TNBA reviews: Sins of the Father

Already in Timm and company’s second entry in their new Bat-verse, many of the permutations and overhauls of the previous series are taking their toll. In fact, Sins of the Father is possibly the single episode of TNBA most populated by new problems, each of which is invariably tied to the new directive for faster paced Saturday morning packages, the move to Warner Bros. clearly imposing a commercial restraint for every censorship rule it lifted.

The first is that it is marketed as an origin story, and as the episode immediately following Holiday Knights it almost seems posed to immediately console many of the confused fans that saw the series debut in disbelief. As such, it is wholly devoted to serving its explanatory function without regard for artistic competence, as if the story of Tim Drake’s origin is a continuity roadblock that needs dealing with as soon as possible or paperwork that Rich Fogel is wearily completing as a prerequisite for writing better screenplays. And as this new series is a pre-ordered package of exactly twenty-six syndicated shows, the freedom to embark on multi-part storylines has significantly dwindled. It also defeats its own purpose of weeding out confusion that Batgirl’s affiliation with Batman raises as many questions about her as Tim Drake's origin answers about him.

Secondly, the animators’ rigid adherence to rigid models may mean that lips don’t slide out of place or that the characters don’t slosh around in motion, but it often does lead to robotic action and lopsided movements. If the angularity is intended as springboard for fluid animation and hyper-exaggeration—as admirably demonstrated by Tokyo Movie Shinsha’s animators in World’s Finest—then the team at Dong Yang failed to take notice and instead treated the model sheets as dictum. Unfortunately, Curt Geda’s direction and his team of storyboarders share much of the blame, who in their obvious detachment from the material fail to follow even the most basic rules of classical continuity, resulting in mismatched action and an inability to maintain scenic consistency from shot to shot.

Thirdly, as a story it cares more for types than characters. Tim Drake is a punk kid who wants revenge for his father’s death—an infantile fantasy that carries none of the metaphysical weight of Batman’s abstract vengeance that is more rooted in altruism than in self-gratification—Two-Face the arbitrary antagonist, Batgirl the peppy sidekick, and Batman at his most vacuous and cold-hearted. One of the few malignant side effects of the transition between series was Batman’s increasing apathy and smugness, and in Sins of the Father he is an unfeeling, monolithic machine who treats Tim like a background prop and can’t even spare an offhand moment of sympathy. Alfred picks up the slack in his efforts to console Tim, but even his paternal impulse is undermined by his less affective design.

As if compensating for this soullessness on the part of the rest of the production crew, Walker does try to enliven things through her music, an effort that unfortunately dismantles into reprisals of character themes that seem terribly out-of-place and unsuited to the moments they accompany, especially when she needs to find something schmaltzy to go with Tim’s unconvincing grief. This attempted sentimentality extends to the ending, in which Dick Grayson makes an impromptu visit to Wayne Manor.

Fans who complain about the growing Bat-Family, which is clearly sowing its seeds in these final few shots, seem to me zealously loyal to an image of Batman as a lone, stoic individual, a reductive mandate that fits Batman into a constrictive anti-hero, Clint Eastwood mold. I was always partial to the idea of a Batman gradually forming communal bonds and never felt that he should be barred from such relationships. However, this sudden, out-of-the-blue arrival of the old Robin met with awe and smiles and nudging foreshadowing stands as the most convincing evidence against such an enterprise should it be accompanied by unconditional, cornball camaraderie.

TNBA reviews: Holiday Knights

It is quite possible to start anywhere in Batman: the Animated Series, provided the episode you have selected is one of the remote few that hark back to a previous storyline, but even then it is far from a puzzling affair. Holiday Knights irritated so many fans because even though it kicked off a similar anthology series, it conflated several continuity mysteries and a visual overhaul with a most anthological structure of three unrelated vignettes, each rushed and whimsical, and yet intentionally posing questions to the viewer that it wryly refuses to answer.

Each segment serves a specific purpose, and the first mini-story about Harley’s and Ivy’s holiday shopping spree is the most flamboyant about the series’ new courage in going after even more extreme tonal departures from the usual dark nature of the show. Batman: the Animated Series featured many a screwball comedy, but rarely any so self-conscious as this. Harley and Ivy wink to the audience, make cheap gags in unlikely situations, and even star in a colorfully abstract fashion show montage set to a perky musical rendition of The 12 Days of Christmas. This opening segment, arguably the most Christmas-y of the bunch, also gallantly expresses the new design preferences for hard shapes over sinuous lines and shadows, possessing a chic angularity as out of a fifties Warner Bros. cartoon. The shot of a retro, symmetrical department store grounded behind the circular contrasts of falling snow is exemplary of this new geometric style.

If the Harley and Ivy romp is designed to communicate a more stylistic openness for The New Adventures of Batman, then the lesser story that follows sets out to confuse our perception of series-to-series continuity. B:TAS was serialized to the point that one may as well start in the middle, but certain characters had their own miniature arcs, which set aside episodes as diverse as Mudslide, Second Chance, and Avatar as direct continuations of previous installments. If there were any character whose fate was left dangling by the end of the series, it would be Clayface, who in Mudslide was presumably left to a watery grave. It is hard to conceive that Paul Dini would resurrect him for the new series’ debut without any intention of befuddling diehard fans and making a deliberate point to throw out continuity in the spirit of holiday fun. Regardless, this remains the weakest of the three, the high point being Harvey Bullock’s hilarious undercover position as a department store Santa, perhaps the closest thing in all three parts to a demonstration of the awkward marriage between holiday festivity and the dark subject matter we typically associate with Batman.

The third segment all but eradicates the colorful, comical attributes of the first two, ironic given this is Joker’s show. Where World’s Finest exploited the new Joker design to its manic extremities, the stiff on-model work here demonstrates where the new design fails, gambling away many of the character’s iconic features capable of enlivening the most poorly animated B:TAS shows for a desired cartooniness that doesn’t always pay off. If this final vignette serves any function, it is to shock the viewer by bluntly alluding to death and mass murder and having Batman suffer a bullet to the arm. Unable to reach the nuance of the best Joker spotlights, this third segment only seems concerned with its most basic operations, the first of which is the shock value, the second of which is the surprise of a new Robin, and neither of which quite pay off.

But the segments are somewhat unified; all of the events are related in the sense that they take place within close temporal approximations of each other, reinforcing a sense of networking wherein multiple heroes can be involved in different struggles in different parts of the city, though the impact of this multiplicity is undercut by structured sequence and tonal dissociation. Each one does, however, end with a familiar holiday tradition playing a part in the capture of each of villain—a Christmas tree, Santa decorations, and the New Years countdown bell—imposing an amusing pattern. When Batman holds his ritualistic New Years Day sit-down with Gordon in the coffee shop, the vignettes start retrospectively blending together into a single string of compounding, exhaustive threats, each just barely overcome. This ending at once expresses a weariness at events past and a celebratory look forward to things to come, marking Holiday Knights as the quintessential transition between Batman: the Animated Series and The New Adventures of Batman, whatever its faults.

