The Wonder-Bat-Bra in action.

The joke’s on us.

The Joker (voiced by Mark Hamill) intends to prove once and for all that even the most stable person is merely “one bad day” away from madness, so kidnaps Commissioner Gordon whilst maiming his daughter Barbara in front of him, and runs the Commissioner through a gamut of torture designed to tip him into lunacy, thus explicating the Joker’s own mindset, mayhaps mitigating his past crimes.

At the same time, The Batman (voiced by Kevin Conroy) is on a mission to reach out a guiding hand to Joker, knowing that their decades of sparring will only lead to one of their deaths, seeking to save them both psychologically and physically.

The Killing Joke is a celebrated 1988 graphic novel (it fueled the thematic grist behind Christopher Nolan’s THE DARK KNIGHT). Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland, it offers an empathetic origin tale for the Joker, also portraying Batman as self-aware of the endgame of being pitted against the same irreconcilable foe for so long. Rather than going through the futile motions of apprehending The Joker through bat-punching, he tries to bring closure to what has become an ongoing, irrational feud.

The writing is terse and layered, the artistry gripping. 28 years later, comes the animated movie based on the graphic novel…

The story is here, word for word, but the rancid cartooning shamefully shits all over the blood and sweat that Moore and Bolland put into their art.

“First of all, I realize this is probably not how you thought this story would start…”

You got that right, girlie! A female narrator opens BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE, the 2016 animated film of the graphic novel. It becomes apparent immediately that the female is Batgirl/Barbara Gordon (voiced by Tara Strong), as she glides into view over Gotham rooftops… So, uh, this movie is from her point of view? Already, any fan of the comicbook will have their doubts. Because Barbara is merely a victim cameo in The Killing Joke, a story specifically told from the Joker’s point of view…

Batgirl narrates, “I’ve been with Batman for three years…” Okaaaay…

Seems that KILLING JOKE mashes together the titular graphic novel and Batgirl Special #1 (also published 1988). Two reasons: Killing Joke was not long enough for a feature film, and adding backstory to Barbara Gordon gives her brutal assault by the Joker more weight. Trouble is, the Batgirl throughline is not integrated very – ahem – artfully. Writer Brian Azzarello is the man tasked to mesh these two comics, and he spends the whole first half-hour on Batgirl getting her panties in a knot over the men in her life – Paris (Maury Sterling), a dreamboat criminal who objectifies her, and Batman, who bosses her around until she’s dizzy with sexual repression. There is no foreshadowing at all that the Joker will take up the narrative later, not one shot of what he is doing or how he is connected to this tale, all our attention focused on Batgirl’s perfectly-rounded tey-teys and the sexual tension building like a tsunami between her and Batman, so thick you could boing it with a batarang.

And then the wave breaks, as Batgirl fights Batman and finds herself inadvertently on top of him… She looks down at him angrily, while his face is impassive as he lets himself be held down. Suddenly, her eyes go from fury to slight shock – I’m presuming that’s when she feels his erection beneath her bat-lap? Because she leans down swiftly and kisses him – and there’s a shot of Batman’s hand almost-caressing her tight little behind. Then she pulls off her top – dammit, there’s a bra! – and goes to town as the camera pans away.

It is definitely an adult-themed story, not just for its graphic violence, but for its humanizing, layered themes – and it somehow comes off as more brutal in animated form than the printed panels. The first R-rated Batman movie in the United States… but sorry, boyz – still no Bat-titties…

As soon as The Joker appears, the focus skews to his backstory. It’s like a bucket of cold water to our laps, as it comes at a strange right angle to Batgirl’s quickly-resolved prurient arc.

The Joker has escaped from Arkham Asylum – just as Batman visits to talk sense to him – and sets his morbid plan into action by killing a roomful of people, and purchasing an amusement park by killing the owner. We see flashbacks at regular intervals (in ochre tones, like the graphic novel), of Joker’s origins as a young failing standup comic, trying to provide for his wife and unborn daughter. Meanwhile Batman is on his trail, bat-punching and terrorizing perps for info, at one point shouting at a perp, “Swear to me!” in direct homage to Christian Bale’s dark knight. Kevin Conroy is a well-loved Batman voice. But Bale’s shout made me wet ‘em.

Film follows the comic panels religiously (to its credit), showing Barbara at home with Commissioner Gordon (Ray Wise), as he pastes Batman clippings into a scrapbook. He holds up the supposed newspaper photo of Batman’s first arrest and – like the graphic novel – it is a picture of the first ever Batman comic (nice Easter Egg!).

