a nice, festive, trade paperback reprint of a number of DC Christmas stories drawn from various decades of the company’s output... or, you know, a shameless seasonal tie in to shift old stories and repackage them for new readers. You decide.

Now, the fact that the stories come from varying time periods means that there is a complete mixture of art (not to mention writing) styles in the tome and I’d have to say, I much preferred the stories reprinted from the 1940s through to the 1960s than any of the other ones from later time periods. Also, I noticed that those ones were more likely to entertain the idea of Santa Claus as a real person rather than just an invention to keep the dreams of children alive... or to keep them quiet.

The age of various strips means there are some characters in here from recent years (up until 2000, when this was published) who I had never come across before and, also, a few second tier characters from the 1960s (but these tales they appear in date from much later), who I had no idea about. So characters like Impulse, Enemy Ace and Bat Lash were not on my radar but, can’t see that I’m missing much of anything, although the Wild West story of Bat Lash showed some promise. What’s worse is that some of the characters had changed identity from the ones I used to read as a kid. For instance, The Flash is neither Jay Garrick or Barry Allen in his story here. Instead he’s... Wally West. Seriously? Wally West was Kid Flash, the sidekick, when I was growing up. I guess he grew up too. Also, well, this seems to be the Tim Drake version of Robin in one of the stories... who I think I remember came on board as the third Robin after Jason Todd was killed by The Joker, if memory serves. Actually, the short Robin story in this, where he’s feeling lonely for the holidays and then suckered into turning up at a surprise Christmas party with his ‘superhero family’ is a nice one and worthy of something written 50 or more years before it actually debuted in 1999. Which is a pleasant surprise.

So, yeah, a bit of a mish mash of a collection but, seriously, I wouldn’t expect anything more and these kind of things are always going to be a hit and miss kind of affair. For me, though, there were some nice highlights to the book...

For instance, although it’s one I’d read before, there’s a nice Wonder Woman story reprinted from a 1943 issue of Sensation Comics called The Story Of Fir Balsam. This one is a snow bound adventure and is told from the point of view of the titular Fir tree. In it, Fir Balsam helps Wonder Woman, who is Amazonian so she can speak to Fir because she knows tree language, to both thwart a nazi racket and also restore an estranged family, bringing two kids and their father back to the mother. This one is pretty good.

Another good one is Billy Batson’s Xmas, reprinted from a 1947 issue of Captain Marvel Adventures. Nowadays he’s known as Shazam... which makes no sense whatsoever (but I’m really not going to go into that yet again). This involves Captain Marvel getting an unfairly dismissed department store Santa his job back and also has the not so brilliantly resolved question of... what did Billy Batson and his alter ego Captain Marvel (who were very much their own beings in those days, remember) get each other when they went out Christmas shopping?

Perhaps the oddest story here, A Swingin’ Christmas Carol, is a reprint from a 1968 issue of Teen Titans. This one features characters like Ebeneezer Scrounge, Jacob Farley and Tiny Tom and, as soon as the Teen Titans realise the adventure they are living is a strange parallel to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, they try to solve the problems posed by the story by masquerading as the three ghosts from that book... with not the kind of solution they were necessarily expecting. This one is annoying because the criminals have a ray gun that can turn rubbish into valuable retail products and, at no point in the story does anyone stop to question what possible science there could be behind this... it just makes no sense. It’s also annoying when... and this kind of dates it... all the characters (including the guy writing the captions) refer to Wonder Girl as Wonder Chick. A sign of the times, I guess.

The last story in the book is a reprint of the 1940 comic Superman’s Christmas Adventure and, yeah, it’s pretty good. In this one, Clark and Lois try to bring Christmas to the poor kids of Metropolis, show a spoiled brat the error of his ways and, ultimately, thwart an evil scheme of Dr. Grouch and Mr. Meany when they try to shut down Santa’s operation at the North Pole. When they kidnap and then gas the reindeer, it’s up to Superman to work with Santa Claus to not only keep Christmas going (Superman pulls the sleigh for the sleeping reindeer) but also to reform the two killjoy criminals by showing them Christmas kindness. This kind of stuff is pretty much what Christmas is all about, as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s about it for my quick overview of this one. A DC Universe Christmas is not the best Christmas superhero comic I’ve read but it does contain a mixture of different styles and sometimes even differing views of just what the Christmas spirit is, or should be. It’s a good stocking filler for that superhero lover in your life and you should find something that will warm your heart inside. The world needs more collections like this, I think.

Batman

Bat’s Entertainment

Batman
USA/UK 1989
Directed by Tim Burton
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

1989 came to be known as The Year Of The Bat for many, due to the release of Tim Burton’s Batman on the 50th Anniversary of the popular comic book character. I remember the mood of the time well. I also remember the queues to get in.

This was pretty much the last time I recall queuing for a movie that was quite literally a ‘blockbuster’. It’s something that, despite the popularity of films these days, you don’t really see anymore. I remember my first experience of the power of the blockbuster, trying to get through a packed Oxford Street in London to see Star Wars at the Dominion Cinema at the tail end of 1977 (literally a day or so away from New Year celebrations... it's a theatre now). Everywhere while the film played for months, monster queues would pop up outside cinemas going on for blocks. Even the word ‘blockbuster’ was first coined for this ‘film queueing’ phenomenon, with the release of Easy Rider in 1969, if memory serves. I remember seeing Batman a few times at cinemas but, the one time which really sticks in my memory is of lining up outside Barnet cinema for a midnight screening with my friend Kerry, in a queue which literally snaked back on itself about 12 times in front of the cinema before ending several blocks away. There was a fair amount of uncertainty as to whether the cinema would have enough seats on any given night to accommodate the amount of people trying to get into a performance.

So it would be fair to say that the film was a huge success (although, I think it technically was financially in the red for decades, in part owing to the deal struck with Jack Nicholson on this film... who was also, due to his shrewd contract, being paid for the sequels even though he’s not in them... at least, I seem to remember reading that).

It was well loved by audiences and critics too, although I remember George Peppard appearing on Breakfast TV at the time and, when asked, saying that the film was terrible. Most people liked it though and that included me. I wasn’t intending to watch this one again for a while but I keep meaning to watch the sequel for a Christmas review (it being a Christmas movie) so, I didn’t want to go into that one again without this one still fresh in my mind.

