Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Alan Moore

“Superman IV” at 35:  How the “Worst Comic-Book Movie Ever” Epitomizes What We Refuse to Admit about Superhero Fiction

July 24, 2022 / / 24 Comments

Superman IV:  The Quest for Peace, unanimously reviled for both its unconvincing visuals and cornball story, inadvertently accomplished the theretofore unrealized dream of scores of nefarious supervillains when it was released on this date in 1987:  It killed Superman.  (Or at least put the cinematic franchise into two-decade dormancy.)

But a closer examination of the film suggests its objectively subpar storytelling might in fact be far more faithful to the spirit of the source material than today’s fanboy culture would care to concede.

Thirty-five years ago today, my mother took me to see Superman IV:  The Quest for Peace (1987).  Afterwards, we met up with my father at Doubleday’s, a neighborhood bar and grill that was the last stop on Broadway before you’d officially crossed the city line into Westchester County.  The restaurant had a hot-oil popcorn machine in the far corner, and when I went to refill our basket, I spied a man seated at the bar, nose in a copy of USA Today, the back panel of which boasted a full-page color advertisement for Superman IV.

When he caught me studying the ad, he asked, “Gonna go see the new Superman?”

“I just did.”

“Yeah?  How was it?”

“It was amazing,” I said, and I absolutely meant it.  Sensing my sincerity, the gentleman pulled the ad from the bundle of folded pages and handed it to me as a souvenir.  When I got home, I taped it up on my bedroom wall.

The theatrical one-sheet for “Superman IV” looks like a textbook “Action Comics” cover from the ’80s

Sidney J. Furie’s Superman IV:  The Quest for Peace is not amazing.  It is, in fact, commonly regarded as one of the worst comic-book movies ever made—if not the worst—in eternal competition for last place with Batman & Robin (1997) and Catwoman (2004).  It suffered from a notoriously troubled production:  After the diminishing returns of Superman III (1983) and spin-off Supergirl (1984), series producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind sold their controlling interests in the IP to the Cannon Group, the schlockmeister studio responsible for the American Ninja, Missing in Action, Breakin’, and Death Wish franchises—not exactly the optimal custodians of a series that had started out, against all expectation, so magnificently.

Richard Donner’s Superman:  The Movie (1978) was and remains the finest specimen of superhero cinema ever presented, at once ambitiously epic and emotionally relatable.  It pulls off the impossible in so many ways, first and foremost that it absolutely made us a believe a man could fly, which had never been credibly accomplished before.  Credit for that goes not only to the VFX team, which won the Academy Award for its efforts, but to Christopher Reeve, who delivered the movie’s most timeless special effect:  endowing profound dignity and genuine vulnerability to a spandex-clad demigod.  Even the lesser Superman films—and we’ll talk more about those soon enough—are elevated by Reeve’s extraordinary performance, which occupies a lofty position, right alongside Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, in the pantheon of defining interpretations of folkloric icons.

What’s also so remarkable about Superman is how many different tonal aesthetics it assimilates.  The opening sequences on Krypton with Marlon Brando feel downright Kubrickian; Donner somehow channels the cosmic splendor of 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968), only to then transition us to Smallville, as warm and fertile as Krypton was cold and barren, which evokes the same spirit of sock-hop Americana George Lucas conjured to such success in American Graffiti (1973).

The remainder of the movie shifts fluidly from His Girl Friday–style newsroom comedy (the scenes at the Daily Planet) to urban action thriller à la The French Connection (the seedy streets of 1970s Metropolis) to Roger Moore–era 007 outing (Lex Luthor’s sub–Grand Central lair, complete with comically inept henchmen) to Irwin Allen disaster film (the missile that opens up the San Andreas Fault in the third act and sets off a chain reaction of devastation along the West Coast).

