the Captain’s Justice League blog!

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at this meeting.

Warners and sibling DC Comics are holding high-level talks to hammer out a master strategy for their stable of superheroes.

Warners has never had such a strategy, and there have long been complaints the studio has been slow to exploit a potential treasure trove of franchises. And while the studio is basking in critical love for “The Dark Knight,” it has watched studio rivals rake in big bucks from Marvel Comics characters, and Marvel itself get into the tentpole business.

The Marvel films work so well because they are very close adaptations of the comics and that’s allowed them to establish a motion picture Marvel Universe, but that traditionally hasn’t been Warner’s approach. They’ve had more success with more edgy or innovative adaptations. Even in animation they’ve always drifted away from the core DCU.

Something stuck me the other day. DC Comics’s version of the Ultimates Universe isn’t a comic book universe. Their version of the Ultimates is the DC Animated Universe (DCAU)! The one that ran from the start of Batman the Animated Series and concluded with the final episode of Justice League Unlimited. If only DC did a comic book based on the DCAU that was able to advance continuity and maintain the more sophisticated tone that Unlimited ended with!

Love it or hate it the final season of the excellent anime-inspired Teen Titans is now in the shops. The animated Titans show has a fantastic ability to switch between brooding/dark and whimsy/light without missing a beat. I must admit I hadn’t seen this season until the review copy arrived so I’ve split this review in half so I can get my initial thoughts up before finishing the second disc.

DISC ONE

The fifth season of Teen Titans introduces us to the Doom Patrol - Beast Boy’s original team. Fans of the comic will know the Doom Patrol as a collection of freaks who debuted almost simultaneously with Marvel’s X-Men. While the X-Men grew into a massive franchise the Doom Patrol has remained something of a cult property and has often attracted a more innovative and down right strange form of superhero story. In the context of the Teen Titans Universe the Doom Patrol are the senior superhero team, a near legendary group of competent adult heroes led by the square-jawed Mento. 

The Doom Patrol’s opponents are the Brotherhood of Evil who are led by the Brain (literally a brain in a jar). The entire season parallels the final season of Justice League Unlimited with a shadowy villain organisation gunning for the assembled heroes. It’s impossible not to draw comparisons between the Titan’s version of the Doom Patrol and the Incredibles. They’ve got the entire 1960s action-vibe and the Brotherhood of Evil’s initial set-up are very much in the mould of a James Bond villain.

The opening "Homecoming" two-parter is a classic rescue the family routine followed by a stop the villains heist. We’re shown in flashback how Beast Boy was harshly kicked out by Mento, then in the present day Beast Boy and the Titans are called in to free the Patrol from the Brotherhoods clutches. The action is really cool and its nice to all the heroes in action, but the new characters aren’t that sympathetic. Indeed they’re introduced to place angst on Beast Boy. It’s not something we’ve seen much of in the Teen Titans. Usually they’re shown operating completely free of any sort of adult authority and when adults appear they’re usually villains.

The defeat of the Brotherhood sets up the arc for the entire season as the Brain enlists an entire army of Titans enemies for his revenge. From the third episode the Brotherhood starts rounding up anybody who has worked with the Titans including the Wildebeast and Hotspot. That starts a world tour as the Titans touch base with various honorary Titans and run into different villains in new and varied locations.

The idea of the heroes operating in different parts of the world is interesting. I particularly liked the use of North Africa as a backdrop for the Hotspot/Madame Rouge confrontation in "Trust." However, the inclusion of the Doom Patrol and the amount of time given to the Brotherhood’s activities actually leaves very little screen time for the real Titans in the opening episodes of their own cartoon. The fourth episode even features an entirely different set of Titans (the Titans East) fighting Film Freak.

The season arc isn’t too heavily stressed, but care is taken to make the Titan’s globe trotting logical. In episode 4 Cyborg is shown on the communicator dressed in warm weather gear when talking to Titans East and then in episodes 5 and 6 the main Titans team are shown in Siberia and at the North pole. It may not be obvious when watched separately, but it makes for a nice sense of continuity when watching the episodes back-to-back as I was.

