"Dark Night: A True Batman Story" by Paul Dini and Eduardo Risso

Just when you think countless YouTube and podcast interviews gave the whole thing away, Dark Night: A True Batman Story still offers a lot of surprises. It's an excellent graphic novel, but whereas most of the reviews on the internet center around author Paul Dini's traumatic experience getting mugged that is the climax/catalyst of the book, I found what stayed with me was a lot of the rich details of other events described therein. The mugging itself is strong, brutal stuff (he almost died!), but there are other moments that have their own power:

+ You do get a sense that Paul regrets his doomed relationships with vacuous wannabe starlets. He would use his feint connection to Steven Spielberg  (Dini worked for Amblin on "Tiny Toon Adventures") as bait..and they would lead him on with their feminine wiles. Paul's adherence to the time period keeps him from elaborating on his happy marriage to actress/magician Misty Lee, but the reveals about his doomed relationships playing into his struggle with deep depression ( Emmy award statuettes never looked as creepy as they do in the scene depicted in the book ) imply that the mugging became a very sobering, karmic experience in his life, though I don't think he wants to attribute it as a good thing, just a trigger for change.

+ Paul's first collaboration with Bruce Timm was a failed revival of Beany and Cecil produced by John Kricfalusi of Ren and Stimpy fame. I found it cute that the show was a childhood favorite of his. It was the 50's Spongebob Squarepants, kind-of the precursor to Rocky and Bullwinkle in approach, though with jauntier designs...lots of Beatnik jokes.

+ The character of Ivan Ivorybill was clearly a proxy for Woody Woodpecker, which means Paul was offered a chance to work on a TV series revival for the FOX network. I recall it lasted a year, with Billy West as the voice of Woody. It was o.k., but I remember reviewers thought it was staid. It had nice animation, though. The scene Ivan in the hospital was sad. And powerful!

+ I remember that Tiny Toons videogame..and seeing photos of the bubble bath bottles with the plastic heads from the out-of-print book, Batman: Animated. It's all real stuff.

+ Batman does have a lazarus pit in the batcave! It happened in Devin Grayson & Paul Gulacy's Batman: Ra's Al Ghul mini-series from 2005. Batman built it to test if he had the only written copy of the chemical formula to create one.

+ The synopsis of the rejected idea for a Batman: The Animated Series episode where Batman would've encountered Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Death is very intriguing..and it reads like a backdoor pilot for a follow-up book that would tell the tale proper. Why not?

+ It's been pointed out elsewhere, but the depiction of Paul's therapist as a voluptuous vixen hints at his inspiration for Harley Quin's origin as the Joker's therapist. The character of Harley Quin appears briefly toward the end. I'm convinced the use of red and white in the cover design was meant to invoke Harley, since the advance copies that were used to promote the book featured a markedly different design...I don't hate the current look, but it reminds me of a Christmas card design. I prefer the one used for the advance copies.

+ The idea of having fictional characters act as avatars for the protagonist's thought processes was the main draw of the book when it was first announced, but it's not an original concept for a graphic novel. I also read a graphic novel about Agatha Christie's life that features her engaged in dialogues with her series characters. Compared to other scenes in Dark Night, this stuff was a little weak, but there is great moment where Dini seems to be challenging the idea of "Anyone can be Batman" for a moment. I do with other reviewers who have noted that Dini is the best at writing scenes featuring large groups of Batman villains and giving them equal time to shine.

+ Eduardo Risso wouldn't be my first choice for a special project like this ( I really wish this had been the last assignment done by the late Darwyn Cooke, as opposed to all those variant covers ), but Risso comes through with a career-defining effort that is fantastic. He showcases an impressive versatility, able to capture different moments with an array of illustration styles..I think people were expecting a journeyman effort and were genuinely taken aback by what Risso does here.

If you're a fan of Dini's comic book work, I would say this fits nicely on a shelf with Mad Love, Harley and Ivy: The Deluxe Edition and Tales of The Batman: Paul Dini. Oh, wait...that last one doesn't exist..yet. :)

Darwyn Cooke, RIP, Cont'd...

I pulled out my copy of Batman: Animated, the coffetable Art History book from 1998 devoted to Batman: The Animated Series, because I remembered it had sample storyboards that Darwyn Cooke worked on for the sequence in "Legends of The Dark Knight" that adapted the battle between Batman and The Mutants leader from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. They do a fantastic job of invoking the suspense and mood of the comic. I really wish the actual direct-to-dvd film adaptation of the book had been animated in this style, not the cranked-out assembly line anime look that's plagued most of the films for the last decade.