Somehow it coheres into a movie that feels like the best of all worlds rather than a derivative Frankenstein’s monster.  Up until that time, superhero features and television, hampered by juvenile subject matter and typically subpar production values, seemed inherently, inexorably campy.  The notion that a superhero movie could rise to the level of myth, or at least credibly dramatic science fiction, was unthinkable.  Superman is the proof-of-concept paradigm on which our contemporary superhero–industrial complex is predicated.

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Challenging Our Moral Imagination: On Hollywood’s Crises of Climate, Conscience, and Creativity

May 25, 2020 / / 18 Comments

“What about Thanos?”

A strange question, I’ll concede, to emerge from an impassioned conversation about the transformative systemic overhauls required to our energy policy, our health care, and our economic ideology in the wake of the coronavirus—

—because what could the cartoon villain from the Avengers movies possibly have to do with any of that?

The answer, frustratingly, is:  More than you may realize.

During a recent online confab with the leadership team of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project, the discussion drifted momentarily from existential matters to televisional ones:  What’s everybody been binge-watching?

Now, anyone who knows me—in person or through this blog—is peripherally aware of my immedicable disdain for movies and television.  Yet… with no baseball this spring to occupy my time, I’ve been reluctantly compelled to sample quite a bit of scripted media to which I’d have otherwise turned up a nose.  And, to my surprise, I find myself excited to share a handful of programming that, in my view, embodies creativity with a conscience.  (We’ll get to those coveted endorsements shortly.)

The cast of “Schitt’s Creek” (2015–2020)

To that end, one of our Climate Reality Leaders recommended Schitt’s Creek:  “The evolution of the self-absorbed yet well-meaning characters as they deal with the adversity that helps them discover what it really means to love is quite endearing,” my colleague said, “and I believe has left an impact on many who are out there now hoping for the world to refashion itself in that way.”

Schitt’s Creek is one of those shows that got away from me in our era of Peak TV, but I second the motion for more prescriptive fiction that both challenges us to be better—individually and collectively—as well as provides a model to do so.  Hard as this may be to fathom for those born into a postnarrative world, but our popular entertainments used to reliably perform that public service.  To wit:  Earlier this month, this unflinching indictment of white privilege from a 1977 episode of Little House on the Prairie resurfaced on Twitter to considerable gape-mouthed astonishment:

Bet you didn’t recall that show being so edgy.  Thing is, the stories we tell about the world in which we live are only as aspirational—and inspirational—as the moral imagination of our storytellers.  Alas, ever since meaningless worldbuilding supplanted purposeful storytelling, the function of popular fiction has shifted from lighting a path forward to drawing us down a rabbit hole of “Easter eggs” and “spoilers” that lead only to the next installment of a given multimedia franchise (meaning:  keep your wallet handy).  As the late Neil Peart wrote forty years ago:

Art as expression –
Not as market campaigns
Will still capture our imaginations
Given the same
State of integrity
It will surely help us along

Talk about advice unheeded.  Consequently, our commercial entertainment is often embedded—however unconsciously—with culturally pernicious values, from glorifying vigilante justice (superhero sagas; revenge thrillers), to undermining trust in public institutions (the self-serving White Houses of Scandal and House of Cards were a far cry from the empathetic Bartlet administration), to romanticizing criminal sociopathy (the street-racing “rebels” of Fast & Furious) and—bonus!—thereby validating a mindset in which “environmental degradation is not only a given but a goal” (robin, “The Fast and Furious Films and Mad Max Fury Road,” Ecocinema, Media, and the Environment [blog], September 20, 2019)

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Tim Burton’s “Batman” at 30—and the Cultural Legacy of the Summer of 1989

June 23, 2019 / / 26 Comments

In order to appreciate the state of commercial adolescence to which Generation X has been disproportionately consigned, one needs to consider Tim Burton’s Batman in its sociocultural context:  how it inadvertently provided a blueprint to reconceptualize superheroes from innocent entertainment meant to inspire the imagination of children to hyperviolent wish-fulfillment fantasies for commercially infantilized adults.