S:TAS reviews: World's Finest

As the first major DCAU crossover, a sprawling three-part story with production values fit for a feature-length film, it’s no surprise that the episodes comprising World’s Finest were spliced together and marketed as a direct-to-video feature. As in any crossover, no hero can take dominance over the other, and so World’s Finest thrives on symmetries and character collisions and an undying spirit of one-upmanship. Only rarely giving way to dubious characterizations as a result of this preordained law of friction, World’s Finest stands as a testament to the complexity and stylistic immensity of the DC Animated Universe, accelerating its bloom into a colossal self-contained entity of intersecting narratives and interlocking characters.

The characteristically vivacious Superman opening bleeds into the now-crimson red sky of the redesigned Gotham City, its craggy skyline in canted frame before our viewpoint descends via dissolve into the city’s hazy, pitch-black underbelly. A shift from blaring, triumphant orchestration to intermittent rain and thunder is followed by another shift from a long shot overview to a more honed in shot of an unassuming antique shop nestled in the street-level blackness. As the shopkeeper closes up, Harley Quinn and the Joker, now revamped to look simplistically angular and more prone to garish cartoon poses and more flexible facial expressions, slip in and steal a jade dragon. We then cut to Batman and the police at the scene of the crime, trying to make heads or tails of Joker’s thievery.

This introduction to Batman and Gotham city, characterized by descent and mystery, segues into our introduction to Superman and Metropolis, now characterized by ascent and directness. Superman has to save Air Force One from terrorists in a grandiose scheme that couldn’t attract more attention if it tried, a crime that starkly contrasts with the puzzling and subdued thievery of Joker’s midnight escapade. Soon enough, Lex Luthor is abducted by Harley and the Joker, whose cartoon motions jut up against Luthor’s stone-faced sturdiness in a comical straight-on medium shot, and the major players are soon all introduced with ample contrasts divvied between each pair.

Lois Lane remains the pivot point, a character with no counterpart, who finds herself privy to moments of romantic insecurity and equally invested in both Superman and Batman as the story progresses. As S:TAS has developed, we have seen her and Superman’s bond subtly evolve, but this evolution is the accumulation of dropped hints and bits of foreshadowing as opposed to tangible marker points that trace a clear growth in the couple’s relationship. As Lois fumbles in an attempt to ask out the Man of Steel, she is presumably just as clouded on the issue of where they stand as we are, solidifying her as the most identifiable and perhaps most important character in the story. Throughout World’s Finest she becomes important to all of the other central characters, becoming the Joker’s bait and the object of Batman’s and Superman’s mutual affections while never diminishing into an objectified plot puppet. She retains her dignity through her unquenchable humanity, thanks in no small part to Dana Delaney’s impeccable voice acting and her exclusive privilege to the episode’s most naturalistic lines of dialogue (“Regale him with madcap tales of the nightlife in Smallville,” “burning, stinging iodine,” and her self-deprecating self-mutterings after she flubs her date attempt with Superman).

Batman and Superman, meanwhile, are subject to several mixes and matches with other characters and each other due to their dual identities. The first time Batman and Luthor meet they meet as business partners, Bruce Wayne of Wayne Enterprises and Lex Luthor of LexCorp engaged in a business venture, an encounter that adds a delicious dramatic irony to Batman’s eventual interrogation of Luthor in his high-rise apartment. Part of the story’s appeal is in studying how an outside organism transforms the status quo of his new environment; Batman has a transgressive disregard for legal boundaries that Superman could never possess out of care for his public image, making this interrogation scene the first time we have the pleasure of seeing Luthor truly afraid, his domain unexpectedly impeded upon by a being ironically more metaphysical than Superman. Additionally, out of costume, Bruce Wayne exacerbates Clark Kent, whom we see aggravated for the first time, through encroachment on his own territory on two fronts—his going out with Lois on Kent’s front and his vigilante exploits on Superman’s—a double-edged sword that neither identity can do anything about, as each character’s secret is at the other’s mercy. All throughout there are unexpected meetings between Batman and Superman, Clark and Bruce, and Bruce and Superman, each new encounter carrying with it its own surprising charms that engage our amusement while defamiliarizing our favorite heroes.

These character interactions are too numerous to list in detail or to do any justice to their particular delights, and the plot too capricious to trace point-by-point with any success. There are traceable patterns that persist throughout, however, that yield more dichotomous enjoyment and toy with the central theme of dualities between characters. For instance, as Superman and Batman grow more at ease with each other, due in no small part to Lois’s revelatory discovery that Batman is her boyfriend in disguise and the gradual evaporation of their knee-jerk biases and assumptions about each other, Joker’s and Luthor’s hatred for one another only escalates. While Batman and Superman are bound indefinitely by their heroism in spite of their differences, Joker and Luthor are hopelessly mismatched as anarchic force of insanity and uptight, methodical businessman. Their key differences are underlined in a few surprisingly thoughtful instances. For example, we know that Luthor is an entrepreneur with his company logo on just about everything who yet tries to sever all traceability to the crimes he pulls, marking him as duplicitous and hypocritical. Joker, while more brutal, is infinitely more honest about his entrepreneurship, stating that he likes “to personalize all my stuff” before taking to the skies in an enormous smiling aircraft that rains fire on the city of Metropolis.

With Batman’s and the Joker’s arrival in Metropolis, we are immediately privileged to sights so far veiled by Metropolis’ established schematic. As the series deals more in bold shapes and long shots and enormous spaces, there is rarely any room for idiosyncrasies. However, thanks to Batman’s gothic influence, we now travel to the clustered alleyway suburbs that house the Metropolis mob and a seedy strobe-lit nightclub called Rocker’s. Thanks to the spatial configurations of camera pans and zooms, each of these new environments has some proximity to an already familiar space; the mob sector on the city outskirts and Rocker’s close to Hobb’s Bay. Other new spaces include two restaurants, one on a 1920s style rooftop of sloping stained glass backdrops and stylized shadow play and another a ritzy, palatial suite encircled by golden archways.

The story is told with an adrenaline rush to accommodate all of the chance encounters and plot progression while still making time for show-stopping set pieces. Each part includes at least two high-octane action scenes, all bathed in some unlikelihood. Bruce Wayne’s bullet-dodging skills are daunting, not to mention all of the particulars of the third act’s cataclysmic hellfire. But it must be remembered that World’s Finest is foremost an adventure between two great heroes that has to be exciting before it can be a series of intelligent character studies, a thematically unified story, or an atmospheric visual tour-de-force.

