As American As They Come

Truth, Justice, and The American Way. That's what Superman has stood for since his inception back in 1938. But in an effort to make Superman "relevant" for our more jaded, ironic age, the makers of Man of Steel (including director Zack Synder, producer Christopher Nolan, and writer David Goyer) have taken steps to ensure that their version of Superman isn't seen as a corny relic from a simpler time. In doing so, they do more harm than good to the character.

Now, if you haven't seen the movie yet, I'm about to jump into spoilers so stop reading now unless you want to know everything about Man of Steel's climax.

I'm serious. If you don't know and don't want to know, come back after you've seen the movie.

Ok, fair warning given. Now let's get into that ending...

At the end of Man of Steel, after a lengthy battle, General Zod is trying to fry a group of defenseless humans with his heat vision, straining against the neck hold that Superman has him in. As Zod refuses to give up, Superman resorts to lethal force, snapping Zod's neck and instantly killing him.

Henry Cavill delivers a powerful reaction immediately following but it's simply a moment that should not have happened. It's just too ugly. As readers know, Superman has killed in the comics before - killing Zod and his Kryptonian cronies, in fact - back at the end of John Byrne's historic run on Superman. In Superman #22, Superman acts as judge, jury, and executioner - exposing a Kryptonian trio to green kryptonite, killing all three. This deed occurs away from any witnesses but although the knowledge of what he's done rests solely with himself, Superman feels the full weight of his deadly actions, ruminating on the fact that none of the people of Earth who look up to him as a hero know that he's been tarnished.

So yes, Superman has killed but Man of Steel handles it much differently than Byrne did, depicting this monumental act in a much less responsible fashion. For one, in the Byrne issue, Superman kills his Kryptonian adversaries by means of a very "comic book-y" method. Seeing characters on a comic page fading away as they succumb to Kryptonite radiation is not nearly the same as the sight of Superman snapping a man's neck on the big screen, with the crack echoing in Dolby digital sound. We're talking about a very real world level of brutality here that is acceptable from a one man killing machine like The Punisher, but not from Superman.

This is a character that has inspired children for decades and still does. To have him straight-up murder someone, no matter what the circumstance, is just wrong. At 44, I'm plenty jaded and onscreen violence is nothing that I'm against as long as it's for an appropriate audience but there are some things that always need to be safe for kids to enjoy and Superman is way up there at the very top of that list. I'm the father of an eight-year-old boy who loves Superman and it was genuinely dispiriting to have our first Superman movie together on the big screen be crowned by the sight of Superman savagely murdering his opponent. Sorry, but it's just not cool. It's a sad conversation to have to have as you explain to your child that Superman was wrong and that he should've found a better way.

For those who want to cite Superman II (1981) as evidence that Superman has killed on film before, in the theatrical cut, the fate of Zod, Ursa, and Nod is left ambiguous and in the longer cut of the film that aired on ABC during its first television broadcast, there's a scene of all three being taken away from the Fortress of Solitude by the feds. So no, it's not quite the same. And for those who want to say, hey, times are different now - are they any worse than during the Depression or during World Wars or the tumult of the '60s? Or is just that people have poorer characters today? I'd say it's the latter.

As poor a decision as it was to have Superman kill, I could've almost gone with it had there been a thoughtful follow-up. But no, it's just glossed over. When Martha and Clark are standing over Pa Kent's grave at the end and Martha's saying she wishes Jonathan could've lived to see the man that Clark has became, my first thought was that he would've surely been appalled. After all, didn't Jonathan raise his son to be better? Couldn't they at least have had Clark acknowledge that he crossed a line that he never wants to cross again - that this is something that will haunt him and drive him to be a better hero? That even though no one blames him for killing Zod, he knows that he has to hold himself to a higher standard?

Some indication of guilt or shame would've been in line with Superman and it actually could've added a richer dimension to the character where he feels that he doesn't deserve the adulation he's receiving because, in his heart, he feels he could've avoided killing Zod.

Unfortunately, this movie was made by people who hold the short-sighted belief that a more violent Superman must naturally be a cooler Superman. It's just sad that the responsibility for this movie wound up in their hands and I wonder how anyone connected with this film (at least those who were in the position to make key creative decisions) can possibly feel good about themselves.


Even in Frank Miller's landmark The Dark Knight Returns, Batman starts to take The Joker's life by breaking his foe's neck but stops short of it. In a final mad act, The Joker finishes the job himself but Batman, the grimmest of heroes, couldn't bring himself to go there. Now we're saying that Superman can? No, I can't go along with that.

