What I want in the Bat Wardrobe for Batman: Arkham Knight

Sell More Toys!

The Batman Iron Man look just doesn't do it for me. I understand the developers wanted Batman to match the Batmobile, but that's an awful marriage idea. If I was Alfred I wouldn't have advised Bruce to apply chrome shine to the work clothes. It's very Robocop and maybe that's coming full circle since there's a helluva a lot The Dark Knight Returns in the greatest film of 1987! I wish the cape wasn't so far away from the neck. I wish for once outside of comics and traditional animation and Adam West the cape could fully encircle Batman and be attached to the cowl. Gripes aside, I'm greatly anticipating racing through the streets of Gotham in the Bat Tank in Arkham Knight. But that suit...  give me a nomex survival suit any day over the Shining.

Against the Death Penalty

Social Crusader and Sci-Fi Adventurer

How do you make Superman relatable? 

 

If you answered one of the following below than you may have gotten a closer representation of the American icon after viewing last year’s Man of Steel than the one I believe in.

            Chris Cornell background music brooder

            Budweiser beer drinker

            Getting called “dick spaz” as an adolescent

            Letting Dances with Wolves become Dances with Twister

            Jesus (Gotta hit the audience on the head with that one multiple times. Subtlety is lost on Snyder)

            Smile only once in costume

            Snap the villain’s neck (A little at odds with the whole “He’s really Jesus” thing, no?

            Snap the villain’s neck

            Snap the villain’s neck

                   Neck. Snap.

An Honest Stand; Marvel Masterworks: The Black Panther Vol. 1

“HE IS NOT A SYMBOLIC CHRIST! FORGET ABOUT TURNING HIS FLESH AND BLOOD INTO SOME ESOTERIC ALLUSION TO THE PERSECUTION OF CONTEMPORARY MAN… THE FLAMES WHICH CONSUME THE CROSS AND HIS BODY PROVE HIS HUMANITY”—From “A Cross Burning Darkly Blackening the Night!” in Jungle Action #21, May 1976. 

The KKK Can't Take My Baby Away

If Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams helped pave the way for Frank Miller, then Don McGregor, Billy Graham and the rest of the talent behind “Panther’s Rage” and “The Panther Vs. The Klan” set the bar for the much admired literary writers of the Brit Invasion almost a decade later to pursue. There’s no reason why these 18 comics should not be mentioned in the same breath as Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, or Sandman.

Beat on the Bat: 4 Scenes from Batman Begins Part1

Without a doubt The Dark Knight trilogy stands alongside Back to the Future in terms of each film in the series being one of my personal favorites by continuing to astonish me in most aspects of production while never losing my interest during each viewing. Batman Begins is a well of detailed and engrossing character study. Never before was Bruce Wayne treated as sympathetic or heroic in any of the past Burton or Schumacher Batman films as he clearly is in the 2005 reboot. Nolan and crew got it right. No Bat nipples, black ooze spewing Penguin, Alfred letting Vicki into the Batcave, or Batman taking lives! They made sure to keep the focus on Bruce Wayne. As a result they created a great film. Sure it's a great superhero flick, but it didn't really on gimmicks.

I remember purchasing a trade paperback of an assortment of Bat tales at a mall bookstore a couple of years after the film debuted and the elderly cashier woman mentioned that although she never read Batman comics, she quite enjoyed the Batman Begins. So join me as a recollect some of my favorite scenes. I hope they were some of Doris' too. Continue on after the break.

Lyco's Back

You can’t keep a good bastich down for long. Here to  rant, rave, and foam at the mouth with outdated updates for your Pop Culture fix. Here to spike your veins for comics, TV, food (WTF), and games along with me is Special Guest Star, the ever lovable Lobo! As sassy Peter Parker's Aunt May would proclaim, he's a real pussy willow! Stan Lee's favorite DC character... Alzheimer's is a serious issue facing our world. For more information please the Main Man at your own peril after the jump.

1-2-3-4-Beat on the Bat: Favorite Bat Comics Pt1

Coming Soon to a Theater in 2015! Minus the Damon!