Fortunately it is all these things and more, a fusion of seemingly incompatible elements that overlap into a succulent dish. Confounding ideas of heroism—both heroes’ approaches to doing right are selective, each concerning himself with areas that fall outside of the other’s radar, and both possess conflicting moral ideologies and equally self-important assumptions about the other—before unifying them, World’s Finest is euphoric on a gut level and uplifting on an ideological one. It ends with Clark Kent in silhouette looking out at Bruce Wayne’s plane bound for Gotham in the distance, capping World’s Finest with a bold, encapsulating image that concludes one story while looking ahead to many more to come.

S:TAS reviews: Ghost in the Machine

Ghost in the Machine is the richest S:TAS entry since A Little Piece of Home and in my mind the series’ greatest achievement, standing side by side with The Late Mr. Kent. A Little Piece of Home stands as its forerunner, forging connections between characters and charting out new architectural spaces and plot continuities. In both episodes, there is no main character, the idea being that Metropolis is too vast a universe to confine any stories set in its expanse to the focus, much less the point of view, of any one character.

But if A Little Piece of Home was something of a genre exercise, pitting Superman against Luthor in their first direct skirmish, mechanized T-Rex and all, then Ghost in the Machine is far more ambitious. It is a story told from all sides of a recent development, the disappearance of Luthor, and in the process it humanizes both Luthor and Mercy, peeling back their professionalism and corporate invulnerability to observe them in a state of urgent anxiety. Intersecting with the narrative is the source of the conflict, the return of Brainiac, which overcoats the mystery with a tone of gothic science fiction and the peripheral development of yet another character arc. Analyzing everything together yields a multifunctional artwork too immense to be reduced to any one of its myriad strands.

If any theme takes precedence it’s that of Mercy’s submission to Luthor, one elucidated less through dialogue than through behavior. To fault the climax, in which Luthor evacuates a collapsing basement storage facility and leaves Mercy to die, for explaining their dynamic in the most recycled and dramatic manner, is to ignore the fact that Mercy’s sycophantic relationship to Luthor is depicted in subtler terms at the beginning. Mercy takes the care to remove a miniscule hair from his suit before a demonstration only for him to selfishly ignore her concerns afterwards, stating aggravatingly that he would prefer to discover the problem (the failure of an electronic device intended to divert two sidewinder missiles away from a LexCorp demonstration) alone and firsthand. Her subservience to him is met at all moments with coldness, a clash that spills into the characters’ physical dispositions; Mercy’s eyes are constantly transfixed on Luthor, but she is lucky if he reciprocates with a glance.

This opening scene also corresponds to a broader, almost equally pertinent theme of the interchangeability between professional and intimate relationships. Luthor’s interest is in Mercy is borne of her worth to his and his company’s security. He sees her as no more than a bodyguard, but she views him as far more than an employer, and naturally Luthor’s status as corporate tycoon so easily dissolves into a more abstract image of indomitable power and stature, making her fascination with him that much harder to suppress. Luthor’s entrapment in the basement of LexCorp strips away his professional armor and untouchable status, humanizing him in the least flattering way by underlining his physical weakness and not in any way assuaging our view of him as a rotten person. This humanization not only paves the way for Luthor’s inevitable act of neglectful self-preservation—his having to act under harmful conditions in his state of vulnerability perhaps makes this the first time he has clearly expressed his opinion of Mercy’s value as a human being, which he has supposedly been able to mask for years by his guarded, stone-faced demeanor—but is also visually manifested in the descent from the streamlined, untouchable peak of LexCorp to the dank, unmonitored basement.

Lois and Clark are allotted a few interludes to let us in on their reaction to both the failure of Luthor’s magnetic device and his disappearance, which isn’t validated until Clark, in an act of headstrong initiative, charges into Luthor’s office without secretarial leeway. There is a sense of temporal continuity whenever one of their scenes pop up; the first time we see them driving back from Lex’s demonstration and the second time Clark is speaking to Lois over the phone from his apartment, ample evidence suggesting that it takes place the night of the previous scene. Though Lois and Clark do not get much screen time, one part of their exchange again emphasizes the blurred line between a professional and intimate relationship. Lois responds to Clark’s statement that Mercy only hovers around Luthor because it’s her job with “it’s no wonder you’re still single, Kent.” In having Lois amusedly recall this notion, screenwriter Rich Fogel is possibly alluding to Lois’s and Clark’s own relationship and its potential for becoming more than just a journalistic partnership.

Brainiac, meanwhile, is plausibly resurrected as having dwelt in the circuitry of LexCorp’s computers since the events of Stolen Memories, replacing our initial impression of him as congruent to that of his robotic personage with one of a more hauntingly ubiquitous, parasitic presence that defies physical limitations. As in Stolen Memories, Brainiac proves himself to be just as inextricably tied to Luthor as he is to Superman, all three of whom exist in adversarial relationships with each other. It is also fitting that Brainiac’s subplot is secondary to both Luthor’s and Mercy’s; our human interest gravitates towards their relationship instead of to the cold, unambiguous threat of Brainiac, who seems to provide the central conflict and little else. He serves the same function in almost all of his appearances, ever the silent predator in a perpetual state of concealment.

And so what of Mercy? She is left upon Luthor’s disappearance in a state of insecurity, as for possibly the first time she has failed in a job that means just as much to her financially as it does psychologically. A few words to Superman reveal that she was once a stray who lived on the streets before she was taken in by Luthor, an act that to her means beyond all doubt that he deeply cares for her. This seems like mere obligatory background info that doesn’t necessarily tell us more than we already know, but when it is merged with Luthor’s climactic moral choice, which is in itself seemingly contrived, we are left with a revised conception of Luthor, a man whose every philanthropic action is performed in his own self-interest and whose concern for others amounts to nothing, even when they have known him and believed otherwise for years. In the case of Mercy, whom we see during the aftermath in the driver’s seat of Luthor’s limo with a drooping face and who refuses to make eye contact with Superman, she still does believe it; her relationship to Luthor is just as unhealthy and abusive as Harley’s relationship to the Joker, both results of compulsive denial and obsessive dependence.

Ghost in the Machine is a juggling act between multiple subplots and multiple action scenes that manages to flesh out characters as they come to terms with themselves and their ever-changing relationships with others. From the concentricity of Ghost in the Machine, wherein a singular event is treated from a multitude of vantage points, we emerge with a newfound knowledge of all the characters, the rubble and debris that mark the catastrophic climax emblematic of what it took for us to get there.

