batman: the killing joke (comic 1988)
writer: alan moore
artist: brian bolland
batman: the killing joke (movie 2016)
“hello. i came to talk. i’ve been thinking lately. about you and me. about what’s going to happen to us, in the end. we’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? perhaps you’ll kill me. perhaps i’ll kill you. perhaps sooner. perhaps later. i just wanted to know that i’d made a genuine attempt to talk things over and avert that outcome. just once.”
was it morally reprehensible?
yes.
but was it a bad movie?
… also yes.
so, obviously i have my problems with the graphic novel. and obviously a lot of those problems are going to be baked into any adaptation of it. i’ll grant you that. i mean, those seem like great reasons to not adapt that particular comic, but i suppose that’s asking for too much.
but to recognize that one of the biggest complaints about the source material is that it treats barbara like a prop rather than a character, and to say “don’t worry, we got this” and add an extended prologue where batman and batgirl are fucking and think you fixed it is … yeah. that’s… a thing you can do, i guess?
you guys understand that the reason we have a problem with fridging is that it sacrifices female characters for the sake of male characters’ angst, right? and giving batman an additional reason to be upset about the attack on barbara … is not an improvement in that regard … right…?
right…??? guys…???? c-rank
justice league dark (film 2017)
more like justice league DORK amirite?
the good:
batman recruiting spooky bois!!!! (and zatanna.)
lots of magic!!! i don’t always agree with how it’s depicted but i’m a slut for magic, and the imagery in this one at the very least is often cool and a nice change of pace at the very least.
zatanna one-shots supes AND wonder woman, which i’m HERE FOR, but i’m gonna need them to follow up on this by having her be canonically stronger than them or at least this being addressed in some form DO IT YOU COWARDS. (they’re not gonna do it.)
swamp thing is a good boy!!!
the not so good:
the beginning is ROUGH. like, i’m pretty sure you coulda established the same stakes without showing a lady about to murder her baby or a dude about to murder his family etc. seriously these movies go way edgier than they need to sometimes for the stories they’re telling.
constantine is a HUGE dick which i don’t entirely mind because i have no particular attachment to the character, but the movie lets him get away with a few things i wish it hadn’t, especially mansplaining to zantanna way, way more than anyone ever should.
anyway, i mostly like it! just feels like it wouldn’t take much to be one of the best in the catalog instead of just another one. c-rank
the new teen titans: the judas contract (comic 1984)
writers: marv wolfman & george pérez
artists: romeo tanghal & george pérez
teen titans: the judas contract (movie 2017)
“ooh, i’m gonna sign up for this thing called ‘tweeter.’ you put up what you’re thinking like, ‘i love pizza,’ or ‘i’m having pizza now,’ or even ‘pizza is awesome!’”
another one where i saw the movie before i read the comic. when i finally read the comic it ended up feeling like a more bare-bones version of the movie with cornier dialogue.
it was cool to see dick’s debut as nightwing, but that was actually kinda infuriatingly- written? like, he decides he needs to sort out his whole superhero identity shit before he can go rescue his friends who are in mortal danger? just… what the heck, dick???
i liked the movie version a lot better, honestly. mostly down to there being a lot more “there” there when it comes to characterization. the plot also feels quite a bit more coherent while still hitting a lot of the same landmarks.
i also liked the team composition a lot more in the movie, which is basically just a continuation of the team and relationships from justice league vs. teen titans. having damian there in particular really added a lot.
there’s also just… a lot in terra’s characterization that i didn’t like in the comic, especially towards the end. although it has its issues (which we’ll come back to shortly), having the general idea be that slade was grooming her makes a lot more sense than going out of your way to say that she was evil the whole time and deserves no sympathy.
just… people can do bad things and still be victims, guys. you don’t need to be an angel to deserve the safety of not being preyed upon by gross older men.
i really could’ve done without the entire “pressure makes diamonds” bullshit in the movie, though. you are a movie that LITERALLY shows someone having ptsd flashbacks and having everyone else immediately get it because THEY’VE had ptsd flashbacks.