The weekly theatrical debut of a new franchise tentpole, voraciously bulling aside the $200 million–budgeted blockbuster released a mere seven days prior, is par for the course nowadays, but back in 1989—thirty summers ago per the calendar, though seemingly as recently as yesterday by the nebulous barometer of memory—we’d never before experienced anything like that.

That was the year that gave us new entries in such ongoing adventures as Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, Lethal Weapon, James Bond, and Back to the Future, lowbrow comedies Police Academy, Fletch, and Vacation, as well as slasher staples Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween—to say nothing of launching all-new franchises with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Major League, Pet Sematary, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Weekend at Bernie’s, and Look Who’s Talking.  To anyone who’d grown up in the nascent home-video era—that period in which all the aforementioned series (save 007) were born and could thusly be re-watched and obsessed-over ad infinitum—1989 was the Christmas of summer-movie seasons.

Tim Burton's "Batman"
Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s “Batman” (1989)

But none of those films, huge as many of them were, dominated the cultural spotlight that year as pervasively as Tim Burton’s Batman, released on this date in 1989.

Out of the Shadows

I can hear my thirteen-year-old nephew now:  “One superhero movie?  Wow—how’d you handle the excitement?”

Yeah, I know.  But it was exciting.  I was thirteen myself in 1989, spending most of my free time with my grade-school gang at the neighborhood comic shop down on Broadway, steeped in a subculture that hadn’t yet attained popular acceptance.  Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) had been the only previous attempt at a reverent comic-book adaptation, and, creatively and financially successful though it was, most of that goodwill had been squandered in the intervening decade by a succession of increasingly subpar sequels (through no fault of the marvelous Christopher Reeve, who makes even the worst of them watchable).

Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in “Superman: The Movie”

As for Batman:  It’s crucial to remember, and easy enough now to overlook, that in the late eighties, the prevailing public perception of the character was not Frank Miller’s Dark Knight, but rather Adam West’s “Bright Knight” from the self-consciously campy acid-trip of a TV series that had aired twenty years earlier.  In the wake of that show’s cancelation, a concerted effort was made by the character’s creative custodians at DC Comics—first Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams, then Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, and most effectively Miller with his aptly titled The Dark Knight Returns—to reestablish Batman as the “nocturnal avenger” he was originally conceived to be.

“Dark Knight Triumphant” (July 1986); art by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley

But if you weren’t following the comics—and, in those days, few over thirteen years old were—the predominant impression the name “Batman” conjured wasn’t the ferocious Miller rendering above so much as this:

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Maybe It’s Time: Here’s to Making 2019 the First Official Year of the 21st Century

December 28, 2018 / / 28 Comments

“Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.”  How ironically apropos that in a world led by a reality-show president, where facts are subjective and everything from our energy sources to our economic policies to our pop culture are the antiquated vestiges of a previous century, that a lyric by a fictitious rock star from a remake of a remake of a remake of a movie from 1937 should emerge as the perfect, hopeful mantra of an impending (if belated) new millennial era.  I propose officially adopting it as such; it might make what comes next a little easier to accept for those of us still clinging nostalgically to the 1950s (Baby boomers) and the 1980s (Gen X).

If you belong to one of those analog generations—I’m an Xer myself—and you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of working with a Millennial, you know their nonlinear minds interpret the world in an entirely different manner than those that came before them.  The first wave arrived in the workforce a decade ago, expecting a seat at the table before they’d earned one, demanding their voices be heard before their opinions were informed by practical experience.  Their operating philosophy seemed to be:  Yeah, but just because we’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it… this way.  In their view, the arduous, incremental, straight-line path of our institutionalized practices and protocols didn’t square with their hyperlinked grasp of our new Digital Age reality.  Thusly, conventional (read:  linear) thinking was to be openly challenged, not obediently emulated.