S:TAS reviews: Brave New Metropolis

Characteristic of many entries in the DC Animated Universe, Brave New Metropolis is ambitious but shaky. There is little reason to believe that Superman would revamp his entire moral ideology in the face of a loved one’s death and embrace totalitarianism. As we see, this is not a radical new Superman; he is simply ignorant to the horrors he has wreaked on Metropolis, leading to further incredulities regarding both his ignorance and his inability to foresee Luthor’s underhandedness.

But these lapses in logic don’t particularly matter. We are not to question how premise A led to result B over however long a period of time. Brave New Metropolis is a thought experiment, and the basic justification for Superman’s behavior that he went crazy after Lois’s death, if anything, serves to adequately impart to the viewer how much Lois means to the Man of Steel, both in the warped hypothetical reality of the new dimension and in the accepted reality of S:TAS. What matters more than how Superman could relinquish his core morals and common sense is what the world would actually be like as a result.

Lois herself plays the stranger-in-a-strange-land protagonist who finds that her existence is pivotal to the state of Metropolis, and this self-investigation is perhaps the episode’s most overlooked quality. It comes so naturally that it takes a while to realize that this is, in effect, Lois’s first starring episode, and this is important because we find that this experience endows her with information about Superman that he himself doesn’t have; whether she knows what exactly to think about it, she now realizes that she means everything to Superman. That we are denied an exclusive look at her thoughts imbues her with some degree of dignified privacy, and also elicits our own curious responses as to what exactly will happen between the two characters.

Though pulsing with Gregorian chants and fierce confrontations and other easy indications of epic grandstanding, I find the actual meat of the episode’s conceit constrictive, overly convenient, and in places unforgivably sloppy. For example, when Lois finds herself in the gray, charred and filthy new Metropolis, what begins as economical storytelling devolves into a hardly probabilistic collision of coincidences. The Superman/Luthor bust, the shopkeeper closing early, the female announcer with the eerily pacifying voice on a distant monitor, and then Turpin in black garb coming to apprehend Lois are efficient instances that get across the central totalitarian image of the new Metropolis. However, that Lois conveniently finds herself within blocks of a break-in helmed by Jimmy Olsen among others, Superman not far behind, is woefully symptomatic of the sort of compressed storytelling that makes sure to relay essentials and rapidly propel the plot forward to the neglect of much-needed detailing beyond the basic prototypes.

So it turns out that Mercy Graves’ squadron only happens upon the resistance on the day that Lois Lane happens to pop up, and soon enough, Lois is face-to-face with Luthor, getting a rundown on what has happened to all the familiar faces (of all people who might occupy a vacant street, Angela Chen just happens to be the one), and impossibly scaling a city monument. All of the dialogue is equipped for only the barest exposition, and all of this rushed, headlong plot progression ends up reducing the new Metropolis to a city block, a holding cell, a monument, and the new LexCorp building. Meanwhile the ‘people’ of Metropolis seem confined to the twelve or so individuals that comprise the resistance movement. Everything boils down to a final confrontation in Lex’s office that attempts to resolve everything: Mercy gets encircled by the resistance, Superman saves the day, Luthor crashes into his monument in a spurt of poetic justice, the woman finds her baby, and Jimmy Olsen and gang stand with their hair flowing in the wind as they look to a better and brighter tomorrow.

For all its conceptual clout, Brave New Metropolis gets by on too many contrivances and easy answers to stand as an even remotely sharp exploration of fascism and all that it entails. But in positioning the run-of-the-mill dystopia as a hypothetical thought experiment hinging on a personal tragedy, it does succeed in giving the series’ two central characters a mythical urgency to their relationship and in providing Lois with a dignity all her own.

S:TAS reviews: Monkey Fun

When viewers complainingly refer to Prometheon as a soporific, plodding go-nowhere story, they should really be directing these criticisms towards the far more lumbering and aimless Monkey Fun. Prometheon pulled out all the stops in its slowly paced miniature epic, seasoning its stew with a tense oppositional dynamic between Superman and the xenophobic US military, animated tribute to a rightly idolized comic book artist, and deft, scope enlarging visual/auditory combinations. Monkey Fun doesn’t share half that episode’s sophistication.

Both episodes are based on simple premises, both essentially about giant monsters that pose a threat to the inhabitants of Metropolis, but while Prometheon is expansive, Monkey Fun is hopelessly reductive, ironic given its central character a monkey undergoing massive growth spurts. It begins with a flashback to Lois’s upbringing on a military base, where she and her little sister had grown attached to Titano, a monkey intended for space travel. In the flashback, her father takes Titano away and submits him to the space voyage, which goes haplessly wrong and leaves Lois sad at the fate of her monkey pal.

This flashback’s ultimate purpose is to hammer home that the means of defeating Titano lies in the past, when as a child it was calmed by a toy monkey that chimed the tune ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’ The ulterior motive it serves is to provide some insight into Lois’s past, a fruitless endeavor given that no information is provided that is not already inferable and that this then-tragic incident fails to register as a key moment in her life. When Superman finds Titano in the present, Lois can only express casual excitement, and her closing attitude to Titano is one of humanitarian affirmation rather than deeply rooted childhood affection.

Monkey Fun’s gambit is its title, which seeks to justify its endless meandering by rebilling it as a kind of wandering, adventure-seeking excitement. Titano’s rampages through Metropolis and the plethora of standoffs and screaming civilians aren’t really inserts intended to fill up space; they reflect the central figure’s animalistic curiosity and constitute a larger ambience. In essence, the lack of plot or point is supposed to be fun! If the episode achieved the kind of amusing atmosphere it advertises, perhaps a tongue-in-cheek Avery-like tale of a monkey’s unstoppable growth that whimsically pokes fun at the absurdities of one of comic book lore’s most trademarked storylines, then I would have been all for it. The episode we got instead is a tonal conundrum, shyly trying for sentimental character development, stakes-raising drama, and head-shaking comedy bits without cohesion.

The most Monkey Fun can boast is the occasional redemptive moment. For some it might be the brief look into Lois’s childhood, for others the well-crafted background designs of the Metropolis zoo, and for others yet the rare moment when the story approaches the fringes of the self-aware mode of absurdity it should have aimed for from the start. But as is implied by the term redemptive, these rare tidbits of interest only stand out because the rest of the show is a sterile mess.

