Sure, you could take your life-size Batman and Superman hang-ups (the Fatheads of their day) and position them in assorted heroic poses —  or as close as you could get with their limited maneuverability. Or you could submit to your dark side, and put them in assorted compromising situations. The World’s Finest Same Sex Coupling! (It would be no surprise if the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which has already thrown in the kitchen sink, took that tack. So hip! So current! So open-minded!) Maybe it’s simply that their hands are perfectly cupped to make it look like each is taking a leak at a Justice League urinal that puts these groinular thoughts in one’s head.

Alex Ross has now settled into some vague plateau of ossified veneration, where his superhero artwork is appreciated in a circular way: it’s good because it’s good because it’s good. A cover here and there, a $20,000 appearance at a convention now and then, and everyone’s happy. There’s an unfortunate static quality to his brand, though, one perhaps appropriate for an artist whose figures are often frozen like statues, a bit too closely resembling the stiffly posed friends and family who serve as his models. Would it kill him to once, just once have a character whose eyes appear to actually be focused on something, and not staring off into the void?

But there was a time when Ross and his realistic watercolors of comic book heroes were fresh. New. Vibrant. Yeah, let’s hone in on that.

Marvels struck the comic world like a bolt of lighting in 1994. In an industry that felt by then like it had seen everything — and not just everything, but everything with a die-cut foil-enhanced chromium hologram polybagged cover to boot — it was unfathomably new. A retelling of Marvel’s rich history through the eyes (eye, actually) of a New York photographer, it made that milieu come alive as it never had before. Spider-Man scaling an office tower, Galactus hovering over Manhattan, hunted mutants and Gwen Stacy’s fall unfurled before us, so close it almost felt like you could reach out and touch the spandex. And, all respect to Kurt Busiek’s script, that was mainly Ross’s doing. This was a visual world that was wondrously terra incognita. (It also spawned an entertainingly bizarre spinoff from Warren Ellis, but that’s another post for another time.)

Then it was DC’s turn. That pantheon was and is Ross’s preferred stock, the universe he’s internalized and the one that contains his personal favorite character, Captain Marvel (he of the creepy flying model kit, not the cancer victim). Kingdom Come, co-created with scripter Mark Waid, wasn’t a recap either, but a new story. A future timeline found the familiar heroes gone, retired or underground, and a new breed battling villains with a level of mayhem and wanton disregard that the Justice League of old would never countenance. (Magog, the villain-hero at the outset, with his Cable-ish cyborg arm and gold coloring and bull horns, was a delicious meta-textual commentary on the hyper-violent false idols of 1990s comics.) So the old band gets back together (a bit more thick around the waist), but with a triangulation of alliances: Superman, Batman and Lex Luthor leading factions into battle, with the Dark Knight the wild card in the middle. It’s a solid story, well-served too by Ross’s work, and it has rightly become a comic standard — so much so that the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (guh that title…) is taking a number of cues from it.

(Aside: When you step back and look at them, these two 1990s Ross books perfectly illustrate the differences between the respective universes. One very much places the chief characters in the Olympian sphere of gods, their own rivalries and hatreds operating on the mortals who are almost afterthoughts — well, at least until those mortals drop a nuke. The other ties them to the orbit of that most on-the-scene of humble men and women: the news photographer, who’s the focus (no pun) of the tale.)

This is all a roundabout way of getting to the subject of today’s post. There weren’t Marvels trading cards, but by god(s) there were Kingdom Come cards. And, not surprisingly, they’re fantastic, a testament both to the quality of the source material and the subsequent effort to not screw this thing up.

Kingdom Come Xtra was produced by SkyBox in 1996, the same year that the series was released. “Xtra” is an appellation SkyBox has used with some of their basketball cards, and it’s deployed here for no particular reason, other than to perhaps indicate that they offer a bonus dollop of the KC universe. Or perhaps their larger size, as, like the Sandman and Independence Day cards we’ve profiled, they were in an elongated format. They were released as a limited edition, a term which has a little more truth to it in this case: there were “only” 20,000 boxes of the cards produced. This sounds like a lot, but when you consider that other supposedly marquee products set a limit in the hundreds of thousands, it means a little more.

There were 50 cards in the base set, and a number of chase sets of varying scarcity. The base cards mainly follow the events of the four issues, reproducing Ross’s artwork with explanatory text on the back. For your perusal, here are a couple, with some particularly memorable moments. First, Superman and Batman having their umpteenth confrontation — “Drop that screwdriver and look at me when I’m talking to you!”:

How about when the one-with-the-Speed-Force Wally West yoinked Norman McKay out of the Spectre’s protective shroud?:

The last dozen-plus cards show individual characters, both new and old. Wonder Woman may have received the best visual treatment of all — by god(dess), she looked good:

As for chase sets, the most common consists of 16 “Sketchboard” cards, which recreate Ross’s design sketches for the future characters and came one in every pack. The cardboard they’re printed on is textured like sketchbook paper, which is a nice touch — literally. Indeed, the best part of the giant Absolute Kingdom Come collection comes in the appendix, with the designs and thought processes that went into creating these new DC generations, so these are a welcome addition. Here’s future Aquaman, who’s not really in the story much, but who gets the full King Arthur treatment anyway:

The rest of the chase cards came 1:9 packs. There are three poster cards, which unfold and show the cover images from the first three issues — and have a helpful key on the back to help you sort all the familiar and unfamiliar faces. Here’s the first:

There are three “Kingdom Come Classics,” in which Ross recreates the first cover images of DC’s holy trinity. Wonder Woman probably has the best of this bunch, as it has a degree of novelty that Action #1 and Detective #27 with their gazillion swipes couldn’t (yes, it’s from Wonder Woman #1 and not Sensation Comics #1, but close enough):

Finally there are six “Creator Collection” cards, which have new artwork of the series’ main players: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, McKay and the Spectre. Waid chimes in on the back with inside dope about what went into their KC personae. Batman’s Iron Manish armor gave Ross a rare chance to depict the Caped Crusader with his classic white eyes, so here’s his:

That’s the length and breadth of the set, and if you have all these pieces, it’s complete. But there’s another layer of chase cards out there to be had. Ross and Waid separately autographed and numbered 40 of each of the base cards, which were then placed in random boxes — so for every 10 boxes you opened, you’d in theory get one Ross and one Waid autographed card. They’re floating around out there, but they can get a bit pricey, and pursuing a full “set” of them wouldn’t be for the faint of heart, or wallet. (Would the OCD collector have to have a run of Ross autographed cards that all had the same number — all, say, 3/40? What a living nightmare.)

The relatively limited print run and the fandom around the original series has meant that the cards have retained and gained a lot of value in the past 18 years. Prices on eBay for sets with all the trimmings often go well beyond similar comics-themed sets, and unopened boxes, when you can find them, are similarly inflated. And you know what? You don’t begrudge it a bit. The full-bleed cards look great, with colors sharper than those found in the comic (which, for all its beauty, can look a bit washed out), and the chase sets feel like they have a point to them beyond just getting schmoes to plunk down more cash to accumulate them. It’s a solid, bright, enjoyable product.

Granted, I have a bias, a special fondness for Kingdom Come, as it’s the last comic series that I started reading before I headed off to college in 1996. Issue #4 was released after I had matriculated, and there were other things understandably on my mind than comics at that point. But the series stuck in my head. Who would win the Superman/Marvel showdown? Was humanity doomed? Could Lex Luthor look even more like Don Rickles? These questions remained unanswered until I got my hands on a collected edition in a book store and a read the last chapter there in the aisles. The book was thus a bridge series for me, as it was in a different way for a number of readers: it brought a degree of maturity to adventures known and loved, without going the clichéd route of sex and gore and graphic hyper-violence.

Ross has never topped Marvels and KC, and in fairness he’s never really tried all that hard. But both remain spectacular milestones for their respective universes and the broader reading public. The Kingdom Come Xtra cards are a worthy encapsulation of that moment in time, when watercolor realism brought beloved characters a pop art status they had never before known. Wrong company, but — Excelsior!

It’s tough to get a new Batman villain to “take.” The Rogues Gallery of rogues galleries is so star-studded, it almost beggars description. With iconic luminaries like the Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, Two-Face, the Riddler — need I go on — there isn’t a lot of oxygen left over for a fresh face to catch fire. So it was a minor miracle that Anarky, the philosophizing youngster with the cattle-prod and creepy outfit, became somewhat of a fan-favorite foe of the Caped Crusader. They don’t admit a whole ton of members to that exclusive list — it’s like the Augusta Country Club of evil-doing.

This is largely testament to his look. Artist Norm Breyfogle (a criminally underrated Bat-penciller of yore), along with Alan Grant the creator of Lonnie Manchin and his alter-ego, drafted one of the more visually arresting enemies that Batman ever went up against. Not to say the look was complex, or even that original: it was a second-generation distillation of the Guy Fawkes inspired V of V for Vendetta fame. Make the mask gold, make the haberdashery red, and voila. But the small touch of the elongated neck, which gave Anarky an eerie otherworldliness to him, was perhaps the most vital flourish — and important in hiding the fact that, yes, it was a young teen under there raising Cain on the streets of Gotham.

Anarky appeared periodically in the Bat-titles after his 1989 debut, some might say growing up before our very eyes. And while he was never a breakout villain star on par with the Venoms of the world, he still had his fair share of fan support, enough to at least make him the anti-hero of his own mini-series in 1997. The eponymous Anarky gave both Grant and Breyfogle a chance to return to and refine their creation, to mold his philosophy a tad, and take him in a different, more grandiose direction. Every villain is the hero of his own narrative, and Anarky is most certainly a hero in his own mind — and maybe one period.

Anarky is heavy on the musing, missing no opportunity to take a moment to let its central character sit down and espouse his (and Grant’s) thinking on the chains binding humanity. In that regard each of the four books at times reminds the reader of any number (emphasis on the “numb”) of Steve Ditko’s dense Objectivist comics, from Mr. A to The Avenging World. The difference being that those are turgid, dreadful reads (and in that regard very faithful in their debt to Ayn Rand’s nigh-unreadable bricks). Anarky has a genuine story. It’s at times quite silly, as almost all superhero comics are when you boil them down, but it has a beginning, an ending, and some action in between. Though yes, there are philosophic interludes, where Anarky sits down and bores his dog to death, like Ted Striker’s harangues to his seat-mates:

One is also reminded of the South Park version of Paris Hilton, who drove her poor dog to suicide with her relentless ramblings. (And please note a portion of the trademark encircled A forms the background of that splash.)