Joker appears and shoots Barbara point-blank, while his minions bash and kidnap Gordon – these are the heavy scenes that earn this movie’s R-rating. Although, I can never figure the MPAA’s gutlessness: the Joker strips Barbara and takes lewd photos of her while she is bleeding from her gut wound (and it is intimated he rapes her as well), yet later, when he shows these photos to Gordon to exacerbate his madness, we see only elbow, thigh, terrified eyes, some ankle, etc. – I mean, what is this? Porn from the 1820s? Even the comic panels never reveal anything actually lewd. It really makes we wonder why it’s termed “adult” at all!

Flashbacks reveal the Joker’s wife and child died, just as he was conned into a robbery where his accomplices are killed, leaving him to take the fall. Which he does – directly into a vat of chemicals, while being pursued by Batman. He emerges disfigured and transformed psychopathically.

His one bad day…

Alan Moore opted to go the route of one of the Joker’s fabled origins (remember, this was before Tim Burton solidified this origin with 1989’s BATMAN). Yet the Joker himself maintains, “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes I remember it another;  my point is, if I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice,” which has become the underlying credo with all Joker media. Alan Moore – you genius thing, you!

After naked Gordon is dragged, collared and beaten through the amusement park (and shown those photos from 1820), with Joker taunting, “There is no sanity clause!” – Batman arrives to rescue Gordon, who has not tipped into insanity, disproving the Joker’s thesis. Gordon implores Batman to take the Joker in “by the book – to prove our way works!”

Unlike the modern run of Batman movies (starting in 1989), Batman’s costume is not armor – it’s pretty much simply a cloth cossie, so all his foes must necessarily use knives and fists and axes rather than sniping at him from afar (which would end all their agita). In comics panels he can get away with bat-punching, and bat-diving to avoid bullets, but these actions start to register as unrealistic in this animated context, when all these henchmen who were just shooting at him then come at him with their fists, as if that’s a last resort after their guns failed to work because he was taking cover behind the armoire. Wait till he leaves cover, then shoot at him again, dummies!

After some perfunctory bat-punching (in which the Joker pulls down on Batman’s cloth cowl to discombobulate  him – can you believe this plot point ever happening today?!), the resolution of this story is at once both quirky and cerebral. Batman tells Joker, “I don’t want either of us to end up killing the other, but we’re running out of alternatives.” After admitting they share a common trauma in their past, Batman offers to rehabilitate the Joker and puts out a gloved hand, “Let me help you.”

Joker thinks for a moment, replies, “No.”

Then he relates a joke about two guys escaping a lunatic asylum. Making it up to the roof, they see rooftops stretching away to freedom; all they had to do was make one jump across a gap. The first guy does it, while the second hesitates. First guy has an idea: “Hey, I’ll shine my flashlight across the gap and you can walk across the beam!” Second guy says, “Whadaya think I am – crazy?! You’d just turn it off when I’m halfway across!”

Joker guffaws. Batman is grim, then starts to chortle, and then full-on laughs. Fade to black on The Joker and Batman laughing.

A perfect joke to connect to the current scenario: In the Joker’s perception, Batman is the one who “jumped across the roof,” freeing himself. And Batman is putting his hand out to help. But to the Joker’s perception, Batman’s offer is as insubstantial as the flashlight beam; he is so deep in his paranoia that he’s not even worried about the insubstantiality of the beam – instead, he’s so distrusting, that he thinks Batman will RESCIND his offer of help if the Joker starts to walk in that direction (“turn off the beam when I’m halfway across”), and leave the Joker rudderless as usual, falling to his doom.

With so much depth in this main story, the epilogue is unnecessary, showing Barbara in a wheelchair, rolling to a bank of monitors, “Back to work.” Whatevs, Babs.

I wonder if I’m being too hard on DC, complaining about the cartooning/animation? Is this the best that can be produced within budgets and economic projections?… Hell, no! This is Warner Cartooning, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. And you know who the two best proponents of old-school, two-dimensional cartooning were from the 1950s onwards? Disney and Warner Bros! We know what great cartooning is – from this very company that brought us LOONEY TUNES (Sylvester and Bugs and Daffy and Porky and Elmer) 60 years ago! You mean to tell me this company that lavished such love and laughter on their product can’t do better than this choppy, jerky, low-frame-rate crap? Fans were crying out that this classic comicbook movie needed a theatrical release – in fact, its theatrical run was on July 25 and 26, 2016 – but you don’t put this low level dreck in theaters. And why did its run last only two days? Was it word-of-mouth that the nasty canasta cartooning was not up to scratch? Or financial reasons?