S:TAS reviews: Solar Power

Target operates on the unlikelihood that an expert scientist would foster an unhealthy schoolboy crush and divert his expertise towards an irrational geeky revenge fantasy. Though the key element in a paranoid tale of systematic assassination, one that oscillated between finely tuned plot details and hilarious histrionic camp extravagance, Lytener served no function beyond that of an object of derision, which the self-flattering audience is expected to find endlessly pathetic. His closest kin so far in the DCAU (though several worthier candidates are to appear in Batman Beyond) is the toy-store owner in Beware the Gray Ghost, another maniacal dweeb driven to villainy by irrational obsession. The difference is that the toy-store owner, as a caricature of Bruce Timm, is both self-deprecating and intended as satire of the kind of mean-spirited cynicism that ever so slightly rears its ugly head in Target.

Robert Goodman delivers Lytener from the torment of Bader’s mockery and fashions a linear villain-of-the-week story flooded to the brim with pseudo-science and master plans and sneering super-villainy. Coming up after a sizeable handful of self-reflexive comedies, the classicism of Solar Power, dependent on all the archetypal English-class basics of the hero narrative—Superman at his weakest and Lytener, now going by Luminus, fully engaged to hi-tech villainy and a revenge scheme exempt from the pitiful romantic despair of his last—emerges triumphant as a playfully inventive slice of old-fashioned heroism prevailing in the face of insurmountable odds, a power-drained Superman going toe-to-toe with a manipulative light physicist.

It is precisely in deviating from comic book conventions that Goodman shrinks Solar Power down to the most elementary tenets of what it is to be heroic, as he attempted to do in Identity Crisis. Luminus has commissioned in space a network of refractory prisms that filters out all of the sun’s light except for the red beams, and without healthy sun radiation to fuel Superman’s unique Kryptonian cell structure, the Man of Steel is left in a disadvantageous position. That Luminus can wreak havoc from a distance cooped up in an invisible abandoned satellite station means that it is in Superman’s best interest to strategize carefully and tread cautiously, and such counter initiatives, usually dictated by narrative conventions, can be found in previous episodes like Prometheon and Blasts From the Past. Furthermore, it is often a writer’s ploy to have Superman show up decked out in Kryptonite protective wear or equipped with some other accoutrement before being disarmed and forced to rely on his wits and instincts. In Solar Power, he is in the middle of preliminary strategizing with Professor Hamilton when Lois and Jimmy are kidnapped, and unable to disregard his heroic impulses, he enters the arena unarmed and without a backup plan.

Once Superman enters the satellite station he finds himself stuck in a dreamlike traversal of evocative places, a Western saloon, murky train yard, and schooner set against a blazing red sky, each of which is a large-scale holographic construct. Each time Superman enters a new zone, it is a result of stumbling defeat instead of progressive action, and it is only when he thinks to make a circular incision in the sky itself that he takes control and makes his way to reality. Goodman and director Curt Geda spend the entire show making a point of Superman’s weakness and exhaustion, that when the first rays of the reinvigorating sun finally fall upon him, it is not without vicarious feeling on the part of the audience, who can finally take delight in Superman’s effortless and much-deserved victory.

S:TAS reviews: Double Dose

Double Dose is possibly the sleekest that Superman: the Animated Series has ever looked. The colors are appropriately bold, the backdrops often muddled and damp and allowing the cobalt and aqua that consumes Livewire’s body dance and flicker on the screen, as well as the striking intermingling of darkened primary colors that overlay Superman's costume and Parasite's hulking purple mass that takes possession of the frame space whenever he becomes the focus. But Livewire is the centerpiece, and here she manipulates her powers with more finesse than in her debut, and instead of garish globs of untempered electrical energy, she fires concentrated musket balls of dazzling light that careen across the screen, slow down, and then impact with a seismic jolt. Every action has its own acrobatic flair, as the animators dissolve every object in motion into streaks of pigment and fashion each new pose with extreme foreshortening.

Perhaps most important is Livewire’s design. She looks the same as in Livewire, but she is no longer weighted down by blocky movements and ugly framing. We get more close-ups of her face, now fastidiously accentuated with seductive grins and playful glances. She exaggeratedly swings her hips as she walks and arches her shoulders when she stands. This is important because the entire plot of Double Dose, however shapeless, is unified by associations between sexual desire and power hunger. From the opening scene, in which Livewire garners a young janitor’s sympathy and persuades him to let her listen to his Walkman and extracts its electricity, writer Hilary Bader slowly molds a story about how sex is a stand-in for any representation of power or dominance, and this metaphor gets played up in a multitude of amusing ways.

Livewire’s absorbing the Walkman’s electricity is a precursor to Parasite’s desire to absorb her power, and each of these power transfers is obtained by a different mode of sexual exploitation. Livewire uses her femininity to seduce her prey, and this attribute is highlighted even when her subjects are unwilling to relent, as when she plants a kiss on Dan Turpin’s mouth. Parasite’s power hunger and the means by which he satiates it are, by contrast, strictly masculine. He has no penchant for cunning and depends instead on brute force to get what he wants. For all of the harm Livewire inflicts, the power she absorbs comes straight from electronic devices and so she does not rob anyone of what is intrinsically his. Parasite’s abilities depend directly on depleting the powers of others, and his lust for Livewire’s energy and third-act betrayal becomes symbolic of the dynamics of rape.

Bader does not extend her analogy to generate any worthwhile discussion or even afterthoughts about sexual dominance in contemporary society, but it’s probably for the better. Unencumbered by the cautionary tightrope of social commentary, Bader lets her premise expand into unexpected moments of risqué humor, dirty asides at their subtlest and the equivalent of visual puns at their most barefaced. By the latter I am chiefly referring to Superman’s arrival at the power plant where the duo are wreaking havoc. Inspired by Lois’s poncho, he shows up equipped with insulated rubber coating that looks like skintight see-through latex, and the immediate mental reaction of more jaded viewers is that he is dressed as a giant condom, a reaction supported by Livewire’s sarcastic comments (“Well what do you know? The Boy Scout brought protection.”) and sure to elicit many a guffaw.

For all it’s jumbled incoherency, Double Dose at its best has the feel of a suggestive romantic comedy out of Hollywood’s Golden Age, made possible only through censorship loopholes and several hefty dollops of innuendo, and made immeasurably more delightful in how it toys with its confinement.

S:TAS reviews: Mxyzpixilated

Paul Dini’s signature S:TAS episode addresses a curious question. How would Superman react in the face of a mere annoyance instead of a threat? Mxyzpixilated spans several months, and the challenge posed by the magical fifth dimensional imp lacks any immediacy. What then, is the fun of an outing with no seriousness beyond a word game, and where most of the source material comes from comic strips as opposed to comic books?