Okay, so, I absolutely loved it back in 1989 but, in some ways, the film doesn’t really hold up that well today. I don’t know what it is about Burton’s vision (a director I find really hit and miss, although always uniquely creative) but, while it does kind of scrape through as a coherent whole, the film does seem to be just a series of nice looking set pieces with maybe no real downtime to give them strength in contrast. It feels like almost every scene is screaming in your face for attention and you almost can’t quite hear everything in the crowd. To be fair, though, I think that’s probably also a criticism of the whole of Hollywood cinema from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s so, in itself it’s probably unfair to bury it just for that. It’s like this is the first wave of movies to be somewhat ‘detrimentally’ swayed by the aftermath of the huge impact of Star Wars on popular culture because, sometimes the things which make a phenomenon successful are not best understood by the art that it unintentionally spawns.

That being said, I didn’t dislike the movie this time around and can understand why Batman still holds a certain place of high esteem in the hearts of certain cinephiles.

One of the reasons that this was a phenomenon, I believe, is because super hero movies were few and far between at the time and, successful ones were hard to find. The Christopher Reeve starring Superman The Movie had been a big hit but that was over a decade prior to this. Batman had been portrayed in cinemas by different actors three times before this one but, the last time had been in 1966. So, audiences of various ages were ready for a new take. They didn’t want a comical version like the last one had been though, so the casting of Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman, someone who was known more for comic roles, met with a huge letter writing campaign objecting to his involvement... boy, I wonder what would have happened if this movie was being made in the internet era. I never had a problem with the idea myself (I’d quite liked him in his previous collaboration with the director, Beetlejuice) and, when I eventually saw him in the role, I think I was justified in holding my tongue. 

Keaton is an absolutely brilliant pick for this film as so many of the actors and actresses here are. What a cast! Kim Basinger is brilliant but there are also some great character artists here, among them Michael Gough (as Alfred), Pat Hingle (as Commissioner Gordon), Jack Palance, William Hootkins and even Lando Calrissian himself, Billy Dee Williams, in the role of District Attorney Harvey Dent. I remember getting excited in the cinema when I saw this and was waiting for him to transform into super villain Two-Face before the end of the picture although, well, it didn’t happen. “Huh?” I thought when the credits rolled, “They must be saving that for the sequel.” Alas, although Billy Dee Williams was contracted to continue playing the role, his contract was bought out by Warners and when Harvey Dent finally becomes Two Face for the third movie in the series, Tommy Lee Jones took over the job.

Looking at the film now, there are some nice things about it. It looks lovely in that dark, gothic way that Burton soon became known for although, I think some of the editing on this one is a bit jarring. Sometimes deliberately so, when we are startled by a close up of a TV screen being smashed by a boxing glove and sometimes, less so, when Burton will attempt to hide the visual edit by carrying on the sound of one scene into another (on a specific sound cue like The Joker’s laughter). Incidentally, the destruction of TV sets by The Joker as opposed to, I dunno, just changing the channel or switching them off like a normal person, seems to be some kind of running character trademark here.

Other things of note would be the turning over of a Joker card from a deck at a key point in the narrative, foreshadowing his character’s fate... and the strangely deliberate lack of period in the film, where technology from all eras comes crashing together to give the setting a timeless appearance (much like the old 1930s and 40s Universal Horror movies which, I’m sure, Burton was probably influenced by as a kid). I especially like the way that both Keaton and Nicholson compliment Kim Basinger on her apartment with the observation that it has "lots of space"... something which obviously re-enforces the connection between their two characters as being different impressions of the same coin, in the way in which they both tend to express their psychological abberations.

There are also a lot of references to other moments of both comic history and pop culture scattered throughout the movie... such as the police file photos of Jack Nicholson’s character, which look to me like they’ve been taken from One Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest, or the references to Vicky Vale’s photographic work in Corto Maltese (after the famous comic book character of the same name, no doubt).

There are also some nice musical references such as the use of Beautiful Dreamer woven into the score which, to be fair, always reminds me of Mighty Joe Young but it’s used nicely here for an expression of The Joker’s more artistic side. Danny Elfman’s score is, of course, phenomenal and, although he’d already done a great score with Beetlejuice, this one really put him on the map. It is kinda clouded by comments that a lot of it may have been... let’s say ‘more than assisted with’ by Shirley Walker, who only receives a conductor’s credit in the final film. Certainly her scores for the Batman animated series sound very Elfmanesque although, to be fair, that was probably part of the brief. Now that she’s dead I suspect the truth will never come out but, I like both composers so I don’t really care. It sounds like this was, maybe, a great collaborative venture, asides from the usual orchestration work by Steve Bartek but, you know, I’m just guessing from differing viewpoints I’ve read and information which sometimes seems to come to light. Great score though, either way.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Batman. If you watch it now, it’s almost more a film about what cinema was doing at the time rather than something which holds together as all that much more. It’s somewhat flawed, I feel but, strangely watchable and certainly entertaining in parts. I’ve no desire to see it again for a while but chances are I will circle back to it again at some point in my life. At the time it was a benchmark movie and deserves a certain amount of respect for that, I think. Not to mention, it also really put cinematic artist Tim Burton on the map too, I believe. Worth a look, if only for the nostalgia rush.

Batman The Golden Age Vol 2

Dark Knight Rising

Batman The Golden Age Vol 2
by Bob Kane, Bill Finger + Various
DC Comics
ISBN: 978-1401268084

Okay, so following my review of the first year in the career of Gotham’s first knight The Batman and his loyal chum Robin, The Boy Wonder in Batman - The Golden Age Vol 1 (reviewed here), I’ve finally read through the second year from December 1940 through to ‘Fall’ of 1941 in Batman - The Golden Age Vol 2. Now, this one collects the caped crusader’s appearances chronologically in all the issues of Detective Comics (where DC gets its name from), Batman Comic and World’s Finest Comics.