I also dug up my copy of Modern Masters Volume Three: Bruce Timm, from Twomorrows Publishing, which contained the passage I had recalled from memory of Bruce Timm's observations on Darwyn's art style. Since my previous post about Cooke was quite packed, I felt like putting these images in a separate post.

Darwyn Cooke, RIP.

Dini, Deconstructed.

When you're a fan of a popular writer, you look for patterns, links, themes - elements that identify either why this writer's work strikes a chord or what distinguishes his/her work from efforts made by other authors.

When Paul Dini's new graphic novel, Dark Knight: A True Batman Story arrives in June, I'd like to be free to devote the eventual review to the book itself. This post is devoted to me having fun with the idea that the events described in the book may have changed Paul's approach to writing Batman as a character. So, yes, this is a companion to my previous post "Dini's Dark Night". So..as awkward as it is to post a long essay revolving around a book that has yet to see the light of day and that I have yet to read...well, welcome to the internet.

With my copy of the classic coffeetable book, Batman: Animated, I did some unscientific research:

Paul Dini is credited with writing 30 episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. The show lasted five seasons, give or take breaks in production, title changes, network changes, even changes in the character designs. Here's a rough breakdown -

# of episodes of Batman: The Animated Series: 14

# of episodes credited solo: 12
# of episodes with co-writer/story credit: 2

# of episodes of The New Adventures of Batman and Robin: 9

# of episodes credited solo: 3
# of episodes with co-writer/story credit: 6

# of episodes of Batman: Gotham Knights/The Batman/Superman Adventures: 7

# of episodes credited solo: 3
# of episodes with co-writer/story credit: 4

Total: 18 episodes (solo), 12 episodes (co-writer/story credit)

At a glance, Paul's output was highest in the series early years, but one must take into account that he had also become a story editor during the GK/BSA era, while also working on Superman: The Animated Series AND the first season of Batman Beyond, as well as beginning to make his mark writing comic books after the success of Mad Love.

Getting back to the time period of Dark Night, I'm going to suppose the episodes produced under the New Adventures of Batman and Robin and the episodes of Batman: The Animated Series were made in the aftermath. Prior to this, all of Paul's early scripts focused on the villains: Heart of Ice, Mad As A Hatter, Almost Got 'Im, The Mad Who Killed Batman are some examples, with Batman appearing on the periphery. This wasn't unusual, since there were a lot of episodes of the series that were Batman-centric by other writers. Ironically, or unironically (is that a real world), these episodes rank among the most-acclaimed of the show's run.

Other episodes were romps - Joker's Wild, Harley & Ivy - or noir stories like Pretty Poison (which he submitted story ideas for) The Laughing Fish ( a re-imagining of two fan-favorite 70's Batman comic book stories into a single plot) and Joker's Favor, with the debut of Harley Quin, who is quickly rivaling Joker for the position of most-popular Batman foe, possibly beating Catwoman as most-popular female Bat-villain.

The only exception to this theme was Zatanna. Paul introduced the superpowered magician Zatanna to the series as an old flame from Batman's past - a romance that had not existed in the comics; barring a single issue of The Brave and The Bold from the early-80's by Mike W. Barr in which they teamed up for an adventure, there was relatively little/no known interaction of note between those two characters, not even when they both appeared in Justice League of America. From here on, this ret-con is slowly incorporated into the comic books and becomes canon when Dini became regular writer on Detective Comics and Zatanna's short-lived solo comic book  series. In animation, this clever pairing is only revisited on two occasions, both in scripts Dini wrote for different series: "This Little Piggy" in Justice League Unlimited and "Chill of The Night" in Batman: The Brave and The Bold.

The airdate for Zatanna was February 2, 1993, one month after the events described in Dark Night. The next episode of B:TAS to air was "The Worry Men", followed by "House and Garden", "Trial" and "Harlequinade", the last of Paul's episodes to appear under the B:TAS title (although reruns of the later episodes would revive it, since the Superman episodes aired separately in reruns). "Trial" is especially relevant to this discussion, since it's the first of Paul's scripts to comment directly on Batman's effectiveness as a vigilante/superhero and his dealings with his rogues gallery. In fact, in this last group of B:TAS episodes, and all of Paul's episodes afterward, Batman has more to say, or is more inclined to make time to comment directly on what's happening. This is when Paul starts offering memorable exchanges between our hero and his supporting cast/villains, like the "I can remember what it's like to have had a bad day" moment in "Harley's Holiday".  In interviews from the past and present, Dini describes Batman's presence as an idea or force of nature, but it appears he can also exist as a human being capable of empathy. In Paul's words, he became more "..circumspect". In that regard, I believe this readjustment made his work with the character, impressive as it was, even stronger, because now we're getting a more fully-realized Batman, rather than a force that other characters reacted to. And while it's macabre to postulate that a traumatic incident became an inspiration - and I don't want to give that a lot of credit - but maybe it underpinned/informed/unleashed some element that was always there, a finishing stroke that hadn't been brought to the surface.