As in The Main Man, Dini loves making the otherworldly hilariously familiar. Mr. Mxyzptlk’s comedy is two-fold. First is the fact that a mystical trans-dimensional ‘superior’ being is practically Gilbert Gottfried incarnate, an obnoxious funny looking loud-mouthed man. Though he professes to be above Earthly concerns, in his trivial pleasure-seeking and hoping to drive Superman batty with his irritating games, Mxyzptlk ends up going obsessively mad, whining like a child, and declaring revenge, ever prone to a wide spectrum of human faults and vices. The funniest of these is his sexual appetite, communicated in classic Warner Bros. fashion in the final scene, which in turn begs questions about his seductive girlfriend and their chic art deco apartment.

Secondly, the logic of Mr. Mxyzptlk’s powers and abilities is constantly vacillating. Initially we view him as having power without limits, restricted only by the limitations imposed by his enormous ego. If he wanted to, Mr. Mxyzptlk could destroy Superman in the blink of an eye with merely a thought. But when, out of rage, he is convinced to get rid of the Man of Steel, we see him slaving away for the entire three month sojourn in his own dimension, to which he is subjected if Superman gets him to say his name backward, on a massive robot suit, complete with oversized Swiss Army knife and zipper, which naturally fails to pay off. Mr. Mxyzptlk, for whatever reason, is bound by an arbitrary logic in his seemingly illogical world, evoking the ambiguous rules of physics and reality that governed old Looney Tunes cartoons (as in Baby-Doll, the fun of Mr. Mxyzptlk is that his cartoon design is like a remnant from the heyday of Warner Bros., visually at odds with Timm’s usual streamlined figures).

Almost as enticing as the weird antagonist is that Superman finally gets his time to shine as a human being, quick-witted, pestered, and prone to wry shoulder shrugging and satisfactory smirks. The appealing thing about Clark Kent is that despite his soft-spoken civility stemming from his guarded disposition, he is by nature a funny guy, whether he’s toying with Lois by sarcastically admitting that he’s Superman or beating her to the by-line, or simply sneaking in a sip of coffee when he’s supposed to have a broken arm. In Mxyzpixilated he makes do as a devious trickster in his own right, capable of verbal sparring and, at the end, indulging in uncharacteristic false modesty with a condescending grin plastered on his face.

Paul Dini has a blast with Mxyzpixilated; fans often complain of his decline from writing hard-edged dramas to farcical comedies, but upon close inspection one realizes that both are equally sophisticated.

S:TAS reviews: Action Figures

Metallo, like Bizarro, is born of an endlessly recycled sci-fi archetype. Also like Bizarro, and also because of his own sci-fi mold, that of a man made machine, he is characterized as the victim of an identity crisis. It is a rather standard crisis exhibited in The Way of All Flesh, complicated by Corben’s amorality and thusly the framing of his loss of self in sensory, more specifically tactile, terms as opposed to emotional ones. The chilling thing about Corben’s iron mold is that he is not in the least bit bothered by the loss of his humanity per se, but by the loss of pleasure. If anything, one could say that Metallo is a reversal of the usual metal man figure, because he starts out robbed of the morality one might associate with an immersion in machinery and yet the very human emotions that yield destruction, anger and vengefulness, remain intact.

Action Figures begins with a Metallo, stricken with amnesia, wandering listlessly until he arrives on a volcanic island inhabited by a research team and the head scientist’s two naïve children. This is identity crisis in its purest form, destruction of self-image (his skin has been entirely ripped off) and amnesia yielding a Tabula Rasa emptiness with a slight pang of remembrance. Like Amazo of Justice League, but without obsequious devotion to a ‘maker,’ Metallo becomes the puppet of the children. The episode’s preferable characterization is that of an action figure, and in that context the children’s inability to distinguish between their playthings and a robot, except in the sense that the latter is autonomous, becomes potentially horrifying. Of course when Metallo regains his memory the episode loses the dimension of a child’s dangerous perception of reality, but it retains its suspense, in that one gets the sense that Metallo’s amorality has serious potential to harm the children he now finds at his beck and call in a 180 degree role reversal.

The denouement is circular in recalling the opening images of Metallo aimlessly walking after the fallout of an enormous disaster. This time, he is in full possession of his memory but without any desire of being John Corben again, softly repeating “I am Metallo.” If there is anything problematic about this ending it is that there never was much distinction between Corben and Metallo, and if this affirmation of a cyborg self is supposed to imply a loss of scruples and inspire a shudder then it sadly fails. However, in stripping away the basis of most stories that attempt to differentiate between man and machine, that which is rooted in our own self-perception as a moral and ideological species, then this finale can be viewed as an ominous look ahead to future stories that have the potential to demonstrate even more atypical implications of such a transformation. Sadly, this never happened.

What makes Action Figures is its climactic fight scene, and its only tie-in to the major theme is that, from the vantage point of Lois and the two children, Superman and Metallo do look like two action figures sparring with one another, flailing limbs and all. It is one of the most brutal fights, a mixture of camerawork, environmental interaction and a preference for actual fight technique over an endless series of consecutive blows. The fight’s signature moment occurs when Metallo uppercuts Superman, achieving such an impact that his Kryptonite-proof helmet flies off. The camera swings upward in conjunction with Metallo’s fist with the same vigor that Superman’s head suddenly swings backward, with the vertical tilt serving a secondary purpose in that we see the helmet catapult into the air and subsequently vanish. The direction team at TMS always seemed prepared to pioneer new and dynamic ways to communicate violence, and the premise of two titans sparring in the midst of a volcanic eruption seemed too good not to go wild.

S:TAS reviews: Target

Middle-of-the-road Superman can often be a surprising integration of unlikely parts, i.e. over-the-top camp and sophisticated drama. Target is almost unanimously considered average at best, a redundant mystery with a silly line-up of suspects and hammy no-holds-barred finale. But I cannot deny a strange satisfaction I got from this seeming standstill waste, and that was a satisfaction almost exclusively associated with what Manny Farber calls Termite Art, network charting, expansive works of wonder disguised as garish melodrama and trite action.

After Superman rescues Lois the first time, during the awards ceremony, there is an immediate cut to their return drive, the sort of in-between sequence rarely indulged in flash-bang superhero cartoons. Naturally this immediately turns into another Lois-in-jeopardy scene, and before the first act is over Superman has come to her rescue on two separate occasions. The subsequent acts alternate between mystery solving and more tiring rescues, the latter compounding as fast as the list of suspects. Slicing it a different way, it is an alternation between campy silliness and refined character intermingling. In the realm of the silliness are Lois’s demurely obnoxious journalistic competitor that flaunts his red herring status, Lytener’s geeky murder motivation, and the endless barrage of flying elevators (“I believe this is your floor”) and out-of-control cars. In the latter category are the sense of well-founded paranoia that might plague a hunted journalist with a long line of potential malefactors, the brief, realistic exchange between Lois and Lex that aptly characterizes their tinted relationship, and of course the final payoff that transforms the running rescue gag into low-key romance.