(For the youngsters: You may have become acquainted with LOONEY TUNES in the 80s or 90s through the airing of their classic episodes joined together with cheap, newly-created animated bumpers, to make them seem like one long storyline, or you might be scratching your head thinking I speak of those lame cheap NEW episodes that feature the beloved characters and crappy repetitive public domain soundtrack, which destroyed their legacy into the 2000s. No! I speak of the original 10 minute shorts with the orchestral backing that were originally aired in movie theaters before feature films, that were collected in the 60s and 70s into half-hour shows of 3 cartoons each. They stand as immortal treatises to animation!)

DC/Warner, don’t try to hide behind good storylines. You don’t do the storylines any justice by schlepping this lackluster cartooning onto them. Economics wins out. How low can we make the quality before people will stop buying it? And then we wonder why Alan Moore refuses to be credited on any of his work that goes beyond the medium in which he originally created his art. (True to form, the film does not credit Moore – *I* credit him because I want people to know his greatness, and I also include all the disclaimers that he would want his fans to be aware of.)

Kevin Conroy voices a stoic stern Batman, and is widely regarded as one of the best for the role. And Mark Hamill’s Joker? What can one say about the guffaw that launched a thousand psychoanalyses? Hamill was tempted back to the role after he complained of blowing his voice out during his previous Joker gig. After seeing the finished version of KILLING JOKE, even Hamill admits the movie is not up to par. So sad for Hamill to always be associated with these giant projects that promise the universe and deliver cold pizza.

I mean, DC, is it too much to ask that our darkest knight be animated at least as well as our cwaziest wabbit?

END

Who watches the Watchmen?… and who watches the Watch-GIRL?
That should really tell you something about yourself…

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

And the fanboys whine like bitches. The “unfilmable” graphic novel, WATCHMEN – has been filmed! Cry the beloved comicbook and let slip the dogs of nihilism.

WATCHMEN is epic and sexy and bloody; sensual and visceral and brutal; more than a comicbook, more than a messianic cry of madness; flamboyant costumed heroes, a plot that shakes the world, and Dr. Manhattan in full frontal ectoplasm.

WATCHMEN is a triumph! …Unless you’re a fanboy.

the rorschach test:
one fan’s classic is another fan’s bubastis.

Who Watches the Cucumber?

And the writer of the graphic novel, Alan Moore (V FOR VENDETTA, 2005) has once again spat the dummy and insisted his name be removed from the WATCHMEN movie, leaving only mediocre artist, Dave Gibbons, credited as “co-creator.” There’s perfectionist – and there’s bitchboy. Alan Moore is the latter.

Directed by Zack Snyder like the graphic novel panels are emblazoned on the insides of his eyelids, WATCHMEN the movie – like VENDETTA – is ardently true to the spirit of the source material and reverently recreates the world of an alternate 1985, where Nixon has been in office continually since the Viet Nam victory (!), where costumed heroes are part of the crimefighting landscape, where colors scream and morals bend and we hit the ground running in thigh-high boots that are not removed for mile-high sex.

The opening montage, showing how the world assimilated these heroes into its culture, is crafted with such care and creativity (with source music from Dylan to Hendrix), I shed a tear at watching the pages of Watchmen come alive. And this was only the opening!

under the hood:
battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster…

WATCHMEN (written by mad prophet bitchboy Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons, published in 1986 by DC Comics as a limited 12-issue series) is a “celebrated graphic novel” because the fantasy world it presents train-wrecks into our reality so closely it hurts our Gotham nerve.

BATMAN BEGINS (2005) portended this trend of superhero films being no longer the provenance of teens vicariously living out fantasies with towels tied around necks; THE DARK KNIGHT (2008) and HANCOCK (2008) continued this journey; now WATCHMEN takes it beyond the Bubastis, raising the bar into dark adulthood, where every sin is a necessity, every moral an ambiguity.

None of the heroes have supernatural powers; except for the atomic anomaly, Dr. Manhattan (victim of an “intrinsic field chamber” accident and able to manipulate molecules at will, and perceive future time streams), they are all versions of Batman and Captain America, well-trained and well-educated athletes with a penchant for vigilantism.