Episode five, "Snowblind", takes the Titan’s to Siberia as they track a nuclear powered outcast called Red Star through the harsh winter wilderness. It’s a fantastic episode and is one of the strongest of the season. The character I was most surprised to see was Kole. I never really cared for the comic book version - one of the classic dead characters - but here entrance in the euphoniously named "Kole" (episode six) is hilarious, definitely worthy of Stone Boy from the Subs. Episode seven, "Hide and Seek", is Raven as Maria von Trapp looking after a gang of pre-school heroes. It’s a nice idea and seems rather formulaic at first, but gets pretty weird once Monsieur Mallah and Bobby show up.

A few weeks ago my home computer crashed and crashed hard. It turns out that the motherboard, the main circuit board that connects all the other components, was defective. That was replaced, but my main hard-drive was scrambled during the crash. Physically the drive was fine - as least according to the amazing spin right. However, the crash had corrupted the master file table (MTR) and all hope and files looked lost.

There was little on the drive that I couldn’t recreate or restore from an old backup, but I didn’t particularly want to spend days re-ripping my mp3s and re-tagging my photos. So I tried a few of the most popular data recovery tools. It was strange, they could see the root directory system on a passive scan, but not much else. More in-depth scans of the corrupt disk started showing up files, but most of the packages made no attempt to reconstruct the original directory structure.

After several different attempts I came across GetBackData For NTFS from Runtime Software. Not only did it reconstruct by directories, but it allowed me to copy the salvaged files to a new disk. I’m not sure how different its scanning technology is, but the real difference that it made was in reconstructing the file system to give me a structure I knew and could easily navigate. I had trouble finding their software as Google is rather polluted with multiple data-recovery sites, so I’m putting up his blog post up in the hope that it points somebody else who needs them in the right direction.

Back in the 1970s Michael Fleisher wrote a series of encyclopedias themed around the DC trinity of characters. As part of the Showcase reprint line the Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman volumes were recently re-released. Each of the encyclopedias contained detailed notes on pretty much every character and fact mentioned in the comics. Everything was heavily cross-referenced and there were multiple citations for anything quoted.

They were an amazing work that proceeded the later and more populist Who’s Who series. The Fleisher Encyclopedias have a cut-off date of around 1970 so lack anything from the later Earth-One period. Original copies could go for hundreds of dollars on e-bay and they were out of print for three decades. Following the success of the heavily illustrated DK Essential Guides DC has updated the Encyclopedias.

The Robert Greenberger’s Essential Batman Encyclopedia (Ballabtine Books) is essentially an updated version of the Fleisher Batman Encyclopedia (in spirit if not in actual copy). The Batman volume covers material up to and including post-Infinite Crisis, the start of Grant Morrison’s run on Batman and Paul Dini’s run on Detective Comics. It is 388 pages of dense three-column type and makes liberal use of black-and-white illustrations taken directly from the comics. There are also a couple of sets of glossy colour plates to showcase the heroes and the villains.

The majority of the entries are character based, but unlike the recent DC Encyclopedia there are also entries for prominent places, events, and themes. Unlike the Who’s Whos no attempt is made to list character statistics unless they’re established in the canon in which case they’re mentioned in the body of the text. I found this Encyclopedia to be more meaty than 2004’s DC Comics Encyclopedia. That was a nice guide to the DCU, but was rather unsatisfying as a reference work.

The centre of the book is of course the core Batman titles, but content from Nightwing, Robin, and even Outsiders and Birds of Prey is included (albeit to a lesser degree). Acknowledgement is made of fluid nature of comicbook continuity and it’s pointed out when and where significant changes have occurred to a character. For example, there is only a single Poison Ivy entry, but her Earth-One origin and history is told before its noted how it changed following the Crisis.

What has surprised me is the relatively quiet reception the book has received. Greenberger has talked to the Comic Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon and The Pulse’s Jennifer Contino about the project. He told Spurgeon that,

I’m a trained journalist and experienced writer and editor who happens to love comic books. Say someone who wrote the Batman comic wrote this book. Their approach might not be as easy given the different writing training and experience. Having read the titles continuously since 1964 means I’ve read it for over half its run which gives me a good global perspective. I also can easily explain the parallel worlds and put each era into perspective which helps a great deal to the book’s clarity.

His journalistic training show in the book, Greenberger’s writing is concise and easy to read, but never repetitive. He has a particular knack for cutting to the most essential parts of a character’s narrative and is not afraid to note where two stories can’t be reconciled. The focus on Batman’s canon doesn’t exclude mention of the wider DC Universe. However, it is slightly frustrating when the history of borderline characters is only partially recounted (e.g. Clock King’s involvement with the Injustice League isn’t mentioned). However, that’s just fan nitpicking.