trauma doesn’t make people great. trauma reveals the greatness that was already there, and which would have flourished in a nurturing, loving environment. and there are plenty of people who ARE destroyed by trauma, and that doesn’t mean they were weak or not special enough or whatever the fuck. it’s all circumstance. and there’s nothing good about it.
i get that it’s tempting to see a silver lining in things that suck, but this kind of thinking can EASILY slide into abuse apologism, “i just wanted you to be the best you could be” etc and i think it’s really important to challenge it whenever it appears.
showing slade to be a grooming piece of shit is not necessarily automatically the wrong thing to do, but like a lot of these movies that get into edgier territory the movie just didn’t punish him enough if that’s where they were gonna go. his bullshit quip about there “not being a lot of grey” in terra’s betrayal of the titans applies pretty directly to him. grooming is a kind of evil you just fucking don’t come back from. taking someone vulnerable and knowingly manipulating and victimizing them... when you’re willing to do that kind of shit, you are the fucking worst kind of evil, and you need to be unambiguously ended, not buried in rubble and shuffled offscreen so you can probably come back in a few movies.
having terra kill herself after all that is just the icing on this bad idea cake. i fucking hate all of this.
... so here’s why i like the movie anyway.
nightwing and robin’s relationship has fucking ruled in all of these movies, but this movie takes it to a new level. robin congratulating nightwing on moving in with starfire in a stiff, overly formal way was just so godsdamned precious. he’s trying so hard, he’s such a good boy! at this point i think i’m just the president of the damian wayne fanclub, at least in these movies.
speaking of damian being the best, him bratting at slade absolutely ruled.
speaking of bratting, the movie basically confirmed multiple times that nightwing is a bottom, and especially in the context of his relationship with starfire. like, she got him all flustered several times, and to top it all off at one point she literally tackled him onto a couch and called him a brat. dick grayson continues to be the most intensely relatable character for me.
i know she was basically the centerpiece of the last movie but the movie version didn’t have nearly enough raven for my tastes? it did somewhat make up for that by having her deliver the final blow to blood, but yeah. at least there was plenty of beast boy and blue beetle. they’re such good boys!
and, yeah, the fight scenes mostly ruled, especially dick versus slade. which was lifted more or less directly from the comic in terms of scenario, but expanded upon and executed so well it was honestly one of the best fights of the entire movie series.
so like... as much as there are a few big picture things to complain about, i enjoyed probably 90% of the movie’s runtime? it’s just that the things i didn’t like were extremely deep tissue so it’s kind of always a little hard to figure out what to do with that. comic: c-rank; movie: b-rank
batman and harley quinn (movie 2017)
“friends don’t let friends kill 7,000,000,000 people.”
actually, i quite liked this one this time!
like, i still stand by a lot of what i said in my more negative review. it still woulda been better if it had been a harley & ivy movie. i still hate that harley wanted ivy to turn herself in. her argument shoulda been “this plan sucks, let’s ditch these dumb boys, live to fight another day and come up with a better one.”
and i still hate that it doesn’t acknowledge harley and ivy’s EXTREMELY OBVIOUS gayness for each other.
i also still really wish it had marginalized bats and nightwing more (and i’m still not convinced it needed bats at all, but nightwing can definitely stay), but it was basically a harley movie honestly. they probably just didn’t have the guts to let it fully be a harley movie because they’re still convinced they need bats’ name on it to put butts in seats.
i reeeeally didn’t like the way usually good boy nightwing approached harley for help, but she puts him in his place pretty thoroughly at least. and wow every version of this guy is just the bottomiest bottom ever, huh? i guess i was still a little defensive from what they did to barbara in the prologue of a killing joke last time i saw this, which is understandable, but yeah. the sex scene rly didn’t bother me this time.
idk! i was a lot more grumpy about this on the whole last time. this time, while there were still a few things that really rubbed me the wrong way, i felt like it was a pretty terrific movie on the whole. one of my favorites of this series, even. a-rank
batman: gotham by gaslight (comic 1989)
writer: brian augustyn
artists: mike mignola & p. craig russell
batman: gotham by gaslight (movie 2018)
“listen carefully, kitten. i’m many things, but i’m nobody’s pet.”
