Holy history, Batman!
With the release of The Dark Knight just a few sleeps away, Jonathan Rodgers is staying up late watching the animated Gotham Knight
For most people, the history of Batman only goes back as far as Adam West's camp 60s TV series. But there is a rich gothic-tinged back-story to this superhero.
Created by DC comics artist Bob Kane and staff writer Bill Finger, the Batman was originally conceived as an alternative to Superman. And the fact the character is a flesh and blood human is one reason given for the character's popularity for more than 60 years. First published in Detective Comics in November 1939, Batman was first and foremost a pulp noir detective. Over the next 20 years, the series slowly drifted towards science fiction with storylines that included a parallel Batman from a parallel dimension. But in the 1960s, the character was wrestled back to its darker, pulpier roots. Alongside the success of the Adam West television series, the comic's popularity surged.
But as the TV series fell from favour, so too did the comic, which had begun to mirror the television Batman's campy aesthetic.
By the mid-80s, it looked like the Caped Crusader was through. Circulation was down and DC began to plot ways to off the Bat-freak. In a last ditch effort to save the character, DC editor Dennis O'Neil hired Frank Miller to freshen things up. The resulting graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns brought Bruce Wayne back to the dark side of the street and in the process marked a coming of age for the comic book form. Miller's darker take on the series was not only a success but a touchstone for the graphic novel.
The history of Batman on film has tended to mirror that of the comic form. Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns were indeed dark, but by the time Joel Schumacher got his hands on the franchise (Batman Forever and Batman and Robin) the franchise had returned, if not to Adam West territory, then something damn close.
A successful resurgence for the winged one came when Hollywood wisely chose to base a re-telling of the Batman history on Miller's Year One, the starting point for Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins.
When that film hit screens in 2005, the character had returned to his shadowy roots. In the final scene of Nolan's film, Arkham Asylum has emptied onto the streets of Gotham. Christian Bale's Dark Knight is faced with the immense task of clearing the streets of Gotham of every loose lunatic. The story gap between Batman Begins and Dark Knight is filled by Batman: Gotham Knight.
This is a series of six animated stories from the minds of History of Violence scriber Josh Olsen and Batman Begins screenwriter David S. Goyer, among others. In Gotham Knight the bat-freak again pits wits and gadgets against Scarecrow and faces new rivals Deadshot and Killer Croc. With each episode directed by different animation maestros - Shojiro Nishimi, Futoshi Higashide, Hiroshi Morioka, Yasuhiro Aoki and Toshiyuki Kubooka - Gotham Knight depicts very different visual approaches to the Gotham City and the Caped Crusader. Alongside the usual bad-guys, the stories explore other elements of Batman's popularity: from kids, skateboards and comics to the grown-up graphic novels. They are well worth a watch.