Dustin Nguyen does covers for an imaginary Daredevil/Batman crossover and they’re awesome.
(Source: superpunch.blogspot.com)
Dustin Nguyen does covers for an imaginary Daredevil/Batman crossover and they’re awesome.
(Source: superpunch.blogspot.com)
![Why I didn’t like The Dark Knight Rises.
I liked Batman Begins and loved The Dark Knight. I tried to keep my expectations low for the third film because I didn’t want to hype it up to something otherworldly. I didn’t watch too many trailers or read interviews. I wanted to be surprised. Sadly, I wasn’t. I found it predictable and actually wanted to walk out a couple times because I felt the script was just too lazy and convenient at times.
Obviously there are spoilers after the cut.
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You were warned!
Bane’s voice. It sounded like Sean Connery doing a Sean Connery impersonation through a Styrofoam cup. The impersonation aside, the vocals were obviously recorded in post-production and edited quite poorly. It seemed like no matter what direction he was speaking to/from that it was the same volume.
Bruce Wayne is Batman. What character didn’t know this by the end? Worst secret in Gotham City. By the time Commissioner Gordon figured it out, and it was treated as something of a big reveal, it almost didn’t matter because he was the last person to figure this out. Every single other character already knew this before Gordon including John Blake, which was the worst “gotcha” moment of the film.
The Wayne Enterprises building has the worst security. After Bane and his thugs manage to storm the board room you’d think they would push up security somewhat. But no, there’s John Blake at the end just hanging out for no real reason except to hear part of Wayne’s will for dramatic effect.
John Blake. It seemed rather obvious as the movie progressed where this character would end up at the end of the movie (Batman giving him advice, Blake repelled by killing suspects with a gun, etc.) but wasn’t expecting him to literally just swing into the Batcave with the greatest of ease. Is he really that great of a detective? Like, really? Everything mostly seemed handed to him in the script.
Batman giving vigilante advice. Maybe he had a change of heart in 8 years, but hearing Batman give John Blake advice to wear a mask seemed completely contradictory to his stance against the “Batmen” wannabees from The Dark Knight.
Bane speaking to an arena-filled crowd through a helmet mic. I thought this was a mic from a football coach helmet at first, which doesn’t plug into the arena PA system, then I realized it may have been a referee’s mic, but it still doesn’t discount the fact that Bane just starts speaking into the mic without turning it on or ensuring the PA system is still functioning after he just blew half the arena away.
Gordon’s Dent/resignation speech. What was the point of this? When Bane reads it all it seems to do is cause a spat between Blake and Gordon. Was it supposed to rile up the prisoners of Blackgate? Demoralize loyal Gordon followers? Both? The moment was so fleeting and anti-climactic. Also, how Bane acquires the letter is just ridiculous. Gordon writes the speech, puts it in his jacket where it stays a day or days later, Bane’s gang finds him while Gordon and crew are searching for someone else in the sewers, they bring him to Bane and “search” him but really seem to just find the speech off the bat (pun!) and then Gordon escapes. Way too convenient.
Matthew Modine’s character.
Miranda/Talia. “Hi, I’m Bruce Wayne and I’m going to hand over my company to this person I obviously haven’t done a background check on despite me having a super computer in my cave that I just used to identify a cat burglar. And while I’m at it, I’m going to sleep with her despite there being no chemistry at all because I’m so very sad and alone right now. Oh, but I have a previous date with that cat burglar so imma just leave you here laying on my floor.” I saw that this was Talia so early on that it hurt to watch it play out in the movie. I realize non-comic book readers will not know who she is so they probably didn’t see it coming, but know it was painful for me. Also, once she is revealed to be who she is, we see her shank Batman and then have a car race? That’s it? I realize the clock is ticking (for the bomb and the length of the movie) but not even a minor Catwoman/Talia spar?
Catwoman. While I didn’t loathe Anne Hathaway as Catwoman, I definitely don’t think she brought anything to the role. But I’m not sure if that’s her fault or the script. I think I lean more towards the script. And once again, no chemistry with Batman whatsoever. Everything felt forced.
Alfred vs. Bruce. I really didn’t buy this one bit. Alfred had always had a “if you fall down you get back up again” attitude towards all of this. Him leaving is obviously based on the story from “Knightfall” where Bane breaks Batman’s back in the comic book, but Alfred leaves *after* those events. Him leaving before just seems off. That said, his scene at the cemetery was probably the best scene of the whole movie.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7h4hvaI7f1qztzndo1_500.jpg)
Why I didn’t like The Dark Knight Rises.
I liked Batman Begins and loved The Dark Knight. I tried to keep my expectations low for the third film because I didn’t want to hype it up to something otherworldly. I didn’t watch too many trailers or read interviews. I wanted to be surprised. Sadly, I wasn’t. I found it predictable and actually wanted to walk out a couple times because I felt the script was just too lazy and convenient at times.