Anarky’s purer anti-order leanings are both complicated and elevated here. Now he isn’t merely concerned with upending imposed, top-down control, but also with freeing the human consciousness itself. At this point Lonnie had not only passed through puberty and thus filled out under the cloak, but had also “fused” both hemispheres of his brain (“bicameralism”), making him a super-genius — and he was trying to do something similar for all humanity. Before writing this Grant had come under the sway of “Neo-Tech,” an offshoot of Objectivism — some might call it a cultish con more than a true philosophy — developed by a direct-mail magnate, writer of poker manuals and tax cheat named Frank R. Wallace. (In the proud tradition of L. Ron Hubbard…) Grant incorporated some of its tenets into Anarky’s new bent. This erstwhile Objectivism can be seen throughout his long speechifying, though scrubbed of much (but not all) of the impenetrable gobbledygook you always find in these empowerment/cult things. (They want to be obtuse so you’ll buy more and more of their overpriced books to figure out what the hell is going on, you know?)

Anarky’s new philosophy might have had a murky real-life origin, but that didn’t prevent the mini from being a decent ride. His quest to free the human consciousness takes him to strange places, all in order to mine personality aspects for a device that will remove the invisible veil obscuring the minds of mankind. Siphoning off pieces of certain individuals’ personalities will provide a power source to do just that. (Just go with it — he’s the one with the bicameral brain.) Anarky first crosses paths with Etrigan the Demon, so that he can gather his madness. Then, for a whopping dose of evil, he travels all the way to Apokolips to stand toe to toe with Darkseid — an encounter that might otherwise have been relegated to far-fetched fan fiction:

Lonnie has a set of balls on him, you have to give him that.

And for the third and final of the necessary components, the “goodness” of old foe Batman — and he can’t resist explaining his goal to his arch-enemy like some Republic serial villain:

Of course things go awry in the end, and Anarchy’s scheme fizzles out, done in by his own hubris. Which is the denouement of almost every comic villain, come to think of it. But hey, it’s the thought that counts, right? And Anarky means well, in his way — but let’s be thankful that Batman is usually there to check his more ambitious plans.

The great disappointment of this book doesn’t come from the story, but ironically enough from what was the first true strength of the Anarky character: the look. Anarky had evolved by this time into dude whose metal mask was for some reason able to transmit his every facial contortion, which is a great boon for the illustrator, as they’re not stuck trying to convey the emotion of a character with a static mask. But it completely robs our titular star of his creepy visual appeal, as the hollow-eyed, impenetrable specter who stalked the night. Not to pilfer an internet meme, but it’s Lips on Optimus. That it takes place here on Breyfogle’s watch, he a man who not only molded Anarchy but also had one of the dreamier, nightmarish Batman palettes, is crushing.

But hey, at least Legs shows up.

Though Anarky had this brief moment in the sun, he lapsed into obscurity as the calendar shifted to a new century. An ongoing petered out a couple of years later (after bafflingly positing that Anarky was the Joker’s son), and the mask and haberdashery gathered dust, even after Lonnie was re-purposed in 2008 as “Moneyspider.” And in the umpteen million animated DC properties and video games he’s hardly rated an appearance — and when he has it’s been underwhelming. (His appearance in the quickly cancelled Beware the Batman CGI cartoon eschewed much of the Breyfogle design to make him into goddamn Moon Knight. Seriously, you have to squint to find the Anarky in that costume.)

I retain a great fondness for the Anarky character. We readers born in the latter half of the last century didn’t get the chance to make the acquaintance of too many original Batman villains from the ground up, and Anarky was one of the best of this limited crop. (Bane may have found his way into two movies, but does anyone really go wild for the Venom-addled, back-breaking hulk? Did Bane have his own ongoing? Did he?!?!) Grant and Breyfogle have apparently both referenced this Anarky mini as their finest creative hour, their pride and joy. It doesn’t seem to live up to that lofty self-regard, but it’s a pleasant enough experience for the Anarky devotee, if you can get past the wordiness. Anarky vs. Darkseid is a kick, and may be worth the price of admission on its own.

Jim Carrey is returning to his big screen comedic roots this weekend, as he and Jeff Daniels reprise their respective roles of Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne in Dumb & Dumber To. Carrey’s been at the top of the Hollywood pay flow chart since he rocketed to super-stardom back in the 1990s, hot on the heels of the original Dumber, Ace Ventura, The Mask, et al. But returning to an old role might signal something: that perhaps his career has cooled to the degree that going backwards and mining hits of yore makes a bit of career sense. Or maybe it was simply a nice payday and reuniting with the Farrellys for another comedy would be fun. Take your pick — no one is holding a bake sale for him either way.

There’s one 1990s role he probably won’t be returning to anytime soon, though. Hey, remember Batman Forever?

Forever gets the short shrift when reflecting back on the Batman movie franchise of the previous millennium, as if the two Tim Burton/Michael Keaton films came, delighted audiences, and then things rocketed right to hell with the abominable Batman and Robin. But yeah, Batman Forever happened, with two villain stars whose careers exploded — in a good way — right around this time: the aforementioned Carrey and the post-Fugitive, Oscar-winning, “hard target search” Tommy Lee Jones. Wattage, people. And it had Nicole Kidman as the love interest. And Robin. And Val Kilmer as Batman, long before he tacked on roughly two hundred pounds and became more Hutt than Crusader. (It’s hard to believe that, with Ben Affleck, we’re on our fifth movie Batman in 25 years.)

Forever wasn’t terrible — though, to be fair, its successor set the bar so low almost anything looks good by comparison. (Batman and Robin may have actually dug a hole in the ground to get said bar even closer to the Earth’s core.) It’s almost a model of restraint when compared with the excesses of the George Clooney Bat-turn, script, visual and otherwise. But it never quite clicked. Carrey and Jones were perfect casting as the Riddler and Two-Face, but they didn’t gel in this milieu, though they tried their playing-to-the-rafters damnedest. (This failing was more the case with Jones, who’s over the top turn was a bit much for a performer who does more with restraint — his performance in Captain America: The First Avenger was a comic book role up his alley.) Forever made money and was a success at the box office, though the critical reception was tepid at best. The movie was certainly more colorful and kid-friendly than the dark and sometimes grotesque Batman Returns, but there was a clear decline in auteur quality in service of merchandizing Mammon.