And vigilantism – as in this real world – is only tolerated so long. Nixon outlaws “masks” (as costumed heroes come to be called) – after they help him win Viet Nam, mind you! – and we are thrust into this roaring, breathing work of art during the second generation of masks after they are disbanded.

When one of the Watchmen, the abrasive, cynical Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, love-child of Robert Downey Jnr. and Javier Bardem) is killed mysteriously, the last Watchman on active duty, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), goes on a solitary manhunt to find the killer.

He warns fellow ex-Watchman, Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), “An attack on one is an attack on all of us!”

Rorschach is the nihilistic conscience of WATCHMEN, a sociopath with principles, wearing a mask that shifts its Rorschach ink-blot patterns continually. He considers this shifting palette his “true face” – mirroring the ineffable, morally relativistic face of the New York he holds no love for… “The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘Save us!’… and I’ll whisper ‘No.'”

As each Watchman entered the equation, I recognized them immediately – the last such perfect casting being X-MEN (2000). There was, of course, Rorschach’s wondrous ever-changing mask; the worrisome dweeb with the weak Chevy Chase lips had to be Dan Dreiber aka Nite Owl II (the faux-Batman guy); the bumblebee hooker with the Pert hair and bad bangs must be Laurie aka Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman); the Bowie-thin Brit is Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) and lemme take a guess that the shimmering blue, hung, naked buff is Jon Osterman aka Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup).

And my own chiseled six-pack hardened with delight when I saw Ozymandias’s exotic, mutated lynx, Bubastis!

WATCHMEN is a wet dream waterfall.

The key to WATCHMEN, the grand concept that elevates it above the jungle of super-beings who bust bank-robbers and petty thieves (which are merely the outlying strands of a much larger sociological problem) is Ozymandias saying, “I fought only the symptoms, leaving the disease unchecked.”

Now, as Nixon and the Soviets edge toward nuclear war, Ozymandias, “the world’s smartest man” with unlimited resources, takes it upon himself to attack the disease. To save humankind from itself.

Hero? Villain? Spandex-wearing looney? When Spock said “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” he was regarded as noble because he was sacrificing himself. Ozymandias plots to destroy life as part of a bigger plot to save life. The Comedian’s death was a small cog in this world-shaking coup. And the moral dilemma falls to the other Watchmen to either stop him, or stop the truth being told.

Though Dr. Manhattan is acclaimed as, “God exists – and he’s American,” Ozymandias’s plan to kill millions to save billions is nothing short of godlike. (“…lest ye become a monster.”) Superman saving kittens just wouldn’t get it.

Thus the graphic novel’s slogan: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Who is going to guard the guards themselves?), or simply, Who watches the Watchmen?

gazing into the abyss:
one man’s artist is another man’s autist.

As with any great movie loaded with cerebral thematic grist, it is impossible to convey the innumerable hooks and references, analogies and cultural touchstones contained within its hurricane walls.

Snyder and screenwriters, David Hayter and Alex Tse, have retained a layered complexity, yet removed superfluous characters and events (such as Captain Metropolis, and a non sequitur pirate story within the Watchmen story, and even (gulp!) changed the ending – okay, stop that puling, dorknozzles!) and recreated every imperative scene as meticulously as possible.

“Look on my – ahem – works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Like his ultra-violent battle hymn, 300, Snyder’s framing is breathtaking: Rorschach atop a roof as lightning silhouettes him, Dr. Manhattan’s clockwork bachelor pad on Mars, a cityscape with the Twin Towers in the distance… even the grimy understreets, the balletic breaking of bones, the mobs and the mayhem, all gloriously swank. Never has the ugliness of mankind looked so alluring – Snyder has a knack for conveying emotional darkness as visual beauty.

This movie has envisioned Watchmen better than the graphic novel and I’ll tell you wh– (Oh. Here comes Alan Moore and his gang of bitchboys to break my little cucumber legs. Marnoo! Bar the doors and windows, would you please. Onward…) –and I’ll tell you why:

Two elements go into making a graphic novel (as if real comics fans don’t know). Story. And artwork.

I give Moore all the credit he doesn’t want to deserve (hell, I’d be happy if someone would just buy my stories, let alone pay such rapturous tribute, man!) – but though his story is epic on toast, Dave Gibbons’s artwork is like watching paint dry – literally.