Obviously there are spoilers after the cut.
DC’s most recent wave of newly announced titles just continued my suspicion that, aside from their main core and Wildstorm titles, they are really striving to go back in their time machine to the 1980s.
The initial wave of titles included “Justice League International,” “The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men,” “Blue Beetle,” “Suicide Squad,” “Hawk and Dove,” “Swamp Thing,” “Animal Man,” “Captain Atom,” “DC Universe Presents,” “I, Vampire” and “Demon Knights” which all had similar titles in the ’80s (with “I… Vampire” being the main story that was running in “The House of Mystery” and Etrigan having his own mini-series before launching a full series in 1990). Interestingly enough (to me at least), the original ’80s “Justice League International” title started out as “Justice League” before adding the worldly portion to the title and we were given both names as titles in this wave. Also something to note is that “OMAC” and “Deathstroke” were titles published in 1991, which isn’t so far off from the ’80s.
That’s 13 titles out of 52. Exactly 25% of their new line seemed like revamps from the ’80s.
Even though DC ended up cancelling four of these titles, they filled their gap and then some with their second wave and first major event.
“Earth 2” and “World’s Finest” are the first serialized stories of an alternate Earth’s team since “All-Star Squadron” and “Infinity, Inc.” were published in the ’80s and really do replace those titles perfectly. “Night Force” was an original mini-series in 1982 and the “Before Watchmen” event added eight new limited titles spinning out of a 1986 publication.
And now with DC’s third wave, we have “The Phantom Stranger” and “Sword of Sorcery” featuring Amethyst. Both of which also had titles in the ’80s.
It’s true that some of these characters and titles have had other titles sprinkled throughout the ’90s and ’00s as well, but it’s interesting that many of these original titles happened the last time DC did a reboot after “Crisis on Infinite Earths.”
Why so many titles that were around in the ’80s? I see two answers to this.
1.) DC is obviously trying to reclaim the last time they were extremely popular on the newsstands. The ’90s had some major popularity for their major characters, but it all seemed to be small spurts based on events like the death of Superman, the breaking of Batman, the dethroning of Wonder Woman, and the mental breakdown of Hal Jordan. While these definitely sold issues, they seemed short lived and creative teams couldn’t maintain the same amount of audiences afterwards.
2.) History is doomed to repeat itself. Many of these original titles aren’t the ones that you think of when you think about DC Comics in the 1980s. “Swamp Thing” and “Animal Man” went on to become favorites and eventually moved to the Vertigo imprint where they seemed to languish with low sales before cancellation. Interesting enough, these are the same two titles out of this current bunch that are doing the best with fans and critics. Quite a few of these other titles have constantly been showing up on short lists whenever DC announces they’ll be cancelling titles. Are they really that far behind?
Should be interesting to see whatever DC’s fourth wave of titles will be and whether or not it will seem to mirror that of what happened 25 years ago.
Batman, Legends of the Dark Knight 98 (Paul Jenkins, Sean Phillips)
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Come to think of it… Uh… No, I’m okay. I’m good.
Batman: “You want to know a secret, Jason?”
Do I ever!
Batgirl by Mike Mayhew
Gorgeous Batgirl piece. It’s also a striking reminder of what made the old DC costumes so classic with their simplicity in design and bold use of few colors.
Yay gay but something else that James Robinson said in his interview that has me irked:
“…the only thing I was sad about in terms of a younger Justice League was that there wasn’t going to be Jade and Obsidian…”
We have Huntress and Power Girl retconned into this new Earth 2, why can’t we have a Jade and Obsidian that’s not related to Alan Scott? Before reading #1, I was hopeful we would see some of the next-generation heroes from Infinity Inc. integrated in with the not-as-old-as-they-used-to-be heroes, but with Wonder Woman’s “I am the last surviving Amazon” speech, I assumed any sort of appearance by Fury/Lyta Hall was now out of the question and began worrying about the fates of others. (Although Lyta and Hector Hall are so tied to Daniel/The Sandman that I can understand why a writer would rather leave them be in the Dreaming.)
Hopefully we’ll see these characters in the future (along with Donna Troy and Wally West), but right now it just seems sad to me that there’s a sort of “kill list” of great characters at DC Comics while continually reading really bad reviews of other books they’re trying to make happen.
First clip of Arrow has hit the interwebs.
Michael Ausiello of TVLine says the preview he saw looks “GOOOOD.”
(Source: tvline.com)
Roku + Plex channel + queuing up YouTube videos = me watching this pilot episode on my television right now. It tries so hard to be Batman, even in the music.
Up next is the “Generation X” pilot and other embarrassingly bad superhero live action shows from the ’90s that are on YouTube.