Like all these Batman movies, the marketing machine was in overdrive for Forever, and trading cards were part and parcel. Fleer had the Bat-license now, replacing Topps, who had produced sets for the Burton movies. Recall that with Returns Topps had put out not one but two sets: a standard edition and one under their prestige Stadium Club banner — necessitating queries of just what the hell Batman had to do with stadiums. (There was a set of cards from the Zellers department store chain, too, but that’s another post for another time.) Fleer, not to be outdone, had three. Yes, three. Which is overkill in the extreme. You had the regular, no bells, no whistles Fleer Set. You had the Fleer Ultra set, Fleer’s premium brand — and home to the Beavis and Butt-Head cards. And you had the super-duper premium set, the Metal cards. We’ll get to that last one in the not too distant future, as it was a microcosm of mid-90s trading card excess. For today we’ll stick to the one in the middle: Fleer Ultra.

Like the movie, it’s not bad, but it’s not so great either.

Cards were distributed in multiple ways, the predominant being regular boxes of 36 packs with 8 cards and one hologram per. The base set consisted of 120 cards, which were the exact same as the regular Fleer set, but with silver foil to spruce things up. (Said silver foil doesn’t scan well, so apologies if some of the text in the following images is illegible.) Let’s have a look at a few.

The Batman costume had now shifted from the sculpted body armor of the Burton movies fully into Gigerish, cod-pieced and benippled BDSM wear:

This was a pattern which migrated over to the new Robin costume, which incorporated both the red/yellow/green colors of the comic original, and a prominent Chris O’Donnell dick-bulge:

Carrey’s Edward Nygma/Riddler persona went through a number of different looks throughout the movie, as he progressed from a mousey mad scientist all the way to a megalomaniacal super-genius with a fondness for brain-teasers. The middle stage most closely resembles the funny pages villain of yore:

Before looking through these cards I had completely forgotten that Drew Barrymore was in this, paired with Debi Mazar as Sugar and Spice, Two-Face’s good and bad henchwomen:

And then there’s Kidman, in the full flower of her famous marriage to Tom Cruise. Her bountifully bosomed and improbably named psychiatrist character, Chase Meridian, always seemed to be shot with a flattering angelic glow — probably a rider in her contract:

(Note: Her wardrobe appears to be made from the same material as Telly Savalas’s “If” jacket.)

And providing continuity glue with the two predecessor films were Pat Hingle and Michael Gough as Commissioner Gordon and Alfred Pennyworth. Here’s the latter, glimpsed on a wrist video phone that was somehow omitted from those Galaxy Gear commercials:

As far as aesthetic quality goes, the cards are rather nice — slightly glossy, on good stock, and with a decent full-bleed design. And the question mark encircling the bat-symbol is an appreciated flourish. Quibbles would be that all too often the photography gets blurry, a phenomenon we’ve glimpsed before in the roughly contemporaneous Independence Day cards, and a mortal sin in our spoiled HD age:

And the green numbers on the card backs, printed in a squashed font, are a strain on the eyes and just plain hard to read (akin to the Shaq-infused Deathwatch 2000 cards):

There are three tiers of chase sets. Most appealing are the ten chromium character cards — a bit gaudy, but de rigueur for the time period. Here’s the pre-transformation Carrey with his Blender of Knowledge or whatever:

Most insipid are the two video game preview cards, which offer up tips for playing it and murky screenshots:

And then there’s the 36 holograms — ideally you could get all 36 in one box, but that kind of perfect collation only exists in theory. (It should also be noted that the box tops, one of which can be seen at the top of this post, had different holograms on them, creating another challenge for the OCD collector.) They reproduce images from the base set, and we’ll finish, fittingly, with the last one, featuring Arkham-imprisoned Nygma in his “I am the Batman!” dementia:

Batman Forever wasn’t the first or last comic book movie that Carrey did. The Mask preceded it, and Kick-Ass 2 followed fairly recently, complete with his refusal to promote the film because of his sudden opposition to gun violence. (One wonders if John Romita, Jr. still has a hit out on him.) He wasn’t a bad Riddler, and Jones wasn’t a terrible Two-Face — though you’re left wondering what they could have done in a Bat-movie that had a bit more Nolan and/or Burton in it. On the whole the project, though initially quite successful, has drifted into more of a “Meh” status for posterity, a movie that generates a shrug of the shoulders, and not a lot of feeling for good or ill. Sort of like its Fleer Ultra cards.

As we’ve already noted, the first two major 1990s DC trading card sets had a glaring absence: Batman, in fact the entire Batman sphere, was nowhere to be found. This was because Impel had the license the broader DC world, while the Batman rights were bound up with the licensing associated with the Tim Burton film franchise. So as Impel jerry-rigged a couple of sets — Cosmic Cards and Cosmic Teams — scrubbed of the terrestrial bat-element, Topps was putting out things like the Stadium Club Batman Returns cards. To put it in all too current terms, it was a bit like Sony having the Spider-Man rights while the MCU spins along without its web-slinger frontman. And, to pilfer some of the old TV show’s alliteration, it was a baleful bifurcation.

But DC’s card output couldn’t be Batman-less forever.