i saw the movie before i read the comic. it was way better than i expected it to be!!
the entire idea of placing batman in a different setting is a lot of fun, and “batman vs. jack the ripper” is definitely an awesomely bananas direction to go with that.
the way most of the characters in the movie were integrated into the victorian setting really added to the fun. dick, tim, and jason as an orphan gang under the thumb of a criminal until batman liberates and adopts them, catwoman as a stage actress who moonlights as a masked avenger of women.
i did also love ivy as a sex worker, but didn’t love her being unceremoniously offed. i get that that’s kind of the entire thing with jack the ripper, but it feels like there are plenty of ways around that.
the comic, on the other hand, just didn’t really have nearly as much going for it.
i know the movie owes its overall idea to the movie, and it’s kind of the two stories from the comic smushed together into one story with more characters added, but i really liked how the movie fleshed things out. the comic just felt really lacking by comparison, and didn’t capture my interest in nearly the same way. comic: c-rank; movie: b-rank
suicide squad: hell to pay (movie 2018)
this was pretty good moment-to-moment, but also not really super memorable. like, it kept me entertained while i was watching it, but i kind of don’t have anything to say about it? it was just kinda there.
reverse flash using the speed force to continue balling despite literally having a gaping hole in his head was badass, though. and scandal savage and blockbuster are explicitly gay and are basically lesbian bullies and i kinda super want them to lesbian bully me!! please? c-rank
superman: the death of superman (comic 1992-93)
superman: funeral for a friend (comic 1993)
superman: reign of the supermen (comic 1993)
superman: the return of superman (comic 1993)
writers: dan jurgens & louise simonson & roger stern & others
artists: various
the death of superman (movie 2018)
reign of the superman (movie 2019)
“your rampage ends here, doomsday! even if it kills me.”
it was basically impossible to be a kid who liked superheroes in the 90s and not know about at least two storylines: bane breaking batman’s back, and doomsday killing superman. i was a much bigger batman fan, so i read basically all of knightfall and knightsend, and bits and pieces of knightquest. the death and return of superman, though, i only really read the issue where superman actually dies and a few issues of reign of the supermen. i also had a like… junior novelization of the whole arc? it glossed over a lot and streamlined the whole thing, but i got a general idea of the story as a whole from it.
so i finally read it, and… yeah, wow, it was rough at times. the actual fight between supes and doomsday is the only really good thing about the death of superman, and it was pretty good. funeral for a friend was just… kind of genuinely awful? like, i frequently found myself bored and tempted to just skim through the issues just to get through them faster. things got way better with reign of the supermen and the return of superman. those were genuinely compelling, though i still found the lex/supergirl stuff extremely missable. i loved superboy and steel, though. i kind of want to go out of my way to read more stories about them in the future.
i still hadn’t read the comics when i sat down to watch the two newer adaptations for the first time, but i definitely enjoyed them. they were a much more faithful adaptation of this arc than superman: doomsday, though they still had their departures. i especially didn’t really like that they changed the fight between superman and doomsday to start in metropolis rather than being an epic battle across america with superman getting increasingly desperate to stop him the closer they got to his city.
still, it was nice to see superboy, steel, eradicator, and cyborg, and a lot of other elements that were entirely absent in superman: doomsday. and i think they did a really good job of adapting the broad strokes of the story into a movie. i even like some of the changes they made, like replacing that weird lex clone or whatever the heck was going on there with just the normal lex, and kind of mushing supergirl and superboy’s stories into one story minus the sexual overtones.
i was a bit caught off guard by how bad the comics were considering how consistently great knightfall and knightsend were, but they had their moments. and i really did like the movies quite a bit. even though i did miss some of the details from the comics that were left out, i’d go so far as to say the movies are probably the best way to experience this story. death of superman: c-rank; funeral for a friend: d-rank; reign of the supermen: b-rank; return of superman: b-rank; movies: b-rank
justice league vs. the fatal five (movie 2019)
“no offense to anyone here, but… star boy is my hero.”