Take a chill pill and remember the casting of Michael Keaton for Batman, Heath Ledger as the Joker, Ann Hathaway as Catwoman, and Daniel Craig for James "Blonde". The fan reaction was just a tad ridiculous in hindsight, right? I'll admit Ben wouldn't have been my first choice for an older Batman (Karl Urban), and if WB wanted a Batman who could do a Boston accent flawlessly I'm insulted I wasn't considered despite being too young, but I'll wait and see before assuming Affleck will tank the film. Most of the hate is probably due to wanting to make yourself hate the most popular dude in school. I recently watched The Town I was more than impressed with his directing and acting, which is a feat in and of itself, especially when directing an action film. So don't despair. BATMAN AND ROBIN WILL NEVER DIE! Which is what I plan to prove after the Batsui Bop.

Watching the Detectives: Beware the Batman Ep5 "Broken"

"I am the eggman... goo goo g'joob!"

Lyco the Bat Hound is skipping over episode 4 due to falling so behind, and having Silver Monkey as the guest villain says it all really. Last week’s Humpty Dumpty got rid of the bad taste from the Anarky episode. If Humpty ever surfaces in a live action production Warner Bros. definitely needs to grab Bruce Willis to bring the character’s proper balding pathos to the silver screen. Until then, contend yourselves with Seinfeld’s Newman as the Dumpler!

Watching the Detectives: Beware the Batman Ep2 "Secrets"

Ready for 6 Degrees of Batman? So last week was “Watching the Detective”, an unsubtle pun on the Elvis Costello song and Batman being the World’s Greatest Detective, but since Jim Gordon will play a larger role than last week’s 3 sec sound bite in the series, I might as well succumb to the change. Watching the Detectives is a 2007 direct to video film starring Batman Begins’ Cillian “Scarecrow” Murphy. Lucy Lui’s character can be seen as the magic pixie dream girl who, according to film critic Nathan Rabin after seeing Elizabeth Town, is “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” While I think Lucy Lui’s character in Watching the Detectives gives off that vibe, she’s also into playing mental S&M with the film’s male protagonist. Objectifying women kinda ties in with this week's episode. Another couple of degrees; Kristen Dunst from Elizabeth Town starred in the equally awful Spider-Man 3 with the actor who played the most annoying character in That 70s alongside Kurtwood Smith, voice of Jim Gordon. Smith also played a baddie in Robocop, and the title character, Peter Weller, went on to voice Batman in animated version of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns.

For a significant amount of less name dropping join in after the break.

Magnificent7 Pt4: "Death is a Star" so said Joe

Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus Vol 1

By Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta

Recommended Listening:          Global a Go-Go-Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros (2001)

It’s not easy coming up with companion albums to go with the comics I’ve been reviewing. I’m not getting paid to plug any bands, I don’t consider myself to be a hipster (probably because I don’t even know how to define one) needing to show off my anthems, but for me rock and roll and comics go hand in hand. I’ve always enjoyed listening to music while reading or doing homework when I was in school. Finding a match for essentially The Lord of the Rings of comics had me pretty stumped until today.

Magnificent7 Part 2: Bow Ties are Cool

The Flash: The Greatest Stories Ever Told

By John Broome, Gardner Fox Carmine Infantino, Cary Bates, Mark Waid, various

Recommended Listening:          Born to Run- Bruce Springsteen (1975)

“Together we could break this trap/ We’ll run till we drop, baby we’ll never go back”- Born to Run

Motion, fluidity, and a promise of escape to somewhere better are all that the Flash and the E Street Anthem can offer to you, gentle reader. At first it may seem too obvious a stretch in pairing the two, but to someone who spent high school in a small ignorant town repetitiously and ritually running around a track with lines like “Baby this town rips the bones from your back/ It’s a death trap, it's a suicide rap/ We gotta get out while were young” I hoped I could make it out alive from the Time Bomb High School just a little faster via light speed into a brighter future a million miles from my hometown. Springsteen’s song and the Flash both extend a hand to anyone to run along side them into the unknown, which isn’t what they are running from, but boldly towards.

The Flash’s design and conception is like a butterscotch Fender Telecaster. Elegant and simple in design, yet versatile in doing anything from melancholy doo wop to razor edged punk. The coolest Flash, Barry Allen, broke out in 1956 and on the heels of Rock and Roll. In the 50s and 60s he visually looked someone you'd see on Mad Men. In his crew cut and bow tie he juggled between making deadlines as a forensic scientist and showing up late to dates with his fiancee, who was in the latest fashion. A dashing combination of a nonviolent Dexter and a monogamous Don Draper as Barry, but as the Flash he was chasing the dragon into psychedelia.

