For the last week or so Ashley has been dropping cryptic hints about a “project” she’d been working on for me. Yesterday she finally finished it and revealed it to me. And man, all I can say is, I have me one cool fucking girlfriend.

Check out the fruit of her labors:

Is that the shit or what? Superman and Batman are from a poster she got, and the words are all Ashley. She and I have been amusing ourselves by saying “Because he can take it,” from Commissioner Gordon’s closing speech of The Dark Knight in a sleazy voice for months, so I thought this was pretty funny.

Not a comic book geek at all, Ashley. This was a totally selfless act on her part. What a woman.
 

Film Review

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies

Lemme tell ya, I am a total sucker for a good World’s Finest story. Give me Superman and Batman on the same page — or the same screen, as is the case with Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, the latest direct-to-DVD DC Universe Animated movie, in stores as of yesterday — and I’m a happy son of a bitch. Usually. There are exceptions — for example, DC/Warner Animation’s first attempt at a Supes/Bats team-up movie, “World’s Finest,” the two-part Superman: The Animated Series episode released to home video as The Batman/Superman Movie. That was dogshit. Fortunately this latest effort, Public Enemies, is not.

The animation division at Warner Bros. has a pretty good thing going with these direct-to-video DCU movies. Of the five released prior to this one, two (Superman: Doomsday and Justice League: The New Frontier) are close to great, two (Wonder Woman and Green Lantern: First Flight) are so-so, but definitely nothing to be ashamed of, and one (Batman: Gotham Knight) is a noble failure. Unlike a lot of the animated output in the previous fifteen years or so, particularly the moronic and inexplicably popular Justice League series on Cartoon Network, none of the DCU Animated movies have been awful. It hasn’t all been great, but nothing has sucked. And some of it has been better than it had any right to be. Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, while not as good as Doomsday or New Frontier, belongs in that category.

Comic Book Review

Justice Vols. 1-3

Writers: Alex Ross (Story), Jim Krueger (Story and Script)

Artists: Alex Ross (Painter), Doug Braithwaite (Penciller)

Look, I’m not made of stone, all right? I dig Alex Ross. I do. Marvels is still one of my favorites of all superhero comics, and I like the oversized one-shots he did with Paul Dini featuring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and the Justice League as much as any maquette-stroking fanboy. I find Kingdom Come a little underwhelming, but I still would call it a good, solid superhero story.

So what the fuck happened with Justice?

It looks good on paper (the paper on which the project was hypothetically described, not the paper on which it was ultimately printed): Alex Ross painting a 12-issue limited series that is essentially an epic Super Friends episode, pitting the classic Silver Age Justice League against the Legion of Doom. Sounds like fun, right? Unfortunately, Justice, a story crammed with so many classic DC Comics heroes and villains that its three collected volumes can barely contain them, is not so much damn fun. It’s lots of other things — dense, confused and confusing, muddled, chaotic, pointless — but hardly ever fun.

Here’s the plot, as best I can make sense of it. The world’s supervillains have all been having the same dream, a vision of the world being utterly destroyed, with the Justice League powerless to prevent it. Convinced that the apocalyptic dreams are destined to come true, the villains — old Super Friends favorites like Captain Cold, Cheetah, Giganta, the Scarecrow, Gorilla Grodd, the Riddler — led by Lex Luthor and Brainiac, join forces to (wait for it . . .) save the world. Using advanced technology, the Toyman begins replacing the lost limbs of amputees, Poison Ivy uses her supernatural knack for gardening to feed the hungry, and Captain Cold uses his freeze gun to create an oasis in a desert. Those people aided by the work of the villains are also invited to come and live in a series of floating cities, where they can escape the suffering they endured on the Earth.

( Read the rest . . . )

The bad news is that the series is being produced by Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson, executive producers of Smallville, and McG, executive producer of another CW show, Supernatural, and director of such bold artistic statements as the two Charlie’s Angels films and the upcoming Terminator Salvation. Is my once-impossible dream of a Batman/Fastlane crossover about to come true?

Even if I weren’t skeptical about a show intentionally set years prior to the most exciting period of the protagonist’s life, I’d have misgivings about this depiction of Dick’s pre-Robin years. For one thing — and this is probably my biggest gripe, since the pilot isn’t even in production yet — I’m sick to death of prequels. Thanks to George Lucas’s shameless and lucrative looting of his Star Wars franchise, Hollywood has been prequel-crazy for almost ten years. Enough already. Sequels are hard enough to pull off; prequels are even more problematic, because you’re telling the audience that significant events — important enough for you to make a film about them — occurred in your characters’ lives prior the first film, but have never, ever been mentioned before.

The result is almost always either too cute for its own good (Clarice Starling’s first visit to Lector in Silence of the Lambs taking place within moments after the end of Red Dragon — Hannibal was busy that week!), or unfathomably stupid (ten-year-old Darth Vader building C-3PO). Almost never are we treated to a truly revealing and interesting bit of character development that allows us to deepen our appreciation of the prequel and the original. In fact, can anyone think of when a prequel has ever done that? Can I just say “never?”

Smallville is one of the worst offenders. Not only has it blown through most of the problems which we would expect the adult Superman to have to contend with, it’s made the familiar status quo, with Clark Kent working with Lois Lane at the Daily Planet, his secret identity intact, and Lex Luthor operating as a clandestine criminal mastermind bent on destroying the Man of Steel, increasingly implausible. Smallville depicts Clark and Lex as best friends going way back to Clark’s freshman year in high school, meaning it’s virtually impossible for Lex to meet Superman as an adult and not realize immediately that this is the same guy he hit with his car and who repeatedly saved his life/foiled his evil plans back in Kansas.

And don’t even get me started on that fucking cave.

The Smallville creators are already putting their distinctive, hip stamp on The Graysons, rechristening the lead character “D.J.,” since apparently their target audience is incapable of following the adventures of a young man called “Dick” without snickering like Beavis and Butt-head the entire time. What other clever, wink-wink tweaks can we look forward to? A bittersweet anonymous romance with a slightly older girl who turns out to be Barbara Gordon during a circus performance in Chicago? Accidentally meeting Aqualad while enjoying a dip in Loch Ness during the circus’s European tour? Facing and defeating major Batman villains before Batman even exists? I can hardly wait.

How old is Dick — I beg your pardon, D.J. going to be in this anyway, I wonder? Clark is 14 in Smallville’s first season, but Dick’s already Robin by that age in the comics. They’re hyping this as a potential companion/replacement for Smallville, so something tells me they won’t cast a sixth-grader as D.J. If the show becomes a hit, will we be seeing Dick still doing the family trapeze act at age 20, with no Boss Zucco in sight? Do the people writing the show have any idea who Boss Zucco is? Time will tell.

I know it’s too early to tell, and maybe the success of a more serious, mature project like The Dark Knight will nudge this in a good direction, but what do you all think? Will this be better or worse than the Birds of Prey show?