i haven’t seen much of the justice league cartoon series from back in the day, just the multi-part origin episode and a few other scattered episodes here and there. so this didn’t mean as much to me as any of the batman: the animated series revivals they’ve done for a few of these. heck, even if i had seen more of the series, i doubt it could’ve meant as much, but you know what i mean.
on that note, i do think the dream/memory sequence in this goes… way too edgy to be believably part of the same dcau as the aforementioned series? if you’re going to do a revival of those, it just doesn’t make much sense to me to go so hard against the tone of the source material. and the movie had already done a perfectly fine job of establishing that jessica was going through some shit. for as good as this movie is at times at showing characters struggling with mental health problems, it sure did fall into the trap that so often happens when shows/movies try to depict a character dealing with trauma. we don’t need to see the event that caused the trauma!
still, i liked this a lot better than i thought i was going to! and i especially loved the characterization of the aforementioned jessica cruz/green lantern! it had a kind of depth i just don’t generally expect in stories like this. and while it is a bit surprising to see a dc animated movie like this do a good job of depicting a hero with ptsd, it was even more astounding to see it do a good job of depicting one with schizophrenia! i love star boy! and that is just… not a bridge i really usually expect these kinds of movies to be willing to cross? even a lot of people who are very vocally supportive of neurodiverse people will often draw the line at “scarier”-sounding diagnoses like schizophrenia due to misunderstandings and the prevailing stigma surrounding them.
before i get too carried away, i should say that i do hate that star boy had to sacrifice himself to save the day. it didn’t undo everything good about how his character was depicted or anything, but it sure did feel unnecessary.
but, yeah! i had basically 0 expectations for this one, and it’s probably one of my favorite justice league movies! so that’s pretty cool. b-rank
batman: hush (comic 2002-03)
writer: jeph loeb
artists: jim lee & scott williams
batman: hush (movie 2019)
“we’ve done this dance for a long time. too long. aren’t you at all curious?”
i’ve been a batman/catwoman shipper since before i knew that shipping was a thing, so obviously i loved this. the movie makes a few departures from the comic to fit it in with the dcamu continuity, but i think it does a pretty great job of adapting the spirit of the comic. the only change i disagreed with pretty strongly was using bane instead of killer croc, but it didn’t ruin the movie or anything. it just felt like a pretty unnecessary change.
ivy being blatantly femdommy, and bisexual at that, was extremely, extremely, extremely my jam. yes please. more of that, please. a-rank
wonder woman: bloodlines (movie 2019)
“everyone gets to decide what they want to do with their life. i might not succeed, but this is what i choose to try.”
omg a wonder woman movie about her, y’know, just being wonder woman and stuff! we do get an abbreviated origin story crammed in there because of course we do, but it’s used to establish the purple healing ray and her relationship with vanessa, so i’ll allow it.
this one sees diana take on quite a few members of her rogues gallery, i think a total of six unless i’m forgetting anyone? but it nevertheless has plenty of time for some awesome characterization for diana and a lot of the other characters. so that’s awesome.
i mostly like this version of etta. i was so excited that she was thirsty for amazons and ended up hooking up with at least two of them from the look of things! her characterization did veer a little closer to sassy black friend than i think is strictly advisable, but it honestly gels pretty well with how she’s often characterizated lately even when she’s white? and fuck, man, i’m not gonna complain too hard about having confident black lesbians in something this mainstream.
seriously, though, this was awesome. this is basically the wonder woman movie i’ve been begging for for years. a-rank
superman: red son (comic 2003)
writer: mark millar
artists: various
superman: red son (movie 2020)
“i don’t blame those among you that fear me, for you’ve been taught to fear all your lives. and if you learn nothing else today, learn this. we in the soviet union do not oppose the citizens of the united states. we only oppose the government that oppresses you. our sole desire is for peace and equality among all men.”
i mean, you knew i’d have stuff to say about this one. let’s not kid ourselves.