In one of Man of Steel's final scenes, Superman assures a general who still harbors a modicum of suspicion towards him that he's "as American as it gets."

And truth be told, in being depicted as content to go for an expedient, lazy, and morally wrong solution rather than working harder and smarter to do what's right, this Superman is as American as it gets.

That just doesn't say anything good about either modern Americans or Superman.

Dark Disappointment

Christopher Nolan was supposed to be the guy to finally break the third film curse. His Batman trilogy was expected to not follow the same disappointing pattern as Spider-Man, The X-Men, and Blade's cinematic trilogies where two good-to-great films are capped off by a lame, frustrating finale. Now, some people will tell you that he did accomplish that, that The Dark Knight Rises was pretty good - maybe even great! - but I don't think there's a legitimate case to be made in that regard. In its own way, Rises is yet another third film disaster, ending this series on a bum note.

Chief among its failings, Rises botches the character of Bruce Wayne/Batman. I know this is supposed to be Nolan's take on Batman so some leeway ought to be given for interpretation but under Nolan's guidance, Batman has become not so much a tireless crusader for justice but more of a self-pitying schlub who thinks nothing of sulking alone in his home for almost a decade. Yes, it's true that Bruce has given up on being Batman before in the comics - and in the world of animation - but it's always been due to either advancing age or some quickly resolved crisis of conscience concerning whether the Batman does more harm than good. Here, it's a lame combo of still being morose over the death of Rachel (!) as well as serving as the city's scapegoat for the death of Harvey Dent.

That last thing, by the way, is really asinine. Supposedly, after Dent's death, a piece of legislation known as The Dent Act was passed, making it possible for organized crime to be more easily prosecuted and before long, organized crime has been run out of Gotham entirely. But...isn't organized crime accustomed to working around the law? Isn't that part of the whole "crime" thing? And the plausibility of the Dent Act aside, even without organized crime, there'd still be plenty of old-fashioned disorganized crime to keep Batman busy. Just the idea of common criminals roaming the streets without fearing The Batman ought to be enough motivation for Bruce to keep donning the cowl at night, rather than spending the better part of a decade shuffling around Wayne Manor.

Not only do Nolan and co. have Bruce give up on crimefighting but they also have him all but abandon his own company and let all the potential good that could come from its charitable work fritter away (even the old, long retired Bruce Waynes of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and the animated series Batman Beyond were never shown as descending into cluelessness - the character was still portrayed as being sharp as a tack). If there's any way to make Batman look bad, Rises finds it. On top of retreating from both crime fighting and from managing Wayne Enterprises, Rises shows Bruce as being all but incompetent once he does get back in the game. Batman is supposed to be not just someone who has molded themselves into peak physical shape but is also one of the world's greatest detectives and, above all, a master strategist. In contrast to that, Rises gives us a Batman who is outplayed at every turn, taken by surprise over and over. Where Batman is supposed to be someone supremely on top of things, Nolan portrays him as always being a step behind.

Then there's also the confused politics of the film to contend with. Is this a film about the haves and the have-nots, a indictment of the 1%, or is it a kneejerk slamming of the Occupy movement? If anything, it seems like the latter as once Bane puts his plot in motion to isolate Gotham, the lower classes are portrayed as grasping greedy animals, swarming on the homes of the rich as the wealthy cower in fright. It's a grotesque cariacture of the OWS movement that Fox News itself would be proud of - the jealous poor getting revenge on all the people who have worked hard for their fortunes. This lines up with Nolan's curiously contemptuous view of Gothamites as sheep, easily led by a lie (Dent's legacy), and makes Rises seem like a simple-minded conservative jab at valid real world complaints about social and economic inequity.

Bane, certainly, doesn't represent any true political viewpoint. As much as, if not even more than, The Joker, he simply wants to watch the world burn. He's just lighting a much longer wick towards that end. His speeches about being for the oppressed are nothing but lip service meant to hide his true intentions and nowhere in Rises do we see any evidence of the people taking Gotham back. If anything, what we see is the police force reasserting themselves while "the people" do essentially nothing.

On a technical level, The Dark Knight Rises certainly looks just fine. But the storyline and the characterization of Batman (a big deal in a Batman film - in fact, a deal-breaker in my book) can't be defended. This is one of those movies that annoyed me on such a fundamental level that I could go through a whole laundry list of individual moments that had me rolling my eyes but that would just be piling on. Going forward, I'll just have to pretend that the series ended with The Dark Knight.