As soon as they could, SkyBox, the corporate successor of Impel, slid Batman into their lineup, making him a part of their Master Series (the DC equivalent of the Marvel Masterpieces, which we’ll get too someday) and all subsequent company wide releases. And, like his World’s Finest partner, the Caped Crusader got his share of individual sets to make up for lost time. What we have before us today is the first of many.

Saga of the Dark Knight traced the evolution of the post-Crisis Batman, from his Year One origin all the way to his post-Knightfall reclaiming of the cowl. Its 100 base cards touch on all the major arcs from the Bat-books of that period, with original artwork capturing many of the seminal moments of the late-20th century Bat. It’s a set without a whole lot of frills — there’s of course a smattering of chase cards — but nevertheless one of the nicer groups of cards you’ll run across. One could make the case that it’s the best bunch of Batman-centric cards anyone has ever slapped together, and Lord knows there have been enough of them.

The set opens, as alluded, with Year One. Though the art of David Mazzucchelli isn’t featured, a fine stab is made at approximating it, as is the case here, in a card featuring an early meeting between Batman and Jim Gordon’s opaque glasses (Art: Rick Burchett):

Other tales of the early Bat are also included under this YO umbrella, including some of the mythos-expanding storytelling from Legends of the Dark Knight. The Joker “origin” from Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke is also in there, as this card back will attest — please note that the backs included a cover from the book they referenced, which is handy:

There are a number of cards devoted to Robin and his doings. The most remarkable of these isn’t so because of anything to do with the Boy Wonder, but because of the Joker’s close resemblance to the Jack Nicholson iteration — “Wait’ll they get a load of me…” (Dave Dorman):

One of the great joys of the set is seeing Jim Aparo illustrate the nine cards dealing with the big “A Death in the Family” arc, i.e. the fan-dictated murder of the Jason Todd Robin. Yes, there’s a card featuring the crowbar beatdown from the Joker. Sadly, though, there’s none for the grief-stricken Batman’s punch to Superman’s indestructible mush. But we’ll settle for the Clown Prince of Crime Iranian ambassador, right?:

Towards the middle of the set there are nine villain cards, all of which feature some of the more refined painted work on display. They may not be at the apex of this particular rogue’s gallery, but the Mud Pack of Clayfaces has/have one of the more whimsical portraits (Matt Wagner):

The interminable Knightfall/Knightquest/Knightsend/Knightsstooges saga also gets its fair share to close things out — more than its fair share, honestly. Since it was the au courant story of the time, pimped to no end by DC, perhaps a bit too much importance was placed on it. This unique Bane’s-eye-view of the breaking of the Bat is definitely the best of this bunch (Graham Nolan and Scott Hanna):

As far as chase specials, five Spectra-Etch cards were included, which featured more artsy looks at the Batman. They came 1:18 packs, though all too often you only found one in a box. Here’s the first (Mark Chiarello):

The grand chase card poobah was the Batman SkyDisc, which came 1:240 packs. The SkyDiscs were round holographic renderings which gave you a legit 360 degree look at their subject. A number were included in DC releases over the years, and oddly enough they were numbered on their own, i.e. without any regard for what set they were in. This was actually the first one, hence its “SD1″ number. Unfortunately it’s impossible to capture the effect with a scanner, but here’s the look of the card anyway — a bit like peering through a porthole at murky pond water, but whatever:

Saga of the Dark Knight was a fine first foray for Batman comic cards. A quibble might be that there’s no reference to the rich Golden and Silver Age history of the character, but you can live with that absence considering the space they had available. After all, they didn’t want this thing stretching to 800 count baseball card dimensions — though, actually, would that really be so awful? And it would have been nice to have some Norm Breyfogle art in there too, considering how important he was to the Bat-books of this era. (He didn’t even get to do the Anarky card….) Still, the art is solid, at times excellent (some of the villain cards are quite stylish), and the full-bleed design gives it all full rein. You can find base sets fairly cheap, and individual unopened boxes can be had easily in the twenty dollar range. This is a fun bunch (even the promo cards, which were affiliated with the Georgia Dome and Camden yards of all things, were off-beat) — give them a try if you’re so inclined.

As mentioned recently in our post on the 2002 Spider-Man cards, it was great seeing J.K. Simmons get an Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards. He indeed deserved it for his performance in Whiplash, one of those supporting roles that totally makes the movie that it’s in. But he was no revelation, as he’s been doing solid work for years, everything from psychopaths to comedic foils, from Oz to State Farm commercials. And, of course, J. Jonah Jameson. It’s for that last role that we comic book devotees owe him a special debt of gratitude. It’s rare that a beloved (or hated-beloved) character is recreated so fully in flesh and blood.

Michael Keaton, star of Birdman, was also up for a lead actor award, but alas he didn’t take it home. There were surely many of us out there rooting for him, though, mainly because of his decades ago turn in the role upon which that film was a meta commentary. Today we look back in time at 1989’s runaway blockbuster: Tim Burton’s Batman — and its comic book adaptation.

Every time there’s a casting choice for a revered character that leads to head-scratching, we all harken back to Keaton-as-Caped-Crusader. Lest we forget, there were eyebrows raised when Mr. Mom was announced as the grim avenger of the night (though any consternation in that sepia-toned epoch paled in comparison to the blogosphere firestorms of today). He wasn’t that tall, he wasn’t that big, and he wasn’t all that suave. But Keaton could do the one thing that was most vital: he could believably convey the constrained craziness that would compel a fabulously wealthy man to dress as a winged mammal and wreak terrifying vengeance on Gotham’s criminals. He worked. It worked. (I’ve always felt that one of the great what ifs came and went when Keaton and Christopher Reeve were roughly contemporaneous in their screen portrayals of the World’s Finest duo, and there was no cinematic team-up. How wonderful would that have been?)