The Essential Batman Encyclopedia is a fantastic book and is easily the best DC Comics reference work to come out since the 1990s loose-leaf Who’s Who. Two other volumes are planned, a Superman one by Martin Pasko and a Wonder Woman one by Phil Jimenez.

The buzz-phase around Time Inc’s new Maghound enterprise is that it’s "Net-flicks" for magazines. Foliomag.com describes the project as

Maghound.com allows consumers to choose titles from a variety of publishers for a mix-and-match “subscriptions” where they pay one monthly fee and have the ability to switch titles at any time. Unlike traditional subscriptions, members aren’t locked in their memberships and can cancel whenever they wish.

What is interesting for me is that Time Warner’s other regular publishing concern is DC Comics. Sure, we know the quip that WB don’t know they own a comics company. But, it’s a no brainer to include DC’s ongoing titles including in a scheme like this? It’s an obvious and logical place for DC to try find new readers.

The MTV blog offers DC comics advice on how to get their movies back on track. They also quote a studio rep as saying the movie is now a “go”.

Get a lock on the League. Despite earlier reports, a studio rep told MTV News this one is now a “go.” Don’t let tax-incentive issues in Australia derail the potential “Justice League” franchise, just find another place to shoot the movie. And if there are problems with keeping some of the cast because of the delay, look for new actors who can play superheroes in and out of the League.

[via Comics 2 Film]

Meanwhile, Common, who had been up for the role as Green Lantern John Stewart, talked to the Comics Continuum about his hopes for the role.

Common told The Continuum he auditioned for director George Miller and was “considered” for the role, but was careful to go any further, particularly since the film missed its original production start and seems to be in a state of flux.

“It was exciting. It was so hopeful man,” Common said. “It was like, ‘Man, I’m going to be part of something that is going to explode on the world.’ It was going to be powerful. You felt like it was going to be a great project. JLA, man. George Miller.

“Just the start of it felt so good. JLA — that’s one of my favorite comics. You’ve got all these great characters. God willing, it may happen.

“I was enthused about being considered. I don’t know what’s happening. It’s definitely divine timing with the right characters and the right actors at the right time of our careers. I would love to be Green Lantern. I was just started to get into digesting who he would be, John Stewart. I started reading so much about Green Lantern — a cool character.”

A direct comparison for what’s going around DC fans at the moment: sport’s managers! When a sports team - baseball, soccer, US football, whatever - is seen to under preform the fans start calling for the head of the coach or the manager. This is no different to how DC fans have reacted to the under performance of the DC superhero line. It is exactly times like this that a manager has to exercise strong and definitive leadership to restore confidence. That however, may be hard to establish at DC if Rich Johnston’s description of Didio’s resolve as “flip floppy” or Chuck Dixon’s charge that they’re “directionless” is correct.

Elements of that editorial resolve, or lack therefore of, have been reflected in recent interviews with DC writers and artists. During a Newsarama interview, Jerry Ordway perfectly summed up what’s wrong with the current DC Universe.

NRAMA: What do you think of the return of the multiverse?

JO: I think it’s great, but right now it’s like the Wild West in the DCU continuity, until they officially settle on some ground rules. Between 52, Infinite Crisis, and Countdown and now Final Crisis, I have no idea what’s going on, what’s real and what’s not. I need some structure, as a reader. Which “Legion” is the real “Legion,” you know?

Hopefully every DC writer will be given a copy of Final Crisis and be told “work to this.” Okay, it didn’t work for Countdown, but they seem to need some sort of agreed upon touchstone to work to. This is why DC is suffering. I don’t think its the technical quality of the writing so much as it is the internal discipline, and yes that means continuity. Fans, by definition, are fanatical and fastidious about their hobby. And at this stage there pretty much only fans left reading comics. When books from a single line don’t display the type of internal discipline that a fan instinctively craves it starts unsettling them. Bad continuity means poor quality-control of the product and is a clear and determined demonstration of a contempt for the reader’s ability to notice such things.

The doom-mongers are decrying that DC isn’t out performing Marvel or that DC are somehow producing terrible books. Yet the strange thing is that, at the moment, DC really isn’t that bad. Many of the books are on the up - Nightwing, The Flash, JLA, and JSA are all on the upswing. The Superman and Batman franchises are solid reads.