Finally, there's the matter of how guns are handled in this film. It wouldn't be fair to chastise the film for how it reflects against tragic real world events but it is fair to note that it goes against Batman's staunch anti-gun stance. Yes, Batman himself is still anti-gun and instructs Catwoman at one point - "No guns. No killing", to which Catwoman replies "Where's the fun in that?" but what really left a sour taste in my mouth is how at a crucial climatic moment, the use of a gun (a huge gun, of course) is allowed to end a battle, capped by a flip, "cool" comment to Batman to the effect of "That thing you have against guns? I don't have that." It's a moment that glibly undermines Batman's antipathy towards guns and his historic insistence on always finding a another, better way to deal with his foes. For any long-time Bat fan, it's a moment that will stick out as being wrong.

There's plenty of that kind of thing to go around in Rises, unfortunately. Having followed the character for many years through comics, TV, animation and film, I'm all for different interpretations of Batman but if you're going to just gut the core of the character, what's the point? The line "I Believe In Harvey Dent" echoed through the last two films in Nolan's trilogy but I just hope that whoever takes on the responsibility of rebooting this franchise down the line will be able to say "I Believe in Batman" and say it with real conviction.

Bat To The Future

If you had told me back in the '80s that one day there would be a summer movie season with big budget films based on Thor, The X-Men, Green Lantern, and Captain America, I would've found that almost impossible to believe (hell, I would've had a hard time imagining just one of those movies coming out). It's crazy how common big budget comic book adaptations have become - and with so many of them of a high quality. Before you remind of all the lousy ones, keep in mind that I grew up in the '70s - a decade in which my favorite comic book characters were brought to life in generally atrocious adaptations, like the hideous The Challenge of the Superheroes TV special or the two Captain America TV movies so even the lesser comic book films of today, like Daredevil (2003) or Fantastic Four (2005) seem at least passable to me. Movies like Catwoman (2004), however, are still godawful by any standards.

Today, "comic book movies" have become a subgenre unto itself. They're so much a part of the movie going experience now that it's odd to remember a time when they were considered a rare event. But that was the case back in 1989 when Tim Burton's Batman was due to debut.

As thrilling as it's been to see characters like Spider-Man and Iron Man come to the screen over the past decade and as mind-blowing as it is to know that Earth's Mightiest Heroes will gather next year in The Avengers or that Christopher Nolan will finish out his Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, I don't think any comic book adaptation will ever be as hotly anticipated as Batman was in 1989.

Prior to Batman, the superhero movie genre consisted of the Superman franchise, which had begun brilliantly in 1978 with Richard Donner's original, continued in high style with 1980's Superman II, but then sputtered into embarrassment with 1983's Superman III (which, honestly, has a few redeeming qualities) and suffered its final nail in the coffin with 1987's Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (which has no value whatsoever).

And that was it. Marvel tried to get its characters onscreen during the '80s but, shamefully, Howard the Duck (1986) was the best they could do. So, for comic fans, the idea that Hollywood would attempt a serious comic book adaptation was a big deal. In the '80s, comics had enjoyed a creative renaissance with works like Watchmen, Daredevil, and The Dark Knight Rises - something that finally made the long-gestating Batman movie an appealing prospect to Warner Bros.

Once the ball got rolling on Batman, fans still had worries. The casting of Michael Keaton was so heatedly debated that the actor and Warner Bros. received death threats. But the casting of Jack Nicholson as The Joker pleased pretty much everybody and once pictures from the film started to be released showing how Keaton looked in the Batman suit (I remember someone on my dorm room floor bringing in a copy of Time Magazine with the first Batman pics and being so stunned by them), the anxiousness in the fan community started to turn into rabid anticipation.

Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy and Nolan's Batman have been generally well-received and caused more than their share of excitement but none of those films created the kind of mania that greeted Batman.

Everywhere you went in the summer of '89, you saw kids (and a lot of adults) in Batman T-shirts, Batman hats, and Batman haircuts, even. A lot of that had to do with Warner Bros.'s marketing muscle but a lot of it was also just a long unfed hunger for this type of film manifesting itself. This was truly an instance of the right film at the right time.

The movie itself...well, it was pretty flawed. For a long time I nursed a fanboy grudge against it for the many ways in which it disappointed - like "why did Alfred let Vicki Vale into the Bat-cave?", "why did they have to have The Joker be the criminal to kill the Waynes?" or "how the hell can one bullet bring down the Bat-wing?". I still believe that these are all legit gripes, not just nerd bitching, and I also maintain that Nicholson was not the most effective Joker. At times his performance is inspired, other times it veers too far into buffoonery. And man, are those Prince tunes a jarring, ill-advised addition to the soundtrack or what?