And of course there was Jack Nicholson. Heath Ledger’s take on the Clown Prince of Crime has become the 21st century standard for the Joker, but we shouldn’t let that distract from Jack’s contributions in white face paint and green hair. That one of the bigger movie stars ever took the role and made it his own, that he swung for the fences and indeed knocked it out, was and is an enduring delight. This iteration of the purple-suited one wasn’t the murky-origined mastermind that we got twenty years later in The Dark Knight, but he was nevertheless an embodiment, a different facet of a gem. Nicholson’s Joker was funny, nailing all the comedy beats, and was evil without the overblown sadism of the new millennium.

And then there was Burton’s guiding hand. I’m not entirely certain that a perfect Gotham has ever been committed to screen, whether big or small. Perhaps its idealization only exists in our respective imaginations. But Burton’s vision of that city and its denizens was a worthy interpretation, hyper-gothic and filled with buildings that looked to have been built before the Great Depression, just the type of place that would be rife with corruption and ripe for an animal-themed vigilante. And with Burton you never got the impression, like with the Nolan Batmans, that the production thought it was a whole lot smarter than it was. It was straight-forward action, without dopey, obvious philosophizing more appropriate for hazy dorm room debates.

These and other factors must have gelled, because Batman was a roaring hit, one that reeled (no pun) in viewers throughout the summer of ’89. (Seeing it on the big screen its opening weekend was my first experience with a big-crowd blockbuster. Like every other theater in the country, the roof almost blew off the joint when the Batwing was silhouetted by the full moon.) The merchandizing was everywhere: I can still recall the boxes of trading cards on the counters in every gas station and convenience store I walked into. (Yes, someday we’ll get to them in a Trading Card Set of the Week.) The sequels were still running on this smash’s fumes 10 years later, when the unimaginably awful Clooney-Schwarzenegger-infused Batman & Robin drove the final nails into the franchise coffin.

Anyway, the movie was great, people knew it was great, and kids couldn’t get enough of everything that had anything to do with it. Including comics.

There was of course de rigueur comic book adaptation, a bit of marketing that’s often cheap and slapdash. The particular scenario in this instance is also weirdly fraught with peril, i.e. when beloved iconography is at the heart, like it would be adapting the movie versions of the Lord of the Rings back into book form: comic to movie back to comic. Yet here at least the movie involved was of quality and a hit, so the pitfalls of a bomb were avoided — see the Superman III and IV comics for exemplars of comics for comic-movies that make your head hurt. DC veterans Dennis (Denny to his friends) O’Neil, Jerry Ordway and Steve Oliff put it together, ensuring that the transition of movie-Batman to a comic would be a smooth one.

Still, there were odd discordances between the screen and page. Take the following spread, which depicts Batman’s first appearance. What’s one of the big take-away pieces of dialogue from the movie? “Who are you?” “I’m Batman.” Right? Here it changes, and one isn’t sure why — maybe the lines were streamlined during shooting?:

The likenesses are excellent, which isn’t always the case in these things. While you could never replicate Jack Palance’s breathy “You’re. My number one. Guy.” cadences, you can at least have a character that looks like him. And, of course, the sinister eyebrows of the Nicholson-Joker:

As if the excising of “I’m Batman” wasn’t enough, the Joker also loses one of his most callously evil — and funny — moments: his “Bob — gun” firing of Bob the Goon after Batman steals his parade balloons:

Towards the end the comic also offers up one of the sequences deleted from the finished product. Audiences would have been forgiven for wondering what Batman’s exit strategy was after his final confrontation with the Joker, when he was left dangling from the side of a skyscraper with Vicki Vale in his arms and roughly 100 police spotlights trained on them. The solution in the comic, which was filmed but cut, was to have Batman and Vicky crash through a window and for Robert Wuhl’s snoopy reporter, Alexander Knox, to help out by masquerading as a fallen Caped Crusader:

Despite the disparities, the comic is a nice little artifact of the Bat-Mania of a quarter of a century ago. It has a prestige feel to it (there was also a square-bound copy with a painted cover — for more money, natch) befitting the gilded material, with work from the comic side that at least feels like some effort was put in. Let’s not get crazy — this is still just a dumb movie adaptation. It’s like having your friend describe a movie to you  instead of you seeing it. But O’Neill and Ordway managed to make it something you don’t roll your eyes at.

In March of next year we’ll have our fifth Batman in 27 years, which sure sounds like a lot of cape and cowl fittings. (Or maybe it doesn’t. What do I know.) The casting of Ben Affleck set off a firestorm of consternation, much like Keaton’s so many years ago. If there’s any lesson to be learned here, it’s a simple one: wait for the finished product. You might be pleasantly surprised. And you might have a juggernaut on your hands. Stay tuned for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: The Official Comic Adaptation of the Warner Bros. Motion Picture, I guess.

We’ve seen the terrifying “Super Baby” rag dolls before, and the less said about them, the better. The Bat-Clock is a fresh face, though, and a fine addition to any nightstand. It talked! But what did it say is the real question here, and a superficial scouring of the internet hasn’t turned up much about this ancient timepiece. Did it just spout audio pulls from the Batman TV show? Something original? “Wake your ass up,” that sort of thing? Anyone out there know?