Now, the one things that DC isn’t at the moment is exciting! Final Crisis is off to an interesting start, but it’s a slow burner - Morrison knows how to properly pace a story. Compare Final Crisis #1 to the first issue of DC One Million or even JLA #1 and see the pattern at work. By contrast Secret Invasion starts with exactly that - an alien invasion - a big event that pulls everybody’s interest. 

In my opinion DC has lost sight of the shape of their world. I don’t mean the Multiverse or even the Green Lantern stuff. I mean the actual DC Earth. Over at Marvel they have a clear idea of the structure of their world, how the various characters operate, the political structures and the society around them. DC started to do stuff like that immediately after Infinite Crisis, but a lot of the down to Earth stuff has vanished. They need to re-establish their characters as a community with all the attendant drama that communities entail.

Well almost finished. Being without a computer over the last week has really accelerated my completetion of GTA4. I’ve averaged about one percentage point per hour and have now completed the main plot line with about 85% of the entire game finished. Yes, that makes 85 hours of game play. Which is still short of my 100 hour average on the Final Fantasy games.

The “hero” of the game is Niko Bellic, a Serbian ex-soldier who is hunting the other two survivors of the ambush that killed the rest of his unit. He suspects that one of them betrayed the unit and has come to Liberty City looking for revenge. Niko is willing to work with anybody who can supply him with the information he requires to find his mark or anyone who one who can introduce him to people who can help him. When he first arrives in Liberty City he finds his cousin being bullied by a loan-shark and quickly becomes embroiled with the local organised crime syndicates. He makes enemies and friends in almost equal measure as his reputation as a fixer, bodyguard, and hitman grows.

What surprised me about the game is that Niko is a genuinely sympathetic character - a classic broken-inside action anti-hero - who is humanised by his relationship with his cousin, Roman. He feels a lot more of a rounded character than the previous player characters. The original 3D series may have generated an outcry, but they were very cartoony. Characters were extreme, the graphics details were relatively limited, and the violence never felt real. However, the increased graphics abilities of the next-gen consoles and a noticeable toning down of the cartooniness gives the game a far more realistic feeling.
Most missions in the game are no different that a standard Halo or Quake capture-the-flag style shoot-out, but some of them will really make you stop and think. You’re asked, nay forced, to assassinate characters you’ve spent hours getting to know. You’ll even be asked at several points to choose between them. There is a particular plot arc towards end of the game involing a kidnapping that I found particular shocking. The great strength of the game was that you always had freedom to choose what to do, but the more sophisticated they make it the more moral freedom I want.

Its strange to say you enjoy playing such a game, but there are parts of the challenges and standard computer-game parts that really are enjoyable. The game is so immersive that you get swept up in the soap opera elements, the drama, and the action. The other parts? Well, do you really “enjoy” Scarface or Friday the 13th? No, but we are still captivated by them. I would make one plea to all the parents out there: GTA 4 is not for children. The box is clearly labelled as such. You have zero excuse for complaining about this. If it falls into you children’s hands that’s your fault, nobody elses.

Last Tuesday my computer froze completely and refused to power up when rebooted. The trouble I faced when diagnosing the actual fault was that I suspected it was either an issue with the graphics card or the motherboard. However, I had no components to swap out to test them with. Once I would have. Once I ran multiple boxes at home, a mini-LAN, including a gateway server to route traffic to the internet. But, nowdays that’s been replaced by an inexpensive router and extra-storage is supplied by external USB drives rather another dedicated box.

I’ve always built my home systems, buying the components and assembling them myself. It’s no great ordeal, although it doesn’t carry the same benefit in cost that it may once have done. Nevertheless, it was a point of pride that I’ve always done it myself. This time I finally gave in and sent my computer to the local computer shop. It’s a sad change, but an inevitable one. It’s just so more cost effective for me to pay their hourly service charge than take time off work to do it myself. And, maybe its a sign of age, but I just couldn’t be bothered with it.

So, the machine went into the shop and the prognosis wasn’t good. The motherboard was toast and the hard-drive had become corrupted. They wanted to wipe the drive and reinstall the operating system, but that I wouldn’t allow. I got them to put a fresh drive in and leave my old one untouched. I’ve got slightly too-old backups and there is nothing on there that I can’t recreate, but one last ounce of techie pride means I’m unwilling to give up on it yet.