Batman: Killing Time

batman killing time

Batman is probably my favorite comic book character (I go back and forth between him and the X-Men – which I know is a group of characters, but you’ll just have to deal with that.) I love that he doesn’t have any true superpowers, I love that he’s often more detective than superhero, and he has a great Rogue’s Gallery of villains.

I realize I don’t talk about comics all that much in these pages, but I like the idea of writing more small reviews and telling personal stories. I want to make this old blog more of a blog. Maybe. Tomorrow I’ll probably change my mind, but for now I’m talking about Batman.

Batman: Killing Time is a limited series written by Tom King and illustrated by David Marquez. It begins with three villains – The Penguin, The Riddler, and Catwoman, who pull off the heist of the century. But then they immediately begin double crossing one another. It is up to Batman to put the clues together and pick up the pieces.

King tells the story with an off-kilter timeline. He does this thing where he’ll start a page with the date and a specific time, and then on the next page he’ll tell us it is exactly 1 hour and fifteen minutes later or whatever. Back and forth, back and forth, each pages, sometimes multiple times a page the time changes. Sometimes he’ll go back hundreds, thousands of years to tell us a little mythology. This mostly ties together in an interesting way by the conclusion, but it is also a little confusing.

At some point a new villain, The Help, is introduced. He’s kind of like Alfred from the Pennyworth TV series (which I quite liked and recommend) in that he’s got an English butler vibe but with loads of combat training). He’s an interesting character, but then he just kind of disappears. That’s about the time a foul mouthed US agent shows up who’s ready to wipe everybody out if the secret, possibly magical MacGuffin gets into the wrong hands.

The story is fine. It isn’t anything special, but it worked well enough for me. The mastermind of the whole thing is apparently some obscure villain that hasn’t been seen in the comics for a long time. I didn’t know him, but the character makes sense within the context of the story and I liked him. But I’d be hard pressed to give you the details of what happened now that I’ve finished it.

The artwork is excellent. One of the things I love about Batman comics is that the artwork often has a noir feel to it and that’s implemented here to great effect.

Overall, a quite good comic. Not Batman’s best, but well worth the read.

Five Cool Things and The Mandalorian and Grogu

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I just wrote my new Five Cool Things for Cinema Sentries which you can read here. Of course I’ve written lots of other things for Cinema Sentries since I started taking a break on this blog. I’ll try to regularly post those and then go back and post all the other things I’ve written for them and never posted here. Plus some new stuff as well.

Five Cool Things and Sturgill Simpson Performing “Ripple”

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I forgot to post this last week. But the Five Cool things included the excellent Max series The Pitt, a very cool comic collection of Batman: Earth One, Season One of the wonderful Apple+ series Slow Horses, the also excellent Apple+ series Ted Lasso, a new collection of film noirs from Kino Lorber and Sturgill Simpson performing “Ripple” with an old recording of Jerry Garcia.

You can read all about it here.

Animation in August: Batman: Year One (2011)

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Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One comic from 1987 is one of the greatest comic book stories of all time. It traces Bruce Wayne’s transformation into the vigilante known as Batman while simultaneously tracing Jim Gordon’s first year policing in Gotham.

It partially inspired Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) and has influenced countless comics since it was published.

For well over a decade DC has been creating straight-to-video animated movies that are adapted from some of their best and well-known comics (or periodically are original creations). I’ve seen a few and I mostly like them. They often involve A-list actors and creators and exist somewhere between what you’d normally think of as a straight-to-video release and true made-for-the-theater cinematic experience.

It has been far too long since I read the comic, so I can’t say how closely this adaptation follows the story, but from what I’ve read online it does indeed follow it closely. Perhaps too closely. A good adaption needs to let go of the source material in some ways so that it can allow cinema’s strengths to shine through.

Bruce Wayne (Ben McKenzie) returns to Gotham City after a 12-year absence. He’s still mourning the loss of his parents and his one goal is to enact the type of justice the police force seems incapable of granting.

Police Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Bryan Cranston) has just transferred to Gotham. He left his last post because he dared to take down a corrupt cop and the rest of the police force shunned him for it. Gotham Police isn’t just a place with a few bad apples. It has a basket full of them. Hell, the entire tree is corrupt from top to bottom. Police Commissioner Loeb (Jon Polito) is openly corrupt.

The film follows Bruce Wayne as he becomes Batman and fights crime in Gotham, while Gordon battles corruption on the police force.

It is pretty good. Again my memory of the book is too fuzzy to really compare, but I do know I loved the book and I didn’t love this. It is a fine story told well. Cranston especially is good as Gordon. The animation is fine. The action sequences are well-developed. But it never wowed me. I’d never recommend this over the comic.

Batman: Assault on Arkham

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It is funny to me now, but when I watched and reviewed this movie I had no idea what the Suicide Squad was, nor hardly any of the characters who made up the Squad (including Deadshot and Killer Frost). Now of course the Suicide Squad has had a couple of major live-action movies made about them and are a household name. But then they were just comic book characters.

The movie is pretty good. DC had done a great job making all sorts of animated feature films, many of which are better than the live-action ones they’ve put on the big screen.

You can read my full review here.

Beware the Batman: Shadows of Gotham, Season 1 Part 1

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Batman is probably my favorite superhero. I love that he doesn’t have superpowers. He can’t fly, he doesn’t have super strength. He can’t shoot rays out of his eyes, etc. He is very strong and well-trained, but he’s still very much a regular human. There have been lots of reiterations of him on the big screen and the small, not to mention all the different comics.

Beware the Batman was a short-lived television series that aired on the Cartoon Network. I reviewed it back in 2014 and now you can read it here.

The Birthday Haul

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As I mentioned in today’s bootleg post it is my birthday. Birthdays aren’t a big deal to me, so we didn’t do anything too exciting. We had plans to see Bill Frisell in a little club, which would have been awesome, but the budget has been tight of late, so that wasn’t in the works.

Instead, the wife bought me a few gifts and it was a lovely day and we went to the park. The daffodils were blooming and they were wonderful.

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy day, it was a good one.