But its irritating elements aside (a thumbs down for the Vicki Vale/Joker/Bruce Wayne love triangle too) there's so much else to love in the movie that I can never completely dismiss it. For one, the fucking Batmobile is a work of art. That's the definitive Batmobile to me (and I love that they incorporated the rear jet engine from the Adam West Batmobile). Just the whole look of the movie is astonishing. The design work of Anton Furst remains brilliant. His vision of Gotham, with its gothic architecture, is one of the few urban dystopias that isn't trying to ape Blade Runner (1981).

Today's comic book movies are largely set in the real world - both for aesthetic reasons (Marvel's heroes have always inhabited real locations, like New York, rather than fantasy cities like Metropolis) as well as budgetary (the cost of creating an entire world out of sets and filming on soundstages would be a hard sell to studios today) and while that's worked out ok, when you look at Burton's Batman it's hard not to feel that something has been lost. This wasn't just filmed on the streets of Chicago or New York and it wasn't a world that was created in a computer. It was handmade. We're not likely to see its kind again.

For a long time I thought that Batman suffered from the idiosyncratic Tim Burton being forced to shoehorn his style into a more conventional framework but now I think it was actually to the film's - and Burton's - benefit. It's still an eccentric film (just for the casting of Keaton alone - a move that proved to be inspired) but yet there's still the kind of fisticuffs and action beats that comic fans would demand from a Batman film (as constrictive as the Bat-suit often appears in this film, I admire how well the stuntmen were able to convincingly sell the fight scenes - especially the ones with the Joker's henchmen in the church tower). There's a creative friction between Burton's sensibilities and the writer and producer's sensibilities that ultimately serves the final product well - as opposed to Batman Returns (1992), which favored Burton's quirky whims above all else.

Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008) are superior in many ways to Burton's original Batman but they weren't the galvanizing event that Burton's film was and the same will be true for next year's The Dark Knight Rises. That film might be (oh, let's just say it will be) better than Batman but it won't be the same kind of epic deal. The world has just changed too much. It's not just that fans and the public are accustomed to comic book films in a way they weren't in '89 and it's not just that audiences practically take these movies for granted now (although both those statements are certainly true). It's also due to the fact that in '89, going to the movies was so much more important. People still love movies, they still flock to them in sizable numbers, but nothing like back in the day.

Back then, yeah, you had the promise of eventually being able to see a movie on cable and home video but the theatrical window was so much longer then. It was ages before a movie would make it to home viewing. And thanks to our age of rampant piracy, anyone who really wants to can get a copy of any new release before its opening weekend is over. Hell, some stores are so brazen as to sell bootlegs right out in public. Thor is opening tomorrow (well, midnight tonight) in the US but thanks in part to it being released two weeks ago in the rest of the world, it's already available on bootleg for anyone who cares to see it that way. If you were a comic fan in '89, you were hyped out of your mind to see Batman and your ass would be at the theater. Not just opening day but repeatedly. Today, a lot of fans will be happier to just download Thor or Green Lantern rather than see them in theaters even once and that strikes me as sad.

Shit, fans used to fall over themselves just to see a trailer on the big screen:



Now people are good with watching this stuff on their phones. It's just a different world (he said sadly).

As much as I enjoy Nolan's take on Batman, I can't help but feel they've shortchanged a generation of younger fans by being dark to the point that no responsible parent would take their kids to see them. It's incredible to remember that in '93, Batman Returns was vilified in some quarters for being too frightening for children but yet you never hear a peep over the violent content of Nolan's films - at least not in respect to it being inappropriate for kids. I guess that's because it's taken for granted that these movies aren't meant for kids in the first place but - pardon me - I find that to be a little nuts. Come on - it's Batman!

I would love to take my son to see a Batman movie but even when he's seven next year I'd be very leery about taking him to The Dark Knight Rises. Not only do I suspect it wouldn't be appropriate - I'm pretty sure it just wouldn't be fun for him at all.

The approach of Nolan's films is just too adult - it's not thrilling from a kid's perspective. For ones who are ten or eleven and up, ok. But that still shuts out a lot of kids who would love to see Batman in action. As an adult I appreciate where Nolan has taken the franchise but yet I like the balance between fun and darkness that Burton achieved and I wish that in the future someone could do the same again. Perhaps whoever makes the next cinematic reboot of Gotham's Guardian can move forward by reaching back into the past.