A note on that third title... this issue covers the first three issues of World’s Finest but the first issue was titled World’s Best Comics. Like the title was always known for, it features both Batman and Superman on the cover (and Robin) but, unlike the comic which springs to mind whenever the title is invoked, these weren’t team-up stories between Batman and Superman as they grew to be. Instead, each character set had their own stories within the comic so, yeah, the stories published in this volume are the Batman and Robin stories only, obviously.

Okay, so I talked about, in my last Golden Age Batman review, how Robin and self censorship had brought a more wholesome approach to the stories with the odd slip or pre-Robin appearance re-labelling here and there. This collection continues that approach and there’s not a whole lot to say about it... the stories are quite inconsequential for the most part, asides from the fact that the newly established running villains like The Joker would often return. The tales are short but the majority of them at this point are far less bloodthirsty and certainly far less whimsical than what the strip had quite quickly devolved into towards the end of the first year. That being said, there is still one story where our heroes are transported by a fantastical inventor into the pages of a book of fairy tales to rescue his daughter.

The stories may still be simplistic but the various descriptions and ‘turns of phrases’ employed by the writers at this time are anything but. For example, when Batman and Robin drop some cloth on some bad guys in a warehouse, we are told... “A Niagara of silk engulfs the thieves.” Also, I learned something from the comic in terms of language origins too. I’ve always known of the phrase when something is ‘plummeting’ to the ground but, here in the 1940s, Batman regularly, every other issue, ‘Drops like a plummet’, with plummet as a noun, which obviously extends from the use of ‘plumb bob’, although I’d never put two and two together in my mind before.

Also, the Batman is now, despite the tightrope of atmosphere that the stories tend to walk, commonly being referred to as The Dark Knight on many occasion. That is, when he’s not being described in more flowery language thusly...

“For he, in reality, is that personality known as the ‘eyes of night’... The Batman.”

The artwork is still simplistic and, many times in these early issues, the bat symbol is not always pictured on Batman’s chest in every frame. It’s like the artist just forgets sometimes. It’s also littered with references to contemporary culture but, somehow, they are often somewhat quite guarded and depicted as parodies of the real thing, such as when a cinema is depicted playing “Melody Of 1941” starring Tyrone Taylor and Myrna Rogers.

The Batmobile finally gets defined into the one generally depicted as its earliest incarnation here. For about a half of the year it still normal looking cars in different colours and sometimes open topped, sometimes covered. After a while though, we get that closed top, chunky Batmobile I always liked with the big fins and the Batman mask at the front like a gigantic hood ornament. Still no sign of the Batcave yet, though... Batman has a secret passage to a barn (the Batcave wouldn’t come until 1944, apparently).

Most of the villains are not that memorable and even The Joker is a bit pedestrian in his approach to crime, despite multiple appearances which, at this time, seem mostly saved back for the multi-story Batman issues rather than having him appear in the 'one off' stories in Detective Comics. Hugo Strange is here though and he uses a fear gas completely reminiscent of what the villainous Scarecrow is now famous for. Oddly enough, the Scarecrow’s first appearance, which I think I first read reprinted in a 100 Page Giant of Detective Comics back in the 1970s, is in issue number three of Worlds Finest and in it he absolutely has no ‘fear gas’ at all. It’s obvious by this time, though, that the writers were beginning to think more of recurring villains because he doesn’t meet an untimely demise at the end of the story.

Something else I noticed was, despite having Robin and all the ‘wholesome’ baggage that was ushered into the comic with him... and the fact that it’s quite often stated that “The Batman and Robin do not kill”, I did notice a few deaths here and there that each of these heroes have caused as an immediate consequence of their actions. For example, in Detective Comics Issue 55, Batman quite happily punches enemy agents off the roof of their dirigible to drop to their death below (presumably by dropping like a plummet, as is indicated so many times in the stories this year).

So, yeah, the tales covered in Batman The Golden Age Vol 2 don't make for the most memorable period for Batman and is not often as surreal or dark edged as the interesting ones from his 1939 beginnings... the stories are mostly flat and simplistic and the artwork is... well it’s not as bad as many of the comics at the time but it’s similarly not often anything to write home about. I get the feeling the writers and artists are just coasting on their good sales but I suspect the next couple of volumes of this will make an interesting contrast, as more regular characters and hopefully more convoluted plot lines may surface. We shall see, I guess.

Kong Unmade

Ape Expectations

Kong Unmade -
The Lost Films Of Skull Island
Written by John Lemay
Bicep Books ISBN: 9781798077993

I’m guessing that not many of my readers will remember the Batman VS Godzilla movie, where Adam West’s character is shown footage from King Kong Vs Godzilla to learn how to defeat The Big G. Or the 1934 Tarzan VS King Kong motion picture? Or how about the couple of King Kong movies that England’s famous Hammer studios tried to make?

Not to worry if you don’t. These films obviously never happened but are certainly among the many attractions in John Lemay’s entertaining resource, Kong Unmade - The Lost Films Of Skull Island.

This epic tome, like the other ‘lost films’ book I reviewed relatively recently, Harryhausen - The Lost Movies (you can read my review here) doesn’t just tackle the ‘completely lost’ films of the expected subject matter. In the case of Lemay’s book, we also get reviews and development stories for existing Kong related features including, of course, the original film and its direct remakes but, also, classic rip offs like The Mighty Peking Man and Konga.

There are, of course, a far amount of lost films in here too... the main meat, so to speak and, I suspect it’s the inclusion of all of these that will be of most interest to people compelled to pick this one up. And it is, to be clear, a fairly entertaining and informative romp through the beloved ape’s vanished film career.

The book starts off with the lost film Creation, which fans of the cinema and animation of Willis O’ Brien will no doubt already be aware of. This, of course, along with his finished version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as a direct result of this failed project, would lead to the original motion picture King Kong. Creation itself was, it seems, half cribbed from the first of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Caspak trilogy, The Land That Time Forgot (which was also made into a film, along with its first sequel, in the 1970s of course). Where relevant, Lemay points out where scenes from various lost projects have been reworked by either the original creators or other producers into movies which did see the light of day, albeit not necessarily having anything to do with King Kong by the time they did. This in itself makes for some interesting reading... as do the various copyright issues regarding both the movie and the separate copyright status of Edgar Wallace’s novelisation (which actually pre-dated the movie in terms of release to the world at large) and the consequences for ‘would be’ directors down through the decades.