to dispense with the obvious, no this isn’t a fair portrayal of the soviet union. not that that’s necessarily ever going to be the point of a superhero story, but look at how your average superman comic treats the united states. clark’s entire deal is “truth, justice and the american way.” you don’t get a lot of pages devoted to imperialist aggression or mass incarceration. also like, yeah i’m not about to pretend the soviet union was perfect, but the version of “history” on display here is like victims of communism memorial foundation-level propagandizing.
the movie inherits a lot of the same problems as the comic, and even at times portrays some of the more problematic distortions of history in even more vivid detail… but in a lot of ways it’s actually drastically better until it isn’t???
for one thing, superman’s dedication to actual communist principles is demonstrated much more effectively through changes both small and massive. like, his public appearance early in the story is just some random demonstration in the comic, but in the movie it’s the unveiling of a new hydroelectric dam that superman helped build. and when he’s given what he considers an undue amount of credit for the project’s success, he actively pushes the credit back on to everyone who was working with him. and throughout the film, we see him earnestly expressing actual communist ideals.
quite a bit is also done to humanize superman in the film. we see flashbacks to his childhood, which is completely absent in the comic. and we also get quite a bit more fleshing out in his relationship with wonder woman, which is way better than the comic… until it isn’t. but we’ll get back to that. supes and wonder woman meet, immediately form a bond, supes assumes wondie wants him to bed her and she’s like whoa hi no when he goes to kiss her, and he’s actually relieved??? and she says “i come from an island of all women. work it out for yourself,” which is just an incredible line, thank you for that! and the two agree to become friends and their relationship becomes even warmer from that point on.
honestly, if you look at superman as an actual expression of the highest ideals of communism struggling against some of the internal contradictions that–combined with western interference–ultimately doomed the soviet union, this would be a good movie up until that point. yeah, there were some pretty wild distortions of history to set up that conflict, but it’s not completely wrong?
it’s… also not completely clear to me how he got from there to having dissidents turned into cyborg slaves. that jumped out less as weird in the comic because everything was weird and wrong, but it was kind of funny that early in the movie i basically said out loud “i wonder how they’re going to get from here to the whole cyborg slave thing” and they just… there wasn’t a “getting there.” it was just like, “oh, okay, we’re doing this now.” i guess the writers of both the comic and movie think it’s just a natural thing to put in your warped communism metaphor and there’s no reason whatsoever to explain it. i don’t know. it’s just kind of hilariously bad.
even at this point, superman isn’t entirely demonized by the movie? he refuses brainiac’s urging to invade the u.s., and it isn’t until the u.s. attacks with their reverse-engineered green lanterns that he responds. and after defeating the lanterns, he goes right to the white house, right to lex. right to the heart of the problem.
oh, let’s talk about this movie’s incredibly strange brand of, uh, “feminism”?
when superman announces his intentions after rescuing metropolis from the falling satellite, lois demands “what about women?” and like, hey lois? i think if we applied a fine-tooth comb we might find one or two or ten thousand ways in which the u.s. was far behind the soviet union in that department at the time?
it’s a totally fair thing to fight for within the revolution, but an absolutely ludicrous thing to try to use to discredit it from the outside. and like… wonder woman, like superman, devolves into a total caricature of herself late in the movie and fully like 90% of her lines become about how men are evil and it’s just… it’s just weird. and uncomfortable. and not earned by the narrative at all.
honestly, even though parts of it are just ridiculously bad, even the latter portions of the movie could be read as a metaphor for how decisionmaking in the soviet union became increasingly centralized and the average person became disengaged with the revolution, until eventually they could only watch helplessly as the soviet union was dissolved, the revolution ended, with no recourse but to try to live in a world that suddenly had one fewer beacon of hope.
superman was right when he and his comrades built that dam. we don’t need a single hero we can look up to to solve all our problems, we need to solve them together. and that’s why no matter what, we will keep fighting. comic: c-rank; movie: b-rank
final crisis (comic 2008-09)
writer: grant morrison
artists: various
justice league: the darkseid war (comic 2015-16)
writer: geoff johns
artists: jason fabok & gary frank
the new 52: futures end (comic 2014-15)
writers: brian azzarello & keith giffen & dan jurgens & jeff lemire
artists: various
“all is one in darkseid. the mighty body is my church. when i command your surrender, i speak with three billion voices.”