It’s not this trailer’s fault that it leaked in the wake of the sunny, nostalgia-laden promo for The Force Awakens, forcing Warner Bros. to put it online ahead of the dopey IMAX screening. But the juxtaposition is unfortunate, to say the least, and it’s taken a few days to process its underwhelmingness. I continue to worry that the first cinematic meeting between Batman and Superman, which we’ve all been waiting on our entire lives, is sailing way wide of the tonal mark. It shouldn’t be a dirge. It shouldn’t be a chore. It shouldn’t feel like it takes place in the Se7en universe. These are characters that should be wary of one another to start, but I don’t know that Batman should menacingly be asking Superman “Do you bleed?” at their first meeting. (Of course, knowing what’s leaked out about the movie, he could be asking that of another superpowered being battled in the movie’s climax. But probably not.) That Batman vs. Predator vs. Alien fan film from a decade-plus ago had more cheer. Based on all the gloom I’m almost afraid we’re going to find out one of these characters is a heroin addict or something. Ain’t nobody singing songs about these guys.

I also don’t know that I’d want my first official tease to open with a Charlie Rose soundbite (nothing says comic book hijinks like a PBS host), but whatever. My mind shall remain open, because by God I really want this to be good. Nonetheless — worried.

Note: Due to a recent illness and a subsequent trip down the rabbit hole of the medical system, the blog has been silent for a while now. Since the upcoming World’s-Finest-movie-by-another-name is, despite its underwhelming marketing to date, my most anticipated film in years, let this (hopefully) latest bit of promotion mark a return to activity.

And this newest Batman v Superman trailer out of Comic-Con? Better. It has its moments. Have to love Bruce Wayne charging towards the danger as everyone else flees for their lives. Robin’s costume, covered with Joker graffiti. “He is not our enemy.”

Still wish this Superman was a little less dour, though. A little more sunshine, please? Just a little?

Not much about the camp 1960s Batman TV show can be regarded as definitive — when Liberace guest stars and is one of the more mundane parts of the ensemble, that’s saying something. But Frank Gorshin’s portrayal of the Riddler is still everyone’s mental image of that character, whether in a book or on a screen. (Jim Carrey’s take, the most recent screen iteration, was pretty much Gorshin’s version thirty years later.) The manic movements and cackling laugh he brought to the table belonged in that outlandish setting, with the written sound effects and relentless alliteration. The Riddler fit right in. More precisely, Gorshin’s Riddler did. And transcended.

Audiences of today might not be familiar with his broader body of work, apart from his memorable turn as a half-back, half-white bigot in Star Trek’s blunt allegory, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” But he was a noted comedian and stage performer over the course of his long career, known for spot-on impressions of contemporary celebrities. The above clip represents the moment when all these worlds collided: when Gorshin took a moment on Dean Martin’s variety show to ponder what it would be like if Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas guest-starred as Batman and Robin. His Lancaster is, apologies to the X-Men, uncanny.

He would have made a great Clayface, too.

I’ve never quite understood all the hate for 2013’s Man of Steel, which I quite liked. The biggest of the problems people seem to have with it — the wide-spread destruction and Superman killing Zod — seem easily explainable with a simple second of thought: it was the big blue’s first day on the job, and he was going up against an unhinged maniac of equal/greater power. Our dear Kal-El didn’t have time to perform the (excessive) civilian-saving heroics of Age of Ultron, much less his usual kitten rescues, but instead had to stop this guy who, if he wasn’t put down, was going to kill, you know, everybody. (Would it have been better if when his enemy was at his mercy he simply crushed Zod’s hand and threw him into an icy chasm for laughs? Because that was in a movie that’s mostly beloved.) Plus, from what we’ve seen, these things make up the bone that Batman and Superman are scrapping over in their first cinematic meeting. Payoff!

But yeah, the Pa Kent stuff was dopey. And the lack of red in the middle of Superman’s costume makes the outfit look even more underwearish, completely undermining the whole point of the briefs’ removal. I’ll grant the naysayers that. (I’m not sure which absence I’m more offended by, the red undies or the alien squid in Watchmen. In both cases it seems that Zack Snyder hasn’t fully grasped the crux of the matter.)

So anyway, above is the new Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer. In spite of that title, which still rankles, I continue to have hope for this thing, which is long-awaited manna for a child weaned more on the DC stable than their Marvel brethren. The first teaser we got back earlier this year was a bit too underwhelmingly Grimdark, what with its “DO YOU BLEED?” tag and all. But the lengthy Comic-Con trailer that was released had much more promise — and Wonder Woman. And then there was the BDSM tease from a couple of days ago, which sent people into a tizzy. (It’s a dream/vision, relax.)

This one?

I kind of love it. Yes, Facebook-Lex is still off-key(it’s like he’s out of some cheap 1980’s comedy or something), but the extended Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne dialogue here has crackling energy. Despite early misgivings, Ben Affleck doesn’t look terrible. Hey, the cave troll from The Fellowship of the Ring as Doomsday! “If I wanted it, you’d be dead already.” “I thought she was with you.” And are those parademons in there? Is Big Barda just around the corner? (I’d be fine with that, by the way.)

Fingers still crossed.

It’s somewhat odd that a film that began its marketing campaign with the line “Tell me, do you bleed? You will!” is glomming onto a cereal largely aimed at the younger set, but whatever. Batman v Superman and Honey Nut Cheerios — a match made in heaven! Even better than when the bee helped Christopher Columbus discover America!