Like many of my fellow Xers that came up the hard way—those of us that knew our place, paid our dues (there’s that pesky sense of linearity again), never assumed we had all the answers—that worldview has often left me bewildered at best, infuriated at worst.  And the sense of entitlement so endemic to Millennials is only compounded by their corresponding characteristic of impatience:

“They’ve grown up in a world of instant gratification.  You want to buy something—you go on Amazon, it arrives the next day.  You want to watch a movie?  Log on and watch a movie—you don’t check movie times.  You want to watch a TV show?  Binge!  You don’t even have to wait week to week to week.  Right?  I know people who skip seasons just so they can binge at the end of the season.  Right?  Instant gratification.”

Simon Sinek, “Simon Sinek,” Inside Quest with Tom Bilyeu, August 7, 2016

Now, to a middle-aged generation still trying (without success) to take the seat at the head of the table from the unyielding occupancy of the Boomers, the Millennials’ impulse—their self-ordained imperative—to grab the wheel and make “meaningful impact” is their most vexing attribute.

And—Christ help me for saying this—it just might change everything for the better.

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This Counts, That Does Not: On Canonicity in Media Franchises

January 20, 2017 / / 34 Comments

It may surprise you to learn this, but the events of Star Wars never actually happened—the majority of them, anyway.  I mean that sincerely—not for a minute should that be interpreted as snide or condescending.  But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself…

In 1983, George Lucas brought his Star Wars trilogy to a close with Return of the Jedi (oh, those bygone days when movie franchises actually reached—wait for it—a conclusive resolution).  Throughout the eighties, the series lived on by way of a pair of made-for-television Ewok movies and the Saturday-morning cartoons Droids and Ewoks, which continued to stoke interest in the franchise—and its lucrative action-figure line… for a while.  But by the end of the decade, with no new big-screen productions to energize the fan base, Star Wars had resigned its position at the top of the pop-cultural hierarchy.

George Lucas looks to the horizon

Lucas, who had always been a forward-thinking businessman as much as he was a visionary filmmaker (he negotiated a reduced fee for writing and directing the original Star Wars in return for ownership of sequel and merchandising rights, which the studio deemed worthless and was only too happy to relinquish), had plans to revisit the Star Wars galaxy in a prequel trilogy that had been part of his grand design when he was developing the earlier films—hence the reason, in case you never thought to ask, they are numbered Episodes IV through VI.  Even though the prequels themselves were some years off—production on The Phantom Menace wouldn’t commence until 1997—he began laying the groundwork to return Star Wars to its lofty place in the cultural consciousness by commissioning science-fiction author Timothy Zahn to write a trio of novels set five years after the events of Return of the Jedi—what later became commonly known as “the Thrawn trilogy” (named for its chief antagonist).

The books were released successively in ’91, ’92, and ’93 (my best friend Chip and I couldn’t get down to the local bookstore fast enough to buy a copy of each upon publication, though being a year older, he got to read them first); they were New York Times bestsellers that not only got their intended job done—reigniting public interest in a dormant media franchise—but also led to an endless, ongoing series of novels that explored every facet of the Star Wars galaxy:  No character or event was too small to be the focus of its own story.  Thus, the Star Wars Expanded Universe (SWEU) was born.  Han and Leia had twins!  Luke got married!  Chewbacca sacrificed himself for the Solos’ son Anakin!  A universe of stories, far beyond the contained narrative arc of the classic trilogy, took on a life of its own and captured the imagination of a generation that invested itself in the ongoing space opera collectively known as Star Wars—a vast, complex continuity that Lucasfilm maintained with curatorial oversight to prevent inconsistencies and contradictions in the expansive mythos, which comprised movies, books, comics, TV shows, RPGs, and video games.