The Dark Knight

It's been a few days now since I saw The Dark Knight and I still haven't been able to shake it. It's not that I'm haunted by the film's despairing events, though. No, it's just that even days later when I think of Christian Bale delivering his lines in his 'Batman Voice' I have to laugh. I had the same issue with Batman Begins but it's only been amplified in Bale's second turn as the character. With all the attention that was given in Batman Begins to showing every step that Bruce Wayne took to refine his Batman persona, I felt the one element that was shortchanged was showing how he developed that Voice. I seriously would've loved at least ten minutes on that alone. Or to have it be a thread running throughout the film. You know, his first few nights out as a crimefighter Bruce just speaks in his normal voice and he doesn't know why he isn't having an impact on the thugs he runs into - he just knows there's some piece of the puzzle missing. He isn't quite "The Batman" yet. Then it hits him - it's the voice. He's got the scary costume with the cape, the cowl, the whole nine yards, but it's the sound of his voice that's got to sell all that crap.

So for the sake of telling the whole story, Batman Begins should've included a montage of Bale's Batman recording his voice, trying to figure out just the right tone of guttural rasp. Show him trying it out on Alfred, maybe crank calling random people, then finally locking it in. Yeah, I would've been all for seeing that because leaving the theater last Friday, all I could think of (besides Heath Ledger's go-for-broke performance) were the scenes where Bale's Batman had to actually say whole sentences in that voice and it gave me the instant giggles. I'd love to know how many takes it took to successfully film some of these scenes because I can't believe the actors opposite him weren't constantly breaking up. I kept hoping for at least one character to say to Batman "Look man, I know you're dressed like a bat but if you don't talk like a normal human being I'm going to pass out laughing!"

Yes, I know that Bruce Wayne has to alter his voice so no one can associate his voice with that of The Batman. But I suspect that when Bale came up with that voice he didn't think he'd have to use it as much as he does (I think other Batmans like Michael Keaton thought ahead more on this count) - that he'd deliver the occasional threat to some low-life, not be responsible for whole dramatic passages. Now that it's established, of course, it's got to stay the same no matter how many movies they do - they can't change voices in mid-stream!

That's fine by me - there's no way I'd want that voice to be toned down. In its own demented way, I think it works because I totally believe that no one would ever think that Bruce Wayne was Batman if only for the fact that most people would assume that anyone who talked like that must get locked away in a vault until they let him out to do his thing.

As for the movie as a whole, I liked it a lot with some minor reservations. The weakest section is the last stretch of the film (I'll assume that if you're reading this you've already seen it too so there'll be major spoilers ahead). The most nagging issue is that Harvey Dent's turn into Two-Face is a hard sell, even with Aaron Eckhart giving his performance all the conviction he can. Dent's overnight switch from crusading D.A. to Gotham's latest candidate for Arkham Asylum feels rigged by the demands of the story - Harvey has to go into super-villain mode right on schedule or else there isn't a climax. The best thing you can say about this movie's Two-Face is that it makes hay of the atrocious Tommy Lee Jones Two-Face in Batman Forever (1995) but yet the '90s animated series from Bruce Timm and Paul Dini was able to pull off a much more nuanced and believable Two-Face origin where they established that Dent was afflicted with a dual personality ("Big Bad Harv") long before the scarring. In The Dark Knight, Dent is too much of a straight-arrow and a stand-up guy (although we do see that he's willing to rough up someone to gain information) to regard his change to Two-Face as anything more than a hollow vendetta rather than the emergence of a split personality.

Also in regards to Dent, too much importance is placed on his fall from grace as being the potential last straw for the people of Gotham. To worry about Dent's courtroom victories being undermined is one thing - that's something pragmatic that needs to be addressed. I wouldn't even mind some concern shown to letting Dent's reputation remain untarnished just because it's what the man deserved. But the catastrophic emotional and spiritual toll that Batman, Gordon and The Joker believe Gotham's citizens will sustain if Dent is revealed to have turned into a violent criminal ("People will lose hope!")? I don't know - on a scale of 1 to 10, I'm going to go over Batman and Gordon's heads and guess it would rate a 3, at best.

If the truth ever came out about Dent, there'd be a collective shoulder shrug and that's that. And I also wonder exactly how the alternative truth that Gordon and Batman are choosing to sell Gotham is any more comforting than what really happened (to think that a good man died senselessly and a murdering vigilante is on the loose, eluding law enforcement, seems like just as much of a spirit killer as anything else). If Batman really is willing to be whatever Gotham needs him to be, as he says, then he ought to just bite the bullet and kill The Joker. Get your hands dirty. Finish the job, man.