Gibbons is a great anatomist (he even depicts Dr. Manhattan as Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man in issue #4), but lacks superhero flair. His neatly-blocked nine-panel pages in the Watchmen comics make for some creative transitions and interesting gimmicks (such as the “Fearful Symmetry” issue #5, where the whole book is almost a mirror image of itself), but are flat, static and would go far to inspire accountants. In this medium, Artwork is King. They’re GRAPHIC novels fer chrissakes!

Bad artwork ruins a good story. Gibbons has no action lines.

Moore would pen the Batman benchmark, The Killing Joke in 1988, with Brian Bolland on poison inks. Now that was Art. So too, the driveway-gravel grit of Frank Miller, the sexual fluidity of Jim Aparo’s 1970’s Batman, the slamdown of Marvelites, John and Sal Buscema; pull up any number of X-MEN artists – you’ll be inspired to tie a towel around your neck quicksmart. Not with Gibbons. The WATCHMEN movie endows The Watchmen with skills, training and verve, whereas Gibbons’s drab panels don’t display any reason for them to be wearing such tight trousers.

kindle a light:
the darkness of mere being.

Each WATCHMEN character is more of an emotional pizza than is usual with costumed types because this series was written as a limited run – they did not have to sustain arena love for decades. Each of them is us.

If we had the impunity to be unchained, unholy, what would we do with that power?

The Comedian “saw society’s true face – chose to be a parody of it, a joke…”

Rorschach, breaking people’s fingers all over the place, says of himself, “This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.” No kidding, with a long trail of fingers to prove it… (The filmmakers admirably got Rorschach’s ‘hurm’ sound down – like the X-MEN filmmakers prided themselves on getting Wolverine’s ‘snikt!’ sound.)

Playing Blind Man’s Buff with Rorschach is harder than you think…

I admit on the fanboyjury stand that Dr. Manhattan’s non-personality was ruined by the movie writers. This amoral, unfeeling wraith would slip further psychologically from humanity with each blue day, but in this movie he went from the cutting, “Existence of life is highly overrated” to a sudden Chick Flick epiphany, “Life itself is the miracle.” Someone call Julia Roberts.

Nite Owl II, a technophile who resembles Batman in more ways than one, only comes alive through his alter-ego. He can only get it on with Silk Spectre (in his Owl Ship floating in the clouds, no less) after they’ve had a costumed adventure together. Just like a woman, first thing Silk Spectre does when she moves in with Nite Owl is start messing with his vehicles.

Ozymandias, whose inspiration is Alexander the Great, wants “conquest not of men, but of the evils that beset them.” When you slide this slippery slope, the question becomes Dirty Harry’s in MAGNUM FORCE, “When police start becoming their own executioners, where’s it gonna end?… Pretty soon you start executing people for jaywalking, executing people for traffic violations, then you execute your neighbor because his dog pisses on your lawn.”

Let’s face it, Vigilantism is as malformed and unjust as The Law that it thumbs its nose at. Two sides of the same confused coin – how to embrace your freedom without being stultified or harmed by other idiots enjoying theirs. We all have built in radar for “right” and “wrong” – and we are all prone to what I’ve always called “circumstantial morality” so a cloudy mix of vigilantism and written laws should prevail.

But who decides what I think is right is wrong? “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25.)

Who watches the Watchmen?

from crimebusters to watchmen:
The times they are a-changing.

Interestingly, Watchmen is not the group’s official name. In the graphic novel, they’re called by the unofficial cheesy name of The Crimebusters. Watchmen is never mentioned. In the movie, they contemplate banding together as “Watchmen” but are ridiculed immediately and never get around to registering the dba. (Or whatever superhero groups like The Avengers and The Justice League did to protect their precious band names. Although, who’d be dumb enough to don underpants-outside-spandex and plagiarize a name that could get them hung by their nipples from the Golden Gate bridge with the ineffectual police powerless against the person who hung them there?) So there’s no such thing as a Watchman, Victoria…

Maybe that’s why the fanboys are bamboozled… they need the obvious frame-to-frame intrinsic field metamorphosis… anything less… is simply blood from the shoulder of Pallas…

What’s that incessant banging on my door? Ah yes, I’ve got some fanbitches to deal with. Marnoo! Bring me my broadsword and clear understanding; let me just slip my Rorschach mask on…. and I’ll meet you on the far side of crazy…

END