The Force awakens? For many fans, it never went dormant

When Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, however, they had their own ambitious plans to expand the franchise, and didn’t want to be tied down to every addenda in the extensive mythology.  And just like that, everything other than the feature films and then-current Clone Wars animated series was “retconned”—still commercially available, mind you, under the new “Legends” banner, but henceforth declared noncanonical.  This was an outrage to many of the longtime fans who considered these “expanded universe” adventures sacrosanct—who’d invested time, money, and interest in the world-building fictions of the Star Wars continuity that had been undone with the stroke of a hand.  Some of their favorite stories were now apocrypha, whereas the much-derided prequels, on the other hand, were still canonically official.  Where was the justice—the sense—in that?

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Collapse of the Tentpole: Why Hollywood’s Grim Summer Is Good News for the Rest of Us

September 7, 2016 / / 20 Comments

Hope springs eternal—and by that I mean it was just this past spring I was lamenting Hollywood’s hopeless addiction to nostalgic, twentieth-century brands, from superheroes to Star Wars, and its incorrigible aversion to original genre works in favor of endless sequels and remakes (I will not cave to social pressure by calling them “reboots” just to assuage the egos of filmmakers too precious to be considered slumming with the likes of—heaven forbid—a remake).  And yet…

And yet what a difference a summer can make.  Let’s review the scorecard, shall we?

Batman v Superman took a critical beating (to say the least) and, despite sizable box-office returns, underperformed to expectations, an inauspicious opening salvo in Warners’ would-be mega-franchise (and something tells me, no matter how tepid the public response, they’re not going to take “no” for an answer on this one).  The follow-up, Suicide Squad, performed well even if it didn’t fare any better critically, though one could argue both movies actually did the health of the budding cinematic universe more harm than good in that they tarnished the integrity, such as it is, of the brand; DC is thus far not enjoying Marvel’s critical or popular cachet.  And you don’t build an ongoing franchise playing only to the base.

Other expensive underperformers:  Warcraft; X-Men:  Apocalypse; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:  Out of the Shadows; Neighbors 2:  Sorority Rising; Star Trek Beyond.  Jason Bourne opened well but suffered a steep second-week drop-off—it had no “legs,” in box-office parlance.

Who ya gonna call to exterminate the "ghosts" of a previous generation haunting the multiplex?

Who ya gonna call to exterminate the “ghosts” of a previous generation haunting the multiplex?

Plenty of other “surefire” sequels outright bombed:  Alice Through the Looking Glass, Ghostbusters (not a sequel, but it was promoted as one), The Huntsman:  Winter’s War, Zoolander 2, Independence Day:  Resurgence, and The Divergent Series:  Allegiant, the last of which has resulted in a particularly embarrassing—and unprecedented—predicament for its studio, Lionsgate, which, following in the footsteps of previous YA adaptations Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games, unnecessarily split the last movie into two parts, and now they’re stuck with a commitment to a final sequel (or half of one, anyway) without an audience anticipating its release.

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The Great Escape: What the Ascendancy of Comic-Book Culture Tells Us about Ourselves

February 22, 2016 / / 19 Comments

Lest anyone doubt the real-world superheroic capabilities of a fictional character, let me state for the record that Batman taught me how to read.

For in watching the syndicated reruns of the Adam West series in the late seventies—the kitschy opening credits, specifically—my not-yet-literate mind eventually recognized a correlation between the splashy title-card logo and repetitive choral chant that accompanied it, and “Batman” became the first word I could read and write.  Absolutely true story.

"Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba! Batman!"

“Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba! Bat-man!”

I loved the old Batman show—the pop-art color scheme and Dutch angles (not that I took conscious note of such stylistics at the time) were like a cartoon come to life.  The camp humor?  Entirely lost on me:  When Batman and Robin slid down the Batpoles and zoomed off in the Batmobile—staged in that glorious life-sized playset of a Batcave—the sense of adventure was kinetic.  And when the villain-of-the-week left our heroes for dead in some Rube Goldbergian contraption—their fate to be determined in twenty-four agonizing hours!—the tension was excruciating.