i read all of these in preparation for apokolips war because according to wikipedia it was based in part on all of them, and it ended up having basically nothing to do with any of them? like, i genuinely have no idea on what grounds they consider it to have been based on these comics? it wouldn’t have even gotten a “suggested by” credit in my book.
let’s start with final crisis. y’all know i love me some grant morrison, but this was definitely not my favorite of his that i’ve read so far. there was stuff i liked about it, like especially some of the green lantern stuff and the stuff with all the main justice league members becoming dark gods or whatever, but this is largely a case of me really enjoying the setup a whole lot more than the payoff. it just ultimately got a bit too esoteric for my tastes.
darkseid war was awesome. it wasn’t on the same level as some of the earlier new 52 stuff i’ve read recently, but it’s easily my favorite of these three stories. and grail just walking through the justice league repeatedly is uncomfortably hot. she gave me several gay crises. i also really enjoyed seeing the justice league just… doing a murder investigation towards the beginning. that was a really cool hook into the story, though i did appreciate them calling out the fact that normally they wouldn’t have the entire justice league doing something that mundane. again, i loved all the green lantern stuff, especially jessica becoming a lantern. out of all of these, i’d say this one had the most “there” there.
while the first two were at least interesting and short enough to be digestible, futures end was a 48-issue… they call it a miniseries, but i categorically refuse to call an event that long a “mini” anything. on top of that it is just a slog of repetitive storytelling that doles out information in a torturous slow drip and never really gives me a single good reason to care. it was published weekly, and it shows.
so, uh, yeah! again, not really sure how apokolips war was “based on” these. like, they had batman sitting in the mobius chair like in final crisis, but it didn’t turn him into the god of knowledge, he was just kinda darkseid’s right hand minion? hell, darkseid wasn’t even in futures end. shrug! final crisis: c-rank; darkseid war: b-rank; futures end: d-rank
justice league dark: apokolips war (movie 2020)
“king shark is a shark!”
when i was a more serious superhero fan, i considered the mcu the gold standard for live-action superhero movies, and the dc universe original movies the same for animated superhero movies. it’s not difficult to see why. and i don’t think it’s out of line to say that the storytelling of the dcamu was heavily inspired by the mcu.
(if i wanted to be out of line i would say the dcamu is drastically better, which it is, but that’s not my point right at this exact moment and also these are not the kinds of arguments i care about anymore.)
moreover, i think apokolips war in particular is pretty blatantly inspired by infinity war and endgame, which makes sense with the latter having come out just a year beforehand.
given that the dceu has never really managed to get its feet under it the way the mcu did, it makes sense that their less well-known animated films which have consistently impressed both fans and critics is where they got to have their infinity war/endgame. it’s a massive crossover with a dizzying number of characters having at least an extended cameo, it has impossibly high stakes, and every single hero needs to throw their everything into it. people die, people are depowered, relationships are consummated or sundered. it is, in every sense of the word, climactic.
obviously some of the more grimdark elements of it are not precisely my cup of tea, nor do i particularly care for its apparent “it’s complicated” stance on abusive parents. but this is still drastically more interesting than any of the comics it’s based on? (aside from its lack of grail. how can you do a new 52 cataclysm and not give me the steppy queer-looking amazon who steps on everyone???) and in spite of its aforementioned grimdark elements, it mostly maintains a hopeful tone? this is a story about people who are going to go down fighting no matter what.
oh, and like. damian wayne is ultimately one of the biggest damn heroes of this entire continuity, suck it nerds. and i love, love, love his relationship with raven omg. it was such a slow burn but seeing it culminate and seeing them be there for each other is just… yes!!
on a much more superficial note, it has That Scene with constantine and king shark, and king shark is looking hot af. and the suicide squad is so much better off without waller.
seriously, this was awesome. i’m glad the dcamu got a definitive ending, and while there are definitely movies in the series i like a whole lot more than this one, i really do appreciate a lot of the choices it made. b-rank
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