Category Archives: Batman
Why Does Batman Name His New Team the ‘Justice League of America’?
DC has relaunched a new iteration of the Justice League of America this past week and I’m a little confused. According to Justice League of America Rebirth #1, Batman forms the team to be a grounded, more human-focused group of superheroes as opposed to the god-like regular Justice League.
Batman is a big fan of The Flash TV show
We all know the branding reason why the new comic is called ‘Justice League of America’, but after reading this prologue issue, I’m wondering what the in-story reason is for Batman being so patriotic in naming his new team. When has Batman ever been a flag-waving character?
The Rebirth issue is a prologue about Batman going out and recruiting Black Canary, Lobo, the Ray, the Atom, Vixen and Killer Frost to form his new team. This isn’t the first time Batman has formed his own, more grounded Justice League. Any comic book scholar worth her salt would see this as an obvious Batman and the Outsiders-style group.
JLA is definitely the name he picks
But no, it’s not called ‘Batman and the Outsiders’. For reasons that go unexplained, Batman just copies of the name of the regular Justice League and tags ‘of America’ at the end, as if his team is only going to fight bad guys in the continental United States. It makes zero sense.
Especially when you remember that there already was a ‘Justice League of America’ in the New 52 continuity, which I’m pretty sure still applies in the Rebirth era. That team had a reason for using ‘of America’ in their name. They were legitimately government-based.
Remember them?
Has Batman forgotten about them? Is her purposefully co-opting the name for his new squad? What reason could that possibly serve?
Batman is a superhero who knows how branding works. And he’s clearly put a lot of thought into this team — hence why he’s recruited complete newbies Ray and Atom, and why he recruited Lobo for a grounded, more human-focused group of superheroes. So it just doesn’t make any sense why Batman, of all superheroes, would call this team the ‘Justice League of America’ instead of literally anything else.
But I suppose even Batman recognizes that ‘The Outsiders’ just isn’t marketable.
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I Was Not Prepared For This Monday
I don’t know what crazy partying I did this weekend, but apparently it caused me to push off all blog prep for today. So in lieu of an actually interesting thing to read, here’s a fun featurette on The LEGO Batman Movie!
Comes out in, like, two weeks! So excited!
Also, keep staying tuned, because I might have some really cool blog news to share this week!
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Hench-Sized Comic Book Reviews – 1/28/17
Comics! I love’em. You love’em! We can’t live without’em! And here’s another big stack of reviews for comics I read this week. Kind of fun how I keep doing this.
Lots of good reading options this week, from Infamous Iron Man to the new Hulk series to my return to the Pink Ranger mini-series. There are so many good comics to choose from these days. Including and especially the new issue of Spider-Woman, which easily wins Comic Book of the Week due to another impressive, emotional issue.
Does Janice know some twerp is stealing her Beetle guise?
Though I’m not going to lie to you: Spider-Woman #15 is crazier than I could have ever guessed.
I’ve also figured out the worst part about Inhumans vs. X-Men: the unintentional villainy of Ms. Marvel. I’m clearly with the X-Men on this one. The Inhumans are monsters who are comfortable with either killing or deporting every mutant on Earth. Since she’s an Inhuman, Kamala Khan gets drafted into the Inhumans’ side with the new issue, and it’s repugnant. That Kamala would so cheerfully and excitedly join the side in favor of genocide is just wrong. But here we are.
Comic Reviews: Detective Comics #949, Hulk #2, Infamous Iron Man #4, Power Rangers — Pink #6, Prowler #4, Spider-Woman #15, The Dregs #1 and Teen Titans #4.
Ben Affleck Needs to Up His Trolling Game
I don’t know how much pop culture news you read online everyday, but I surf a pretty healthy number of websites. And over the past few weeks, or even months at this point, I’ve started to notice a pretty troubling and hugely annoying trend: every single word out of Ben Affleck’s mouth about his upcoming Batman movie launches an avalanche of identical headlines across the Internet. If this guy’s fart sounded like a Joker laugh, we would have to head for the hills.
I could link to a bunch of the articles to prove my point, but io9 has a pretty healthy summation. Thanks io9!
It’s reached the point that I, in all honesty, just want Ben Affleck to start trolling the heck out of the Internet.
Did he know what he was signing up for?
I don’t know why Affleck is doing so much press. Is he promoting a different movie? But it seems like every single day he just happens to mention the Batman movie to somebody, and then everybody else posts huge clickbait headlines about whatever random comment he made. Is he looking forward to directing? Is he hinting that he won’t be directing? Does he have a script? What are his thoughts on the costume?
The avalanche is endless. And yeah, I understand how clickbait and Internet headlines work, and I understand that these websites need content. But jeez louise, this is getting to be a bit much. We’re still only in early pre-production, people!
I think the solution to all of this is that Affleck should just start making stuff up. He should release a press release on one day and give a release date for the movie. Then he should come out with a new one the next day saying the project has been cancelled. Then just keep talking about it like it’s back on. He should announce that Danny DeVito will be reprising his role as the Penguin, alongside Nicki Minaj as the Riddler and Matt Damon as Robin. Announce an Adam West cameo! Nothing is true; everything is permitted!
And in this way, Ben Affleck could become a pretty good Joker.
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Hench-Sized Comic Book Reviews – 12/31/16
Here we are at last, on the final day of 2016. This accursed year has done much to destroy the human spirit and crush all our hopes and dreams. But I say that dreams never die! I plan on making 2017 the best year ever! And we can start with a nice, big pile of comic book reviews to end out the year.
We’ve got so many comic reviews, too! I had some extra time on my hands this week, so I read and have reviewed a ton of books! We’ve got great comics, like Infamous Iron Man and the new Hulk! We’ve got middling books, like Ghost Rider and Prowler! And we’ve got not quite good books, like Teen Titans!
But Comic Book of the Week goes to a stellar Spider-Woman, as writer Dennis Hopeless shows everyone the pure awesomeness of carefully constructed and executed character drama!
This day, we punch!
The final issue of Civil War II also came out this week, and just as we all feared, it was a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Captain Marvel and Iron Man duke it out and nothing really comes of it. Tony is taken off the table, Ulysses literally just disappears, solving that crisis, and pretty much every comic has already moved on to their new ongoing storylines anyway. So yeah, this thing was a big stinker.
Comic Reviews: Batgirl #6, Detective Comics #947, Ghost Rider #2, Great Lakes Avengers #3, Hulk #1, Infamous Iron Man #3, Mighty Thor #14, Prowler #3, Spider-Woman #14 and Teen Titans #3.
Henchman-4-Hire 