I’m still indifferent in spite of my momentary spurts of excitement. Structurally it is still a messy sine graph of ups and downs and the cheese doesn’t always jive with my comic sensibilities. Though it is impossible for me to take the mystery seriously, I still cringe when Lytener reverts from mild-mannered lab worker to histrionic, browbeating spurned lover with an insatiable schoolboy crush. The entire third act fight is silly to me, especially Lois’s nervously standing within a ring of vertical lasers waiting for it to end, her impatience mirroring my own as Superman and his body-armored nemesis trade repetitive blows.

It appears that if the final reveal and subsequent fight is Target at its lowest, then Luthor is its saving grace, clouding our villainous perception of him in his sincere concern for Lois’s well being. Though it is Superman who comes to Lois’s rescue, fists raised and ready for battle, one must not forget that it is Luthor who slips Clark the revelatory information. In stark contrast to his appearance in Identity Crisis, in which he is played up as either a mad scientist or a source of dry comedy, Target grounds him as a real person with indelible virtues and remnants of past feelings scattered luminously throughout the darkness at his core. It is appearances like these that make the character’s series spanning arc such an intriguing phenomena, as we can trace how these virtues slowly, and almost tragically, diminish.

S:TAS reviews: Identity Crisis

Though Identity Crisis is an admittedly contrived piece of work—doppelgänger, clones, secret laboratory, noble idiot—one has to admire that the producers never miss a chance to play with expectations. If the main plotline is only fair, then the patronizingly moralistic opening minutes that tonally contradict the bulk of the story demonstrates how even such a banal entry is atypical of Saturday morning television. Serving a two-pronged purpose, this opening, which is not entirely implausible as S:TAS filler, also raises certain expectations in the viewer who, aware of the inconsistency of all television, might shrug his shoulders and conclude that this will amount to little more than cloying didacticism in the vein of The Underdwellers of B:TAS, unprepared for the jolting scene in which Superman rescues Clark Kent from a plunge off the side of a cliff.

The episode doesn’t entirely supersede its opening segment; no matter how enjoyable Bizarro’s character is and no matter how snappy the one-liners, Identity Crisis is little more than condensed, watered-down variations on classical themes, as well as rife with implausibilities. Bizarro is fun, but does he represent much more than the usual clone/doppelgänger baggage of standard science fiction instinctively slapped on by writers penning a story that practically writes itself? Lex Luthor’s wry humor doesn’t disappoint, but his seemingly indefinite sojourn in his mountainside laboratory comes across as unlikely and it stands as one of the few times in Superman that Luthor fails to amount to more than a mere domineering mastermind. The climax is a gallery of clichés, managing to incorporate a timed bomb, sudden epiphany, and heroic sacrifice before closing on a trite, affirmative appraisal of said heroism.

But what proves fascinating about Identity Crisis is the titular crisis, in one sense one of the various riffs on archetypal sci-fi storylines but in another abject from them. Bizarro believes himself to be Superman because he is a defective clone programmed to think as such, but his perception of himself conforms to a very simplistic rubric of basic virtues. Superman rescue building. Superman fix bridge. Superman save Lois. Unlike other versions of the charmingly dumb hero, Bizarro’s childish stupidity is not a prerequisite for his heroism; his heroism exists in spite of his stupidity and lack of better judgment, both of which lead primarily to destruction. While so often the noble idiot stands angelically apart from those around him, whose intelligence seems to have automatically endowed them with bitterness, Identity Crisis presents a far more open view of what it means to be a hero, ultimately deciding that the will to do good is the highest virtue, and that it is not selective. The biologically deterministic moral perspective is shaky (“he came from good stock”) and would seem to contradict my conclusion (and it is also the very thing that the DCAU’s grandest statement, Epilogue, sets out to rebut), but it is not authoritatively insisted upon.

Bizzaro’s World, a superior sequel, will come along to stretch Bizarro’s self-perception to its most emblematic, arbitrary extremes, in a sense doing away with the sentimental morality in favor of a comic-surrealist extravaganza. Even so, Identity Crisis is too sincere to discredit, and even directs its grounding theme of identity confusion towards the development of Lois’s and Superman’s relationship, which starts off brazenly and winds up in a state of subdued, unspoken awareness.

S:TAS reviews: Speed Demons

Speed Demons, like much of the series, is a glorious tribute to the Silver Age of comic books. It takes its premise from a 1967 issue of Superman in which the Man of Steel and the Fastest Man Alive competed in a charity race. As the Flash would appear to rain on Superman’s parade, ever a cocky smirk on his face and never missing a chance to show off, the story thrives on clashes between their personalities. The judicious Boy Scout miffed by his competitor’s egocentrism and immaturity. As is predictable from the outset, the story isn’t about the race, as to crown a single winner runs contrary to superhero ethos, in which everyone who takes a stand against evil comes out a hero. And naturally by the end, Superman and Flash are best of friends, bound together by their unfailing heroism.

The episode is justifiably founded on the notion that buddy film conventions are all the grounding needed for a superhero team-up. The eye candy is the main attraction; Speed Demons is the most convincing demonstration of super speed in the DCAU. Instead of Justice League’s insisting on flashbulb repetitions of figure to relay rapidity to the viewer, which is counterproductive and merely clogs up the line of action with an all too noticeable ‘effect,’ Tokyo Movie Shinsha and director Toshihiko Masuda instead juggle the classical tradition of speed lines and abstract gusts of color with painstaking attention to the surrounding physics. From a distant vantage point we see the evocative stripes of blue and red and from a close-to-the-ground, worm’s eye perspective that views the figures first in long shot before they accelerate straight into the camera, we see the force with which their feet plant themselves into the earth and the resulting geyser of dust and gravel that spews out from under the friction. Wisps of wind, trailing eruptions of ocean water, flittering debris, and flailing of fabric are other examples of the appeal to the physical reactions of their hyper-fast sprinting.

In a lesser show, the villain who comes to pose a threat and thus spur our heroes to action would be an arbitrary no-good interventionist, or else a rogue overtly linked to the guest star (Reverse Flash would be the most prime candidate). The Weather Wizard occupies a gray area. He seems chosen because he’s a fairly well known Flash adversary, but I feel his link runs much deeper. He is predominantly associated with the elements, and since so much of the thrill of watching the Flash and Superman in action is how their enhanced speed is rooted in actual physics and how their deviation from what is scientifically normal affects their surrounding environment. The Weather Wizard is also concerned with altering the natural environment via acceleration of a similar kind, and so there is a certain theme of disharmony of nature whenever the two collide. To be even more analytical would be to observe that the Weather Wizard mans a man-made machine from a sterile enclosure, while Flash and Superman not only possess powers that are naturally ingrained, but are interact directly with the environment instead of digitizing it into holographic representations.