It also includes films like the puppet Kong remake The Lost Island, which would have had Mae West voicing Ann Darrow and Groucho Marx voicing Carl Denham. This production was abandoned due to rising costs but some photos still survive and, what was probably the most famous one (even I can remember it from books from the 1970s) is used as the cover to this edition of Kong Unmade. Like the cover shot, I’ve only ever seen black and white stills from this half finished production but if it had been finished it would have been the first 'one reel' movie to be shot in Technicolour so... yeah, would have liked to have seen that one.

Among the many surprising revelations Lemay nonchalantly drops into his book is the fate of a proposed 1940s movie, Abbot and Costello Meet King Kong. This would have been awesome but was eventually abandoned and, instead, became two other Abbot and Costello films, one which did indeed have an ape in one scene and the other being Abbot and Costello Meet Captain Kidd which, apparently, still features Skull Island in the finished film but, alas, it isn’t populated by either dinosaurs or Kong himself.

Another interesting production is the one which was trying to beat Dino De Laurentis’ 1976 remake into cinemas but eventually got called off before shooting had actually started. This was to be called The Legend Of King Kong and was due to star Robert Redford (or Nick Nolte if Redford walked) in the Jack Driscoll role and Peter Falk as a much less sympathetic version of Carl Denham. There’s a quite long chapter which summarises the full script and it really does make for some interesting reading.

Other items of note might be the inclusion of some of the Italian posters for the Godzilla movie Destroy All Monsters, which all seemed to somehow break copyright law and depict King Kong on them... he certainly isn’t anywhere to be found in the film itself although Toho Studios did try and make some other King Kong movies asides from their existing King Kong Versus Godzilla and its sequel King Kong Escapes. Not to mention the 1958 stab at King Kong VS Frankenstein.

There’s also a truly great section on an aborted TV animated project called Kid Kong reproducing loads of Robert Lamb’s original sketches for the proposed show, which has some nice work in it.

In addition, some of the history behind some of the famous, released ‘inspired by’ films that did make it to the silver screen is also very welcome and entertaining. Take the ‘British King Kong’ movie Konga, for example. I learned from this book that a few nights shooting in Croydon culminated with the last night which the director had earmarked for all the gunplay and explosions, after he’d bribed the local chief of police to secure permission. This last night’s shoot resulted in 300 or so emergency phone calls to the police from the general public but the director managed to smooth things over from being prosecuted by sending flowers and chocolates to all of the people who had called in. So that’s an interesting story... I should probably get around to rewatching that one for this blog sometime soon. It’s been well over four decades since I last saw it and I think I bought a Blu Ray in a sale at some point.

So anyway... not much else to say here other than John Lemay makes the whole thing very entertaining and goes into a lot of detail on various productions where he’s able to. I could have happily heard a lot more about the Batman Vs Godzilla project, to tell you the truth, like how come it was 1965 when the show didn’t come out until 1966? I guess it must have been mooted fairly early on in the show’s development but there’s obviously not enough material and, due to it being more about Godzilla than the little bit of Kong footage, it’s been placed in one of the book's four appendix sections instead. Still, Kong Unmade - The Lost Films Of Skull Island is another great treasure of a book for any cineastes or even casual film fans who I’m assuming know the importance and influence of the 1933 King Kong (reviewed by me here) and the huge footprints it made in the annals of cinema. Definitely one for the film lover’s book shelves, for sure.

Joker

Attack Of The Clowns

Joker
Directed by Todd Phillips
2019 Canada/USA
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Minor spoilers about a subway scene here.

Cesar Romero did it better.

Heath Ledger did a pretty good job too but it’s kind of hard to compare the portrayals of the fair few actors who have played The Joker on screen over the years since they’ve mostly been written slightly differently for each incarnation and, certainly in the case of this new variant of the character played by Joaquin Phoenix, he’s a very different beast altogether.

Set in the 1980s, this new stand alone stab at an ‘origin’ film for The Joker is purported to be inspired by Alan Moore’s groundbreaking 80s graphic novella The Killing Joke but... I really don’t see that. In that comic the iconic character had more or less the same origin he had in the majority of the previous comics (and many of the big screen versions of the character) which is something this new iteration does absolutely nothing to parallel. It kinda makes you wonder why they bothered calling it Joker and tying it into DC in a way but, they do at least use the iconic make-up here and there are some other overlaps from the world of Batman in the movie.

I remember when I first heard about this project and I thought that it was kind of a bad idea. Back in the 1970s, DC had tried launching a stand alone comic of The Joker and it got cancelled after nine issues. Ironically and, presumably, to tie in with this new movie which also seems to be trying to distance itself as much as possible from the comic book version of the character, the company has recently released Issue 10 containing the artwork and story originally scheduled for that issue way back in the 1970s (I might review this short run of comics sometime soon on this blog, I think). So, the point I’m trying to make is that I wasn’t expecting a film about a super villain from DC to make much of a splash (even though I’m probably the only person in the world to like the Catwoman spin-off movie with Halle Berry) and I’m not the biggest fan of Phoenix either, although I’ve warmed to him of late due to his participation in You Were Never Really Here (reviewed by me here).

It’s interesting that Phoenix should follow that movie with this one because they both have a lot of echoes of Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver about them... although it’s even more blatant in the former movie. Critics who have cited Scorcese’s Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy as major influences on Joker have been absolutely right to do so. You can see the mentally damaged Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver (not to mention some Gotham street scenes which could pass for Bickle’s nightmarish perception of New York in the 1970s) and there’s definitely a strong link to The King Of Comedy here, with Joker obsessed to an extent with a talk show host here which manifests itself in almost exactly the same way as they did in the Scorcese movie (flights of imagination presented as reality etc). Ironically though, it’s Robert De Niro himself, who had the obsession with the comedian played by Jerry Lewis in The King Of Comedy, who is the target of The Joker in this film so... what goes around comes around, I guess.

Joker itself is, I have to admit, a pretty good movie. I was very surprised at the quality of the narrative conviction shown in the performances here... Phoenix is great, as is Zazie Beetz, DeNiro and Frances Conroy as the older version of The Joker’s mother. Conroy also had a role in that Catwoman movie with Halle Berry too so, I’m glad this production was not cursed by her involvement in that one.

