Tag: Batman

DrFaustusAU is (as you might guess) an Australian artist. What you might not guess is his specialty—mash-ups in the style of Dr Seuss. He's previously gained fame for his adaptation of THE CALL OF CTHULHU in Seuss-style, and a series of Batman postcards. And now he's turned to Iron Man.

Damn! One of the best things about Christopher Nolan's Batman movies is that the villians are truly bad people, not just cardboard guys in suits. And in the glimpse of Bane (played by Tom Hardy) that same feeling of danger comes across. Can't wait.

Based on this trippy preview, we'd say probably. This stage show opens July 19th in the UK, and arrives in America in 2012.

The countdown to THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, the highly anticipated third entry in Chris Nolan's Batman trilogy, kicked off today with a new new site, which thus far contains ominous chanting. The site was linked to via a Twitter account, @TheFireRises, which sends you to a page where you can upload your Twitter or Facebook avatar to help collate a collage of an image of Tom Hardy as Bane, one of the villains in the movie.

In these end times, we'll likely see more of this kind of thing; a lone vigilante, striking out for justice, armed with a baton, a can of chemical irritant Freeze Plus P, and lead-lined gloves, until suffocating government interference shut him down. It all went down in Petoskey, MI where Mark Wayne Williams, 31, was peacefully minding his own business, climbing a building dressed as The Batman.

After months of speculation, we now know that Christopher Nolan isn't giving up the Batman franchise without going into the sexy feminine side of the myth: Anne Hathaway will play Catwoman in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES -- and yes, that sounds pretty dirty. And the previously announced Tom Hardy will play back-breaker Bane, an escaped criminal who gets super strength after getting jacked on drugs. (Bane was responsible for breaking Batman's spine in a '90s comics storyline.)

Yesterday's release of BATMANn & ROBIN #16 -- the final issue leading into the new BATMAN, INC, book by Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette -- included a shocking ending. It was also the first time DC's new Editor-in-chief Bob Harras had made the press rounds with a bunch of interviews at various sites, including a chat with Kiel Phegley at CBR. Nothing too shocking or revelatory. Harras shows himself to be a smart publishing professional who likes Grant Morrison and thinks comics are a visual medium. He's also getting a handle on a wide-ranging job:

It's called "Batman and the Giant Pile of Box Office Receipts". Okay, it's really called THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. Everyone has surely made a Viagra joke by now, and there was ours.

Tom Hardy, lately of INCEPTION, has joined the Christopher Nolan repertory company with a role in the upcoming BATMAN 3 movie. No word on...

Late last year, DC announced a new line of graphic novels called Earth One. The idea was a line of standalone graphic novels...

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Bruce Wayne, orphaned at eight, wants to overcome his fears and honor his father. This turns out to be rather more complicated than he suspects it will be. Batman Begins presents a radically new vision (for the movies, anyway — this stuff had been around the comics and the animated series for many years beforehand) of the Batman story, grounds it in a startling new sense of reality, presents not just a caped crusader and a wacky new villain but a whole wealth of good guys and bad guys, all following their stars in increasingly complex and interconnected ways, all of it bound together with the one fantastic conceit of a young billionaire who dresses up like a bat. It strongly reminds me of the Casino Royale re-boot, which brought the James Bond character to a new level of immediacy while retaining enough of the series’ fantastic hallmarks to still qualify as escapism. There is still enough silliness in Batman Begins to make it a recognizable "superhero movie" (grand, outsized villains with colorful personalities and an ambitious scheme to destroy an entire city, spectacular action sequences that teeter at the brink of believability, production design that borders upon science-fiction) but it’s presented with a sober, straightfaced earnestness that’s nothing less than shocking after the garish camp of Batman & Robin. The Dark Knight would successfully develop all of Begins‘s good ideas into an even more complex, startling vision of modern urban justice.

Contrary to its reputation as a garish, headache-inducing day-glo nightmare, Batman &Robin is, in fact, a sensitive, heartfelt examination of power, frailty, family, humanity’s custody of the earth, the ties that bind and the mysterious ways of the human heart.

I kid, of course. Batman & Robin, as every schoolboy knows, is ridiculous. A ludicrous traffic-jam of a narrative, it makes no goddamn sense whatsoever from any conceivable point of view. However, that does not mean it is unworthy of study. To paraphrase Charlie Brown, if one learns more from one’s mistakes, that must the creators of Batman & Robin the smartest storytellers who ever lived.

No fewer than six main characters vault into the narrative of Batman & Robin, each with his or her own agenda. Some of these agendas cohere into a compelling, thematically- linked narrative. Others, well, not so much.