Finally, I don’t believe any of these strengths are necessarily compensation for the conventional story, as I don’t see anything wrong with this episode’s almost road-movie contrivances. Watching Speed Demons as a child, I didn’t mind the overbearing emphasis on duality: Superman vs. the Flash, streams of red vs. streams of blue, and the aforementioned clash of personality, neither getting the better of the other. I was excited to see the Flash, one of my favorite heroes, and such a bifurcated competition is the ideal, if a bit pedestrian, format for a superhero team-up. At the risk of sounding platitudinous, that’s the way it has to be.

S:TAS reviews: Livewire

The DCAU has always existed in a vague contemporary vacuum. There is plenty to ground it in the modern world, but it also encompasses odd anachronisms, futuristic technology and retro architecture, microchips and black-and-white TV sets. Livewire is the first brazen attempt to appeal to modern culture; the producers wear their intentions on their sleeves by nature that Livewire, the titular villain, is an original creation, the S:TAS equivalent to Harley Quinn. However, she is a far less complex and enjoyable character, a trash-talking controversial shock jock with an axe to grind and a public to rally.

Since the mid-nineties, when this episode first aired, shock jocks have become a relentlessly skewered pop culture phenomena; because they are the bottom of the barrel of popular culture, many television shows have taken it upon themselves to paint negative pictures of these polarizing provocateurs, even though they are usually every bit as part of the commercialized dumbing down of American culture as their easy satirical target. Even in the mid-nineties, these anathemas could hardly count as interesting, relevant subjects for assault, and in Superman: the Animated Series, which has proven itself capable of lightly commenting on more universal social and political ills, this flash-in-the-pan, clear-cut critique of media mouthpieces who savor the attention feels maddeningly out of place.

If there is anything exciting about the elongated first act that depicts media personality Leslie Willis spending her morning on the airwaves digging into Superman and creating a rift between the public in the process, it is the image of a Metropolis unified by media. Willis’s hate rant pervades the entire city, and we get a glimpse of how it affects various bystanders, whether they reside on the wharf or operate a crane atop a skyscraper. Until the usual mechanistic disaster that calls Superman from, of all things, an on-air interview with Willis, we have a rare look at a city of divvied up into sectors, further divided, ironically, by media, the universal leveler and the only uniform entity that spans across the entire city. Furthermore, though it is pedantically conveyed, we are finally introduced to the notion that there is a wide-reaching populist contempt for Superman. We have already seen such hatred and xenophobia within the context of corporate America (Luthor) and the US government (General Hardcastle); now we finally have a much-delayed overview of the outcry among the common people.

The first act concludes with Willis getting electrocuted at a show held during a thunderstorm and miraculously gaining the power to harness electrical energy, though of course the parameters of her powers are shakily defined. The background paintings of Metropolis’s equivalent to Central Park doused by rain and lit by lightning are impressionistically rich with the subdued palette of an overcast late evening. This first-act climax (and as far as I’m concerned that of the entire episode) is dazzlingly animated, both Superman’s and Willis’s electrocutions a swirl of wispy lightning that emits a bright fluorescent blue monochrome, the jumpy, flickering flashes of electricity energizing the scene with kinetic shadows and the overall feeling of elemental chaos.

Unfortunately, her subsequent plan and eventual demise are utterly contrived, the action suddenly becoming a series of dryly animated long-shot sequences instead of the intense close proximity of the first-act action. The second and third acts run together as the show devolves into an endless series of scuffles. The breadth of Metropolis exhibited in the first act becomes constricted to a Times Square district and a few spare interiors. A promising first act that was just prepared to extend its ideas of media ubiquity and do away with the grating shock jock routine fizzles out into a glob of villain-of-the-week tepidity.

S:TAS reviews: The Prometheon

The story plods along like the lumbering star of the show, the giant Prometheon, whose every feature has the cumulative look of craggy terrain. A plotless, entertaining connect-the-dots giant-monster extravaganza, The Prometheon is a much-needed chapter in Superman. Not every episode can be nuanced or explorative; if the series is to acknowledge its hero’s lengthy history charting back to the early days of simplified sci-fi monster brawls, then surely another small-scale narrative can be postponed for something so appealing to that raw human desire for spectacle.

Many fans slight this episode not necessarily for its subject matter, but for its lugubrious pace and the absence of any riveting physical confrontation. For me, the appeal lies in the creature’s extensive animation, how every cast shadow across the ravines of his face or bodily craters moves in correspondence to his hulking motions. By nature that this monster is so meticulously animated he is made to fully embody his voluminous physical presence; see Justice League’s Metamorphosis for an example of a giant monster whose monumentality is underplayed by a dearth of detail. He isn’t merely a separate entity squeezed into a preexisting landscape, two different masses of image unconvincingly rubbed against one another. Every step makes the earth tremble and a gust of gravelly smoke emit from the impact.

Of course the creature is a tribute to Jack Kirby, whose allegedly gruff personality already has a vessel in Dan Turpin. Hallmarks of Kirby’s dynamic style manifest in the Prometheon’s protruding brow, fluorescent eyes nesting within thick black outlines, and rough, rocky exterior. His defined lower lip is characteristic of all of Kirby’s brutes, from The Hulk to The Thing to everyone in between. The star of The Prometheon is this design, a grueling labor of love that occupies a daunting physical space and hearkens back to a great era in adventure serial comic book art.

Besides this animated feat is a narrative strand that is both referential and foreshadowing, one General Hardcastle who stands for all of the prejudicial political and military higher-ups of Marvel Comics, most recognizably General Ross of The Incredible Hulk. At the same time he is a seemingly isolated homage to yet another element of a typical Kirby comic book tale, he does reappear sparsely throughout the rest of the DC Animated Universe for more complex political commentary on the relationship between superheroes and government. Charles Napier is ideal for the general, drawing out each tangential statement and self-absorbed command with passive-aggressive relish.

I will never understand the popular hatred for The Prometheon. In addition to what I have already mentioned, there are tremendous, stellar set pieces. A subjective glimpse of Metropolis renders it a dazzling dreamlike lightshow, a mirage-like Las Vegas resting amid a dry and desolate landscape. From the monster’s nosedive into the harbor comes a deafening quake that extends the animators’ skill at putting homogenous elemental entities into motion to the foamy tidal wave that comes crashing down on a nearby yacht. The finale is abrupt and thusly concentrates the catharsis into a powerful shot of the alien’s frozen arm reaching out of the reservoir; for whatever reason I find this instantaneous incapacitation an inevitably haunting conclusion.