The film is also impressive in that it portrays a very small scale story (writ large with bigger implications) and it’s consistently, tonally, a downward spiral. A grinding, wearing depiction of down beats with a character who has no real grasp on reality and who is portrayed, for the most part, as a victim. I’ve already had a disagreement with somebody as to whether The Joker is depicted as evil in this film. I think not... he’s just mentally unhinged which, I suspect, takes away a person’s ability to make a choice between right and wrong and so, I think this is more of a monster... a human monster, for sure but, a monster nonetheless. Indeed, one could say the writer/director is even trying to illicit sympathy and empathy for the character with the way he portrays all of life’s ‘tough breaks’ as a force which finally flicks the switch in the title character’s head. In Bonnie And Clyde, Arthur Penn did this much more subtly using the language of film to win over the audience to the title characters by withholding establishing shots and long shots until the first crime is being committed. Here, Phillips and Phoenix are somewhat less subtle by piling on the despair and pathos of the character.

Indeed, the first set of murders The Joker commits are something the audience are really, I suspect, rooting to happen. He’s just been terrorised and beaten by a gang of rich, yuppie thugs who are the absolute opposite of sympathetic character types... you kind of want them to get their just dessert and  when they do it kind of puts you on his side when it happens. Later on, when he slashes someone’s throat before stabbing him in the eye, the damage is already done with the build up and framing of the character that, even though it’s a totally unjustified killing, you kind of shrug it off. In fact, in the audience I was with, in the aftermath of this very scene, when he lets a distraught character go free instead of murdering him because he was always nice to him in the past, I heard one of the ladies in the audience utter the words “Aww, so sweet.”, so, yeah, there’s empathy and identification going on with the title character in this for sure but, you know me, I’m not one to be on the side of censorship. Art is art and people will interpret it how they will, dependent on their psychological make up so, it’s good that this film can blur the lines between villain and ‘everyman’ character in some ways. At least it throws up the issue for discussion.

Another way in which the movie seems to ‘normalise’ the psychopathic killer, to some extent, is to make his laugh a psychological condition which the character even has to highlight to people by carrying a card around with him, explaining he’s not laughing at them it’s just a neurological malfunction. Gone, though, are the character's keen wits that allow him, in the comic, to be a master of crime. This film has much less in common with popular, lionised super villains of past literature and film such as the exploits of Fantomas and Fu Manchu and seems to be a much more willing spiritual cousin of those 1930s hoodlum and gangster pictures that Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson used to make. So not like the keen mind of the comics at all.

That being said, the film does take things from the long, comic book history but the biggest thing I think it takes is probably the ‘Cult Of The Batman’ which was at the forefront of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns... except it’s filched for The Joker instead. This ‘movement’ isn’t even something the character deliberately instigates or has any control over, although there’s a wonderful scene near the end of the film (which I think is where the film should have ended) where The Joker is confronted by his ‘children’, so to speak, and plays to them. It feels a lot like the end scene from Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes (reviewed here) and I think it’s quite effective.

Another thing from the comics, of course, is the Wayne family. There’s a nice set up to the idea that The Joker might actually be Batman’s step brother and, although it’s thrown out as the reality of the situation before the end, there’s also evidence within the film that this is just a cover story (take a look at the back of the photo of Arther Fleck aka The Joker and his mother and tell me whose initials they are). Similarly, the familiar old Batman origin story which gets done here, is portrayed as an indirect result of the actions of The Joker so, once again, we have the idea that the creation of The Batman was only possible with existence of The Joker. This yin and yang relationship about the two characters is pretty much the only thing I can really see as being taken directly from Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke although, I have to say, it’s probably been thirty years or more since I last read it so, that’s something I need to get into again.

There’s some beautiful cinematography here too. The many online critics of the use of orange and teal to light a scene will not be happy with this because the film is full of it... but it works well and I loved the way the colour pallette sometimes started out as one thing and then suddenly became a little schizophrenic, possibly as a visual metaphor for what is going on in Arthur’s head. For example, a shot bathed in orange where Arthur is sitting at a desk towards the other end of a long shot is suddenly changed when the camera slowly shifts slightly to the right, allowing the kitchen door and window space to come into view at an angle, which is completely lit in teal. Stuff like this make the movie fun to watch when, perhaps, the tone and content seem a little too bleak to be able to get anything positive out of it.

Whatever you make of it though, the film looks good, has some fantastic performances and has a nice score by Hildur Guðnadóttir, which is something I’ll definitely have to pick up on CD at some point soon. There’s also a nice undercurrent of reality versus what’s going on in the mind of Arthur Fleck and the ‘twist reveal’ actually caught me out for once... so that’s good. Admittedly, the film maybe goes on a little longer than it should and the final coda is a bit redundant but the very last shot revealing the probability that something very violent just went down 'off camera' is quite effective and it’s not a terrible ending... I just thought it was better ending up with The Joker playing to his cult following rather than give it almost a ‘crime doesn't pay’ undercurrent at the end. Not that The Joker, unlike his comic book and previous big screen counterparts, is interested in crime at all. Only with killing people, by this point. I do suspect that the ending has been added after either test screenings or studio interference to soften the tone somewhat... the location of the character makes no sense after what we’ve seen in the sequence prior to this (when he has so many admiring people in the crowd ready to help him).

If you have been sitting on the fence about Joker... I would urge you to give this one a go. It’s at the very least a really nice looking film and it’s very well put together. And, even if you don’t like the film, it’s simplistic approach to some very questionable viewpoints on this kind of character and his portrayal on cinema screens is perhaps something you’d like to have an opinion about. I know I really liked this film and though I wouldn’t see it again at the cinema, I would be happy to take another shot at it on Blu Ray next year and see what else I can spot in it. Definitely something I’d recommend you to go and see, if you get the chance to get to the cinema in the next week or two.