Possessing only super speed, Barry Allen can do just about anything his writers imagine and make it believable in a Pop fused SF manner. Grant Morrison once wrote that the Flash has to use his powers like a science fiction writer writes. In most of the Silver Age stories and the ones in this volume, the Flash rarely ever just punches out a non super powered foe, which is lazy and maybe more importantly, recklessly dangerous. As someone who abhors real world violence, it’s always a delight to see a fictional hero intelligently dispose of a villain without using fists.

 It needs 1.21 gigawatts of electricity

If you’re a fan of Doctor Who, then Barry Allen, the Fastest Man Alive, is the other guy in the cool bow for you. Besides always standing up against injustice like the Doctor, in this volume the Flash is also an explorer of time, alternate worlds,, a hidden city of super evolved gorillas, and meta fiction. Barry, just like his readers is a comics fan. He even visited our world and went to the offices of DC Comics in NY to ask the then famous editor, and an architect for revamping many DC properties in the Silver Age, Julie Schwartz for help building a version of his Cosmic Treadmill to return back into his fictional reality.

Once bestowed with superpowers, he never needed a plausible reason to become an altruistic hero other than a childhood of reading simplistic superhero comics from the Golden Age. Of course his favorite was the 1940s’ Flash, Jay Garrick, who he meets in the classic “Flash of Two Worlds”, which introduced the idea of multiple universes existing on different vibrations in the DCU.

A sad trend in many current comics is to provide characters with lost family in order to justify them becoming heroes, but that’s actually quite insulting to at least a few decent paramedics, social workers, 9/11 First Responders, and others around the world with vocations in which they try to do the right thing in life for humanity, and they probably do it without needing to avenge dead relatives.

Running can be an isolating sport. You’re often trying to beat your past glories. You might not even notice your opponents struggling to keep up or outdistance you. The Flash’s race is a relay and a legacy of passing the baton and yellow treads on to another speedster. That legacy and the family created from it runs across the history of the DCU from the rebirth of superheroes in the Silver Age, through the Dark Age when Barry Allen sacrificed himself to save the universe, and helping usher in the Renaissance Age with writer Mark Waid’s character building on Barry’s former kid sidekick, Wally West, and worthy adult inheritor of the lightning bolt sigil.

Although the person in the suit changes every now and then the Flash is always running towards a better tomorrow, which is something that helped me and I hope others to get over hurdles. That was a lame pun, and I apologize. I never did hurdles. I ran long distance, even in winter with shorts and a hoodie, thinking if I kept moving I wouldn’t get cold or bitter. Something that the Flash can teach you that can’t learn from track or cross country is that you don’t get the chance to stretch when it really counts.

"Don't look back"

Magnificent 7 Part 1: Sunny Doomsday

Doom Patrol, Book 1: Crawling from the Wreckage (Original issues from 1989)

Written by Grant Morrison; Art by Richard Case, Doug Braithwaite, 

various

Recommended Listening:          Munki-Jesus and Mary Chain (1998)

Meet the “World’s Strangest Heroes”, the ultimate misfits of society led by their wheelchair bound genius mentor in a fight against the bizarre and meaningless. No, I’m not talking about the X-Men. Technically DP debuted before Marvel’s mutants, and although some comparisons can be made, can you actually picture Wolverine slicing his way through Dadaism? Maybe a little.

The DP takes the “Strangest Heroes” title literally. Cliff Steele is a survivor of brutal car wreck with only his brain intact inside a robot body. Crazy Jane suffers from over 60 split personalities all vying for control, and each with their own superpower. Rebis is a hermaphrodite paradox wrapped in specially coated bandages to hold in its radioactive Negative Spirit. 

Having first read their odd adventures during my initial year living in Japan, I could find myself relating more to the DP’s newest ape faced teen sweetheart recruit, Dorothy Spinner than to seXy-Men Gambit, Logan, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, and the rest.

"Walk, Don't Run" with scissors

As part of their duties the DP courts the totally weird. The series is filled with fever dreamed images that will stay with you for a long time. Although an experiment in Dadaism (Video of Morrison’s writing process during the run), you don’t need to regret not paying attention to the boring lecture and slideshow from Art History 101 in order to understand what the hell is happening in the stories. Sometimes you don’t need to understand everything because it doesn’t need to be realistic. It’s a comic! It’s not real! 