Unlike most of my heroes at that time—Michael Knight, the Duke boys—the Dynamic Duo weren’t confined to the limited jurisdiction of their own fictional worlds, but rather popped up elsewhere, too, in animated form on The New Scooby-Doo Movies and Super Friends, and I never quite understood why no one had thought to put Adam West, Christopher Reeve, and Lynda Carter in a movie together; with no concept of copyright issues or irreconcilable aesthetics or what later came to be called “shared cinematic universes,” it seemed like a no-brainer to assemble an all-star superhero team from the preexisting talent pool.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Thirty-five years after I—along with an entire generation raised on the same pop-cultural diet, it turns out—first dreamed it, the team formerly known as the Super Friends are getting the tent-pole treatment next month with the release of Batman v Superman:  Dawn of Justice, Warner Bros.’ opening-salvo attempt at the kind of license to print cash shared cinematic universe Marvel has so deftly pioneered (to the envy of every studio in Hollywood).  Fanboy anticipation is at a full boil, if enthusiasm on social media is any barometer; many are counting down the days with a breadth of fanaticism ordinarily reserved for the Second Coming, others forecasting the would-be mega-franchise’s stillbirth, but all are anxiously awaiting Dawn.

Not me, though.  I can say with absolute and irrevocable certainty that I’ll be sitting out Batman v Superman—in theaters, on home video, on cable.  In perpetuity.

But, more on that shortly.

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Attack of the Clones: Why Hollywood’s Creative Approach Is in Need of a Reboot

February 2, 2015 / / 8 Comments

I had no context to recognize this at the time, but I came of age in a golden era of fantasy cinema.  Some of my earliest theatrical experiences included Superman II (1981), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), Ghostbusters (1984), and Back to the Future (1985).  Movies like those were made, by and large, by a generation of filmmakers—notably but not exclusively Steven Spielberg and George Lucas—that had been raised on the sci-fi and fantasy offerings of 1950s B-movies and comics, and later became the first students to major in cinema studies and filmmaking; when that formal training was fused with their pulp passions, the contemporary blockbuster was born:  first with Jaws (1975), then Star Wars (1977), and then Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Superman:  The Movie (1978) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and The Goonies (1985).  That cornucopia of imaginative fantasy—hardly an all-encompassing list, by the way—was my first exposure to the movies.  Is it any wonder I was hooked for life?

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Who’s Laughing Now? Different Depictions of the Joker, Part 2

November 5, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Last week, we looked at the Joker as portrayed by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s 1989 blockbuster Batman and analyzed his five traits:

  1. Criminally, murderously sociopathic
  2. Wickedly macabre sense of humor
  3. Grandiose/theatrical
  4. Artistic/aesthetic
  5. Egomaniacal

This interpretation somewhat varied from those that had come before it:  He was certainly more lethal than Cesar Romero’s Clown Prince of Crime from the old Adam West series, and artistic is such a singular Tim Burton peculiarity—a signature he left on the crazy-quilt mosaic that comprises the Joker in his ever-evolving mythic totality; in American Idol’s clichéd parlance, Burton “made it his own.”  His Joker shared an undeniable DNA strand with the arch-villain created by Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger, and Bob Kane in 1940, the one later personified by Romero in the sixties, as well as then-contemporary comic incarnations as envisioned by Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns), Alan Moore (The Killing Joke), and Grant Morrison (Arkham Asylum:  A Serious House on Serious Earth), despite the markedly different aesthetics within which each of those varied interpretations were realized.

Because where is the line drawn, really, between a reinterpretation and an altogether different character?  How does an artist (in a vocationally general sense) redefine a folkloric figure to reflect his own personal idiosyncrasies, the sociocultural conditions of the day, or both, while still working within the recognizable parameters of a time-honored fictional creation?

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Who’s Laughing Now? Different Depictions of the Joker, Part 1

October 29, 2014 / / 5 Comments

To commemorate his seventy-fifth anniversary, the United