Batman The Golden Age Vol 1

Bat Out Of Hell

Batman The Golden Age Vol 1
by Bob Kane, Bill Finger + Various
DC Comics
ISBN: 978-1401263331

Okay, so I enjoyed my little jaunt into the Golden Age tales of Wonder Woman so much recently (reviewed here) that I decided to maybe start familiarising myself (and refamiliarising, to a certain extent) with some of the early strips of other characters in the DC universe. So it’s onto Batman and, though I’d read a fair few tales of the early Batman comics as part of one of the expensive The Batman Archives collections, the big stumbling block of those old, very pricey editions was that they were fixated on just one title... in that case the Batman stories that appeared chronologically in Detective Comics. However, when various superheroes became popular, fairly quickly at the dawn of the phenomenon (Batman is kind of an honourary superhero because, in fact, he has no super powers at all), there was often a second title brought out dedicated solely to the title character and also the odd special issue of something else. So, for example, Wonder Woman would have self contained stories running concurrently in Sensation Comics and, later, Wonder Woman.

When I read The Batman Archives Volume 1 around a decade ago, this really foxed me because when The Joker popped up in the Detective Comics reprints, it was clear that he’d already had at least one (it turns out a fair few) appearance against Batman before, which weren't part of that same reprint tome. What these new Golden Age reprints do is to republish the stories involving the title character from all the comics which carried them in a chronological order... so if something refers back to a previous story (as I know it will here in a specific story in volume 2 or 3 when they get to it), you’ve definitely already read that one. So Batman - The Golden Age includes chronological reprints from Detective Comics, Batman and, in this case, a story featured in a promotional comic of collected stories to tie in with the 1940 New York Worlds Fair showcasing various DC heroes. Batman - The Golden Age reprints all the Batman stories from roughly the first year of his appearance, spanning 1939 - 1940.

Now, a few years ago people on Twitter were getting kinda irked that the version of Batman at the cinema was not a kid friendly version... that he was a darker character. Well, kid friendly these days is a very relative term and I got quite annoyed by people saying this stuff on Twitter (they didn’t feel they could take their kids to see movies like Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice... reviewed here) because my memory of Batman was that he always was the dark, vigilante of the DC universe and it was people like Frank Miller in the 1980s (with his much celebrated The Dark Knight Returns) who were merely trying to return him to his roots.

Now let me make something clear here. The other day I was thinking about all the stuff which used to be pitched to general family audiences on 1970s TV and I realised there’s no way on Earth half of the stuff I watched as a youngster would get passed by the censors these days, when everything at the moment seems to be veering towards a much more prudish, dreadfully PC and somewhat Victorian set of values (underground reaction and alternatives to those values, also, it seems). And it strikes me when I read something like pulp novels written in the 1930s or, indeed, these old Batman comics from the 1940s, that kids back then were even less bothered by, or mollycoddled to, the bleak, violent realities of life... which were obviously plundered for their entertainment value and reflected back in the art form. So these comics were more than kid friendly enough... they were just very grim and violent (for a while, there’s a big sea change within the first year here) and... maybe that’s the way things should be today. Who knows? However, somebody obviously didn’t think these were good reading for youngsters (in more than a decade before the comic book witch hunts of the 1950s which would lead to the creation of the Comics Code Authority) as you’ll see when I get to the introduction of a certain character. It all makes for very interesting ‘in between the lines’ reading though...

In Batman's very first appearance in Detective Comics Issue 27, we have a somewhat different looking character from the one most audiences are more familiar with these days. The masked head is more rounded with longer ears and a generally more sinister, edgy and well defined look to him. This look would remain for around half a year or more and it’s easily my favourite version of the character. This isn’t an ‘origin’ story in any way, shape or form... with the writer wisely deciding to hit the ground running to see if the character was successful before going into the more convoluted origins, I would expect. Actually, I wish this practice of eschewing where the character came from was something more modern movies did with these kinds of figures. After all... nobody seems to have much trouble accepting antagonists with no explanation in zombie movies.

It’s not until his seventh appearance in November 1939, The Batman Wars Against The Dirigible Of Doom, that we get the first crack at his origin story... which doesn’t really differ much from modern retellings (as it does with some famous comic book characters) although he definitely had no Alfred The Butler around to help him in this instance. That character doesn’t appear at all in this first year.

And, in his first story, his secret identity is kept a complete secret from the reader for a while, building up the mystery until, on the very last panel of the last page, he is revealed as Bruce Wayne. And, for some reason, it’s very rare in the stories that, once Batman is knocked unconscious (as he often is), anyone thinks to take his mask off and see who he really is. It just doesn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind at this point. But there’s a lot of other interesting stuff going on with this ‘dark’ character in this and subsequent stories...

In the first issue, for example, the villain accidentally falls backwards into a vat of acid and, while The Batman is not exactly responsible for his death this time around, he does make the comment that it was... “A fitting end for his crime.” In his second story, he casually summersaults an attacking villain off a rooftop to his death. In another adventure he deliberately throws one heavy onto another bad guy’s sword to kill him. In yet another story, he is feigning unconsciousness and is left with a guard while the main villain brings a disintegrator gun to melt him. When he is alone with the guard, he knocks him out, changes costumes with him and deliberately allows the guard to be melted to death in his place. So, yes, this is a much darker avenger than even people like Frank Miller in the 1980s were getting away with for a while.

As you would expect, various elements of the Batman mythos we recognise today are either not present or are not yet fully formed. It takes a fair few issues, for instance, to name the police chief as Commissioner Gordon. Another missing component is the Batmobile, as it came to evolve into. Here, he seems to sport a number of different cars, over the first year, of differing colours... often alternating between red and black. In Batman’s fourth appearance, the red car is drawn a little longer and is referred to as... “his specially built, high-powered auto.” So they were getting there.

Oddly enough, he had a batplane from very early on but, directly contradicting the accompanying text, the plane was more often than not a helicopter or autogyro. It took a little while over this first year for the Batplane to be rendered as... well... a plane. That being said, the way he uses his helicopter is somewhat questionable in regards to the story dynamics. For example, in a completely cloudless sky, he sets his ‘plane’ to hover above the villain’s lair and ‘disguises’ it by billowing a big black cloud of smoke to hide it. Conspicuous much? The villains react thusly... Villain 1: “A black cloud.” Villain 2: “Yeah, looks like rain.” Oh... so that’s alright then.