 That isn’t to dismiss comics as not being artistic (There’s often more creativity on a single page of DP than in many other books or films), but the emphasis in the late 80s at the time was on how to make superheroes as realistic as possible, which is interesting for a few stories, but has been hammered to death, and isn’t a healthy approach to these impossible characters. What is plausible are the emotions and reactions of the characters in Doom Patrol, which is all you need to jump into the absurdity.

The team is a metaphor for traumatized and handicap individuals, but instead of being depressed and suicidal the heroes are able to actually cope. It’s a process that isn’t made light of, but the possibility is in reach when their working as a team. By realizing that they haven’t been destroyed through their own self doubt they can see life through all its randomness.

Despite the serious issues that come up in the series, in no way is this isn’t your average joyless dark 80s comic. The characters like many real survivors of misfortunes can make fun of their own handicaps and see the absurdity in and around their situation. Cliff “Brain in a Robot” Steele is in a similar mold to the Fantastic Four’s The Thing, a man stuck in a rocky exterior with a similar jaw line. Cliff is a lovable roughneck, leather wearing Tin Man whose heart figuratively also survived the crash. The DP’s Chief has a constant craving for chocolate, presumably to help boost his genius inventions and research. Dorothy Spinner is the Judy Garland of the team, who due to her facial deformity only had imaginary friends. Eventually she said goodbye to those friends with an imaginary shotgun Old Yeller style. The DP characters’ relationships with each other are tender and never feel forced or hokey as they search for an OZ of their own.

Crawling from the Wreckage does what it says. Imagine surviving your own worst apocalypse. What do you do next? Life will always have something stranger to throw at you

.

Just Another Cosmic Pooch

Name:                          Lyco Barks

Notable Aliases:           Ranak

                                   Darkness on the Edge of Town

                                    狂犬

Attended:                    Punk Rock Church

Workplace:                  Clubs and the Cosmos

Hungry Heart

Who is this pretentious goofball? Goofy I am. I’ll be the first to shoot my own ego down. But don’t let that stop anyone out there from giving me some kicks. This pup can take it.

I’m a proud resident of Hope Street and a true believer in the power of fictional superheroes. I’ve learned more from a 22 page comic and “a 3 minute record” than I “ever learned in school” (Springsteen, 1984). I’m also the lead singer and rhythm guitarist in a Japanese Ramones cover band, though we’re looking into doing some original tunes. Occasionally I moonlight as a chaos magician and mystify drunk salary men with my tarot.

I want to kindly thank the Nerd for extending the invitation to write on his arbitrary blog. I look forward to leaving future scribbles of hopefully worthy additions of insights into arbitrariness. There’s plenty of randomness going on in my head to share. 

Space is a valuable commodity

I’m too humble or lack the moxy to claim to be a master of all things DC, though sometimes I like to think I’m PreNew52’s Tim “Robin III” Drake’s biggest fan and that I’ve seen and read every Grant Morrison interview I could find. I would probably own Gardner Fox’s entire Silver Age Justice League run or all the Jack Kirby Omnibuses if only international shipping rates were cheaper on Amazon.

One of the pitfalls of living in Manga Land Japan is limited access to U.S. comics. I’ve scoured a country a little smaller than California for the allusive American consumer product. I manage to get my monthly fix from digital comics with their gorgeous backlighting on a computer screen. Currently I’m enjoying Batman Inc, Justice League, Justice League of America, Wonder Woman, but might be picking up  forthcoming Justice League Dark issues after liking Pete Milligan’s opening arc, and catching up on Animal Man.

Although I love DC and quite a few Vertigo books, Marvel isn’t a neglected child in my eyes. I adore the first fifty issues of Amazing Spider-Man, Chris Claremont’s X-Men, Life of Captain Marvel, The Kree-Skrull War, and other great past and recent stories.

 Other interests I’ll probably be exploring at a later date are Kurosawa films, Mad Max, TV’s The Prisoner, Anime’s Darker than Black and Occult Academy, and maybe anything that might be connected fundamentally with Bruce Springsteen. No, I’m not from Jersey, but I usually picture Gotham City there.

  

 For the immediate future I’ll be reviewing Grant Morrison’s recently completed Action Comics, Geoff Johns’ Shazam backups from Justice League, and Wonder Woman beginning from #15 and onwards.

First up, I’ll be doing a 7 part series of suggested introductory collections to new and recent readers of the expansive DC Universe outside of Superman and Batman.

           Be seeing you.