But overall, I give high marks to The Dark Knight. It reminds me a little too much of the sort of heavy-handed, 'grim n' gritty' comics that were in vogue twenty years ago in the wake of such industry-altering works like, well, The Dark Knight Returns and I still think that a middle ground between the real-world approach of Nolan and the stylization of the comics could result in the best Batman of them all one day. But until then, The Dark Knight will have to do. To paraphrase the movie, it's not the Batman film we need, but the one that we deserve.

The Madcap Laughs

Up until I read a reprint of Batman #1 (1940) when I was probably about seven, I had never seen a truly sociopathic act in fiction - nothing that had stuck with me, at least. I know I had already seen plenty of death dealt in various films, TV shows and comic books but I had never seen anyone kill for the sheer glee of it. Marking the first appearance of Batman's clown-faced arch enemy, this story contained a scene in which The Joker used black paint to remove the yellow center line on a patch of road that traveled around a treacherous mountain. The Joker then painted a new yellow line (likely laughing as he did) so it went directly off the side of the mountain and when a bus full of passengers traveled this road late at night, the driver followed the yellow line straight off the road and sent every life aboard that bus careening to their deaths.

Although sending a bus off the road might seem like small potatoes these days, the amorality of The Joker's actions chilled me. Even as a kid, I knew it would take a lot for someone in the real world to emulate The Batman - they'd need an endless supply of money, technology ahead of what even the highest levels of law enforcement employed, the kind of physical training that only a handful of people in the world could provide, and a indefatigable spirit. And even with all that, anyone who really tried to be Batman would get their ass handed to them. But on the other hand, it would take very little to be The Joker and make it work - just a willingness to cross lines that others wouldn't and, as a child, that thought alarmed me. As I said, it had never occurred to me prior to this that anyone could kill randomly, without purpose (apparently I lacked imagination!). It introduced an anxiety that was new to me - that is, how can you defend yourself against someone who would kill you just as easily as they would the person next to you? How can you anticipate the sort of plans that a lunatic would put into play to murder people that he's never met?

So as a character, The Joker really unsettled me - but his incarnations in TV shows and movies have always been another story. I gave Caesar Romero a pass on his Joker from the '60s TV show but Jack Nicholson's wasted opportunity was almost enough to make me angry. Before The Dark Knight, I thought the closest to the "real" Joker that fans would experience outside of the comics was Mark Hamill's expert vocal performance in the Batman cartoon series of the '90s. But thanks to director Christopher Nolan and actor Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, for the first time on film, The Joker has earned his high-ranking place as Batman's arch-nemesis.

Rather than take the character's historic popularity for granted, Nolan's ambitious screenplay (co-written with his brother Jonathan) has put The Dark Knight in the front-running to be considered the definitve Batman/Joker tale. As an equal to comic tales such as The Long Halloween or Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight makes us understand how The Joker can get under Batman's skin in a way that villains like Killer Croc, Mad Hatter, or even A-listers like The Penguin and The Riddler can't. He isn't just a slippery character, he calls Batman's whole crusade into question.

Ledger's performance not only leaps past the hammy quality that deliberately snuck into even Hamill's Joker at times but he burns through the cliche of the 'scary clown', which always was the hook to previous portrayals of The Joker. In the history of the comics, Ledger's Joker reminds me most of the Joker as depicted by artist Neal Adams and writer Denny O'Neil as seen in 1973's "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge" (Batman #251) in that as drawn by Adams, The Joker was no longer a costumed super-criminal, instead he just dressed in a distinctive, but contemporary, fashion (after Adams' run, The Joker was returned to his familiar pinstripes). And as written by O'Neil, The Joker was returned to being the murderous psychopath that he was in his original '40s incarnation and the gimmicks, pranks, and props that had become so outrageous during the '50s and '60s were done away with (no more giant jack-in-the-boxes or rocket launching Pogo sticks) and his methods were brought back to street level (like Ledger's Joker, the things he likes - such as exploding cigars laced with nitroglycerin - are cheap). "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge" was a model for how to make The Joker 'real' and The Dark Knight is the first depiction of The Joker outside of comics to accomplish that with the same success.

I hope that Ledger's death won't shut the door permanently on The Joker in live-action. Although it's impossible right now to imagine anyone matching his approach to the character, his performance does prove that in the right hands, The Joker is far more than just a giggling buffoon.