There’s also a Metropolis Insane Asylum rather than Arkham Asylum and the city is not once referred to as Gotham City as yet. Given the name of the asylum, one wonders if these early stories were meant to be set in the same city as Superman or whether that was merely a coincidence and the writers were just looking at an alternative term for a city.

Even from fairly early on, the art and practice of the early comic book industry, where I guess they thought people really weren’t paying that much attention and throwing them out after reading them, is in evidence. They’re already recycling exact poses copied from earlier issues several times in that first year, and placing them in panels in new stories. Also, the first two pages of Batman Issue 1 is a complete steel, being a straight reprint of the origin story already run in Detective Comics but with different colours used.

Another take away from this first year is that the earlier stories were full of non-scientific phenomena. For instance, we have a monk who keeps a giant gorilla and pet werewolves. We have a shape shifting vampire villain. We have a man with literally no face at one point and, when Batman enters the gardens of the villains who have stolen this man’s face, he sees flowers with living human faces on them. So I think it’s fair to say that these stories were not written with a worry about straying from a good, scientific foundation... which is something Batman was more known as in later decades... something of a ‘science detective’ like Doc Savage.

And then, in Batman’s 12th appearance, we have the first story featuring Robin The Boy Wonder and the tone of Batman comics are completely changed. Someone must have thought these things were getting too mean spirited because, once Robin becomes a regular feature of the strip, it’s not just the look of the Batman character which changes into something more like the Batman we know today. This is a Batman and Robin team with a big commitment to not taking life where possible... so a complete sea change for the character, it seems to me (although, to be fair, Robin does kick a guy off a metal girder to his death at one point, in self defence). Sometimes the violence still does happen and Batman seems somewhat contradictory in his responses. After happily letting two asylum patients maul each other two death earlier in the same issue, he later states at one point... “Much as I hate to take human life, I’m afraid this time it’s necessary.” What the heck? This is from a story where Batman is gunning down a giant man with a very strong cultural reference to the ending of King Kong. Interestingly, this is a solo Batman story which had been advertised a few issues before but was delayed for publication until after the addition of Robin, by the looks of things. It’s one of the few post-Robin stories here without The Boy Wonder in it. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that bizarre character contradiction comes from adding different text in the speech bubble to what had originally been in there for the original scheduled publication.

I hate to use the language of the Batman’s foes here but this newer, conscientious version of the Batman really was a boy scout. In Batman Issue 1, he breaks the fourth wall to deliver to the readers this message... “Well, kids. There’s your proof. Crooks are yellow without their guns! Don’t go around admiring them. Rather, do your best in fighting them and all their kind.”  Which is definitely a comic with a strong moral message methinks. I also found it very interesting how the writers keep pushing the idea of building gyms and other community centres for youths to keep them occupied and stop them getting into crime. This is exactly the same kind of thing I’m hearing now in London as the crime rate rises over here due to various issues... spend more money on keeping the kids occupied and focused (not that there’s any money left to be able to do that with over here).

Actually, the breaking the fourth wall thing becomes more of a thing too, on occasion. For example, at the end of the story in the 1940 New York Worlds Fair Comics issue, Bruce and Dick talk directly to their readers to urge them to visit the New York World’s Fair. The power of 'in-panel' advertising.

Funnily enough, one of Batman’s most vicious villains also makes his debut in Batman Issue 1. The Joker is, by my count, the third regularly occurring villain in these comics, after Hugo Strange and Catwoman. Actually, Catwoman is known only as 'The Cat' in early issues and she hasn’t yet acquired the name of Selina Kyle (or any fixed identity, it has to be said). Funnily enough, even from The Cat’s first appearance, Batman was already ‘accidentally’ letting her escape and making his sexual attraction to her known to the readers. Which is much earlier than I’d expected. In her second appearance she also manages to make an enemy of The Joker, which is kinda interesting.

One of the great things about reading these early comics is trying to catch the cultural references of the time and how they influenced the strip or were cherry picked to be a part of them. I’ve already mentioned the King Kong homage in one issue but when a character called Boss Zulch is introduced, he seems to finish almost every sentence he utters with the word “see?” which is obviously picked up from Edward G. Robinson’s character in the film Little Caesar. Also, one reaction to a pirate radio broadcast by The Joker goes thusly... ““Haw! That’s just a gag - like that fellow who scared everybody with that story about Mars the last time. Ha! Ha! Pay no attention to it dear.” So Orson Welles’ ground breaking documentary style radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds, which panicked half of America, was obviously still very much on everybody’s minds at the time.

Also in regard to influences, you can see just how one of my favourite pulp characters, Doc Savage, directly impacted on and influenced the Batman character by this point, as the supernatural stuff is mostly dropped and scientific stuff starts. Mention of brain surgery to cure criminal ways, for instance, or using an infra red lamp to read invisible markers left on a villain’s footprints to trail him. This would eventually lead to Batman’s later title as The World’s Greatest Detective, at some point, I guess... was that the 1970s or before then? I can’t remember.

Anyway, that’s the first year or so of Batman encapsulated in Batman - The Golden Age Vol 1 and, honestly, if you’re a Batman fan and want to know more about the character’s roots and how he evolved and changed, even in his first 12 months, then this is a really good place to start. Essential reading for me and I shall definitely be picking up the second volume at some point to re-read one of my favourite Batman stories from that era (which I have reprinted in an old 1970s Detective Comics Giant)... The Case Of The Carbon Copy Crimes.

Tales Of The Shadowmen

The Shadows Know...

Tales Of The Shadowmen
Edited by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier

Okay, so it’s time I try to finally make right something which has been on my mind since not too long after I started this blog review site. Long term, regular readers will probably know of my two Christmas book rituals, which have been celebrated in reviews on this blog every year apart from the last two, when the two authors concerned didn’t write any new books in their respective series. I’m talking about my annual Christmas week tradition of reading first, the newest release from Patricia Cornwell of her latest Scarpetta story, followed by the latest Temperance Brennan mystery, as written by Kathy Reichs. However, there’s actually a third Christmas book reading ritual I have every year and, each year I put off reviewing it because I’m always exactly one book behind in the order of the releases and I always figure I’ll start off with an overview review of the current volumes to date. The reason being that the newest volume in this specific series, which is an annual short story collection called Tales Of The Shadowmen plus whatever the latest volume’s subtitle is, are released in December each year. Shipping being what it is, I always ask for the previous year’s volume the following Christmas. This is still the case and I need to break that cycle soon, I guess.

And this is my way of doing it... by getting the overview out of the way so I can start reviewing the individual volumes as I receive them each year without having to reintroduce the concept of this series in such a detailed way each time.

So, yeah, here we go.

 I discovered these books around about 11 or 12 years ago, I think it was. I’d heard the names of Jean-Marc Lofficier and his wife Randy before because they used to be associated with some Doctor Who guides I used to read back in the 1980s. I think they have handled a lot of different franchised and individual science-fiction and fantasy projects over the years and Black Coat Press, a French imprint with an English translated equivalent, is one of those projects.

So what, or who, are The Shadowmen... well the term originally derives as a collective name for various French characters from past literature who are revived by a number of various writers for these collections... except it’s more than that. So initially, we’re talking about famous characters, some of whom are more familiar to French readers than British ones I suspect... and we’re talking about The Black Coats, Fantomas, Judex, Arsene Lupin, Irma Vep, Josephine Balsamo, The Musketeers, various Jules Verne characters, The Nyctalope, Rouletabille and so on and so forth. However, these characters are, in the parlance of the youngsters of today, mashed up by the various contributing writers of these collections... not just with each other but with many other fictional characters from around the world. So you will have two or more characters from various completely different literature sources, often a lot of heroes or villains and their supporting characters, mixed together in brand new stories.

So yeah, add in to the mix characters like Batman, Sherlock Holmes, Madame Atomos, Harry Dickson, Sâr Dubnotal, Sexton Blake, Bulldog Drummond, Fu Manchu, The Green Hornet, The Shadow (an inspiration for young Bruce Wayne in one tale), Hercule Poirot, King Kong, Solomon Kane, John Carter, the Frankenstein Monster, Nosferatu, various Bond villains, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Babar the Elephant... the list goes on and on. They’re up to volume 15 now already (I just finished reading volume 14) and  there are many different heroes crossing over with each other. Heck, there's even a very short story where Barbarella abducts Captain Kirk in order to have sex with him, if memory serves.

And there’s quite a few writers involved in these... sometimes very famous ones such as Michael Moorcock or Kim Newman. Heck, Kim Newman’s Angels Of Music, which are a kind of 19th Century group of female characters operating as the ‘Charlies Angels’ of their time and run by Eric, The Phantom of The Opera as their Charlie figure, was originally instigated in the pages of a couple of stories from these collections (I believe Mr. Newman’s novel from a year or so ago, detailing their adventures, is an expansion and continuation of these original tales).

Now the possible disappointing thing about these, if you’re new to them, is that these characters don’t all link up in a single continuity like Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold-Newton family tree. So story consequences in one won’t often, unless it’s a continuation of a previous story, spill over into other stories involving some of the same characters. For the most part these are stand alone stories with the odd serialised story (some book length serials are published in sections in consecutive volumes) and mostly should be enjoyed for the flights of fancy they are. Many times a family tree connection is established by a writer but it won’t always hold true for another story. So, for instance, in volume 14 there is a Honey West adventure where she takes on the main arch nemesis from The Wild, Wild West. This makes sense within that tale (where she also meets Gene Roddenberry and Julius Schwartz) because in that particular continuity the writer establishes that both James West from The Wild, Wild West and, also, Herbert West (Lovecraft’s re-animator!) are descendants of hers. That lineage probably won’t be present in any future Honey West tales in the series however, unless it’s one written by the same writer. So, if you can forget the possibility of a bigger, over reaching continuity within the collections, you can get a lot of enjoyment out of them.

Of course, by their very nature, depending on whether the reader finds each writer’s style entertaining or not, all the volumes are a bit hit and miss in their overall make up but, for me at least, they have become more hit than miss as the series of volumes has grown over time.

Actually, a big part of the enjoyment of these things is that the various references and character identities are not always given away up front, from either the writers themselves or from the Lofficier’s, who usually write a brief intro to each story. So it does also become a game of reference spotting a lot of the time and sometimes the amount of references can be quite dense... I remember a story from one of the early volumes mixing up various Spaghetti Western characters with Shaw Brother’s style kung fu action references and it’s sometimes a bit difficult to spot all the different props and people in these tales. Luckily for anybody reading along and playing that kind of game with the text, there is usually a ‘cast list’ for each story given at the end of the book, listing the main characters, supporting characters and references plus the original creator they are credited too. Very useful if you miss out on any. So, for example, I may have realised that the Roger Delgado incarnation of The Master from Doctor Who was taking on Professor Quatermass in one story but, there was probably a lot more going on than at first met the eye and the post story ‘dramatis personae’ can sometimes help clear up the odd references that litter these tales.

So there you have it, you’ve probably got more of a flavour of this ongoing series of books now and, frankly, if you are a fan of period set fantasy, science fiction, horror or crime fiction (or preferably all of those genres) then you’ll probably find at least a few tales in each volume that you’ll have a good time with. I’ve never seen these books sold in even specialist shops like, for instance, Forbidden Planet but you can usually get them from places like Amazon and, of course, the Black Coat Press themselves at http://www.blackcoatpress.com, which is a website which really is worth checking out. If you click on their catalogue link you’ll find a list of intriguing titles (not just Tales Of The Shadow men) where you can get English translations of hitherto rare or out of print science fiction, horror, crime and fantasy which you just can’t get form anywhere else, plus a load of new stuff too. Their new releases are always a bit of an eye opener (and often of stuff I’ve never heard of) so just reading about their release schedule and existing back catalogue can be an education in itself, sometimes.

So there you have it... Tales Of The Shadowmen and Black Coat Press... something you may want to get into if interpenetrating, famous and not so famous characters are your thing. Definitely worth a recommendation and definitely worth a look. And now this ghost of a review is finally committed to reality (at least in the digital realm), I can maybe review Volume 15 with a clear conscience when I get around to reading it. Maybe even before Christmas this time.