I saw the above box as I was passing through the cereal aisle the other day, zipping past the high fructose sugar bombs towards the dreadful plain whole oats that make up most of my morning meals. (As an aside, it still boggles my mind that Cookie Crisp, a breakfast cereal composed entirely of small cookies, chocolate chip cookies no less, ever made its way to market. This was one hell of a victory for the American Federated Children’s Union, Local 151. How that ever got into the parent-child collective bargaining agreement, I’ll never know.) And lo and behold, there it was: a Batman and Superman tie-in, with a free comic! If there’s anything that can shake me out of my non-posting doldrums and dust off the scanner, it’s this movie. I mean, it’s wish-fulfillment of the highest order — Avengers who? How long have we been waiting for a live action pairing of these two guys? Only about 80 years, right?

There are four thin collect-em-all comics, each about digest size and delving briefly into the Dawn of Justice-verse. I’ve purchased two boxes, and have the two comics and the post-sugar bloating to show for it. Of the most interest is #4, entitled “Lights Out”:

Written by Joshua Williamson with art by Eduardo Pansica and Art Thibert, it has kids in an orphanage engaging in that age-old late night argument about who’s better, the Caped Crusader or the Man of Steel. Both sides make the usual salient points, and of course before you know it a red sheet is tied to one kid’s neck and the other makes a makeshift cape and cowl out of a black one, and we’re about to have a showdown, much like the upcoming movie brawl. It’s then that one of the poor ragamuffins who’s been rattled awake by all this nonsense comes in and gives meta voice to the great criticism underlying the whole cinematic endeavor:

From the mouths of babes, you know? Duh.

There are some puzzles at the back of each comic, because nothing says a-movie-that’s-going-to-have-a-hard-R-director’s-cut quite like a word search:

And if that’s not enough to sate your hunger for puzzles, the back of the box has its own “game” — it’s at least something to keep your bleary eyes occupied as you slurp your morning coffee:

There you have it: the World’s Finest pairing of the DC Expanded Universe and General Mills. As you can see from the back of the box, you can also get your sugar/comic fix with Cocoa Puffs, Golden Grahams, Lucky Charms and Trix — so as it turns out, Honey Nut Cheerios may be the most healthy option. Anyway, check back in for my review of the movie later this week if you’re so inclined. Like I said, if this flick can’t shock paddle me into posting again, I don’t know what will.

They might as well just release the movie as a series of jumbled one-minute spots at this point, and let the internet piece them together. Anyway, this last(?) pre-release ad touches on some of the emotional heft that hasn’t been in evidence up until now — surprise, a superhero movie about icons punching each other might pluck a few pathos chords. (Spoiler: Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered in front of him, and this haunts him.)

Review forthcoming in a couple of days…

It seems like we’ve been waiting for this thing forever, and in multiple ways. Superman and Batman have been around for almost 80 years now, and never, not once, have they crossed paths in live action. It’s stunning when you think about it — never in a movie, never in a TV show, never in a serial, nothing. Nada. And this movie has been a long wait in and of itself ever since director Zack Snyder announced it in San Diego in 2013 as a sequel to that year’s Man of Steel, which was itself delayed from a 2012 release date after being announced in 2010. We were supposed to see Batman meet Superman last summer, back when the 2015 blockbuster season was to feature an Avengers sequel, a Star Wars sequel, and the World’s Finest, which might have been enough to make the universe collapse in on itself. But anyway, here we are. What a long, strange trip.

As long as the wait has been, there’s been more than enough time for salivating hordes to develop agita about the whole thing. Does the title suck? Yeah, it does. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice sounds like a Justice Department attorney named Dawn is intervening in superhero litigation. It’s focus-grouped blergh. The casting of Ben Affleck in the Bruce Wayne/Batman role met with stunned disbelief from an audience still reeling from the decade-old Daredevil disappointment. We all had our favored sons for that part, and he wasn’t anyone’s. (My personal choice was Lee Pace, who of course was Ronan the Accuser in the surprisingly successful Guardians of the Galaxy.)  Should they have rushed the Dark Knight Returns imagery for the first meeting of two icons? Probably not. Has the promotion been uneven? Indeed it has — vacillating from the underwhelming “Do you bleed?” first teaser to the scintillating (and lengthy) Comic-Con trailer and back and forth again. It’s all been fuel for the online blaze, an arena where opposing camps are more than willing to defend and condemn a movie before it even premieres. And when you have something as eagerly anticipated as this, brace yourself for the firestorm.

But now it’s in theaters. And?

And it’s kind of good. It’s not great, which is a disappointment in and of itself — we have every right to expect perfection from a movie we’ve all been waiting all our lives to see. DoJ has taken a drubbing in the press and among the online cognoscenti, and I get where most of the criticisms are coming from. It’s bloated, often lurching to a stop to set up movies to come, with questionable editing choices all around. It goes to places narratively that it simply hasn’t earned, and you’ll see that in that regard the Dark Knight Returns material is merely the tip of that iconography iceberg. Characters make questionable decisions at times — Lois Lane in particular goes to retrieve an item in the last act without knowing what the item is or what bearing it could possibly have on anything. But it comes down to this: I enjoyed watching this movie more than any I’ve written about here in a long time. More than Age of Ultron. More even than the good but too safe The Force Awakens. It has problems — oh it has problems — but it gets some very big things right. Maybe it’s simply the novelty of it, but I’d like to see it again, all two and a half hours of it.

Some more in-depth analysis and observations over on the next page. Click over if you’re so inclined, but beware of spoilers — I put some warnings in bold type where the big ones lurk.

Though I respectfully dissent from their conclusions, I can’t say that I disagree with many of the concerns voiced in the above video by our friends at Red Letter Media. The shtick ends and they start talking about the movie at the 5:40 mark. Enjoy, if you’re so inclined.