It's like the Fatman (Kevin Smith) said: if there was a Mount Rushmore devoted the top 4 guys that truly defined Batman for the masses, the guys that identified a Batman that's loved by all...Paul's face would be up there.

And he also gave us Bat-Duck in Tiny Toon Adventures. I'm not being snarky; honestly and sincerely, Bat-Duck should've had his own show; that was gold. :)

Paul Dini's "Dark Night"

I really wish DC Comics' upcoming graphic novel, Dark Night: A True Batman Story by Paul Dini and Eduardo Risso, were released now instead of in June,  because, for my money, that's a more-interesting read than a lot of the Batman comics offered right now (and yes, that includes Dark Knight III: The Master Race*). So..as with that Ducktales preview art and Spider-Man's cameo in the Captain America: Civil War trailer (or...is that Spider-Man: Civil War? ;) ), I/we must make do with speculation and inferences based on whatever tidbits available.

Dini's Dark Knight is actually more like Realworlds, the series of standalone one-shots from DC's Elseworld's imprint, which offered stories of the effects fictional characters  (in this case, DC Comics superheroes) had on the lives of people in the "real" world. Superman was about an ex-con who had a tattoo of the "S" shield on his chest; Batman was about what happens when a developmentally-disabled boy whose habit of role-playing as the "goody-two-shoes" Adam West Batman in his interactions with others becomes influenced by his exposure to darker incarnations of the character. Dini's tale, however, is autobiographical, and in this sense, reminds me of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. In 1993, Dini was mugged and beaten to within an inch of his life by two thugs. The incident left him shaken and despondent; he goes through a considerable amount of soul-searching before he recovered. Batman, the Joker, and other characters appear as avatars for Dini's thought processes throughout the story.

When Dini was recently interviewed by Kevin Smith and Mark Bernardin in an episode of Smith's Fatman On Batman podcast, Bernardin popped the 1 million dollar question: Did this incident change the way he wrote Batman? This is interesting, because according to the timeline, Dini recalled that he was working on the script for Batman: Mask of The Phantasm and considered being pulled out of the production. I'm not sure which scripts of Batman: The Animated Series credited to Dini were completed before it happened or after, but he did observe (with the air of it being the first time anyone had asked him that particular question) that his Batman became more "..circumspect..more human." It's very tempting to say that he began writing Mad Love, one of the greatest Batman stories ever told, in the aftermath, but certainly, all of his creative output, post-1993, would've fallen under the auspices of his "circumspect" Batman, even his run on Detective Comics during the past decade. I imagine it will to look backwards and re-read/re-rewatch all of Paul's stuff when this book comes out.

I can make one observation: Risso's cover depicts Paul wrapped in bandages, similar to how Harley Quin appeared in the ending to Mad Love. Harley has become Paul's signature character; for a time, it was logical that Paul be brought in to write her reintroduction, be it in a new Batman cartoon series  ( The Batman ), a spin-off  ( Batman Beyond: The Return of The Joker ), webseries ( Gotham Girls ) or a video game ( the Arkham City series ). I remember being disappointed when DC chose Karl Kessel instead of Paul to write Harley Quin's first ongoing comic book series (especially when it turned out that Kessel wasn't really familiar with the character's appeal/popularity and the book coasted on the artwork of Terry Dodson). So, with the character more popular than ever before  (and likely to increase exponentially when Suicide Squad hits theatres), it is fitting that it coincides with her creator  (technically, co-creator, but the character was born out of a cheesy sketch by Dini - which was eventually revisited and given new life as a pricey statuette from DC Direct) would offer an experience that parallels a moment from his most-acclaimed work...and just as other writers, artists and actresses begin putting their own spin on Harleen Quinzel. If you've seen the trailer for Squad, you've noticed Margot Robbie's performance is the first to eschew a facsimile of original Harley Quin-potrayer Arleen Sorkin's exaggerated vocal stylings...though I recall a rumor that we might see her wear an outfit resembling the classic Harley Quin, the Tank Girl-meets-Rainbow Brite look is more interesting than Harley's current look in the comics.

Like I said, I wish this was available to read right now...

*issue 2 had a nod to World's Finest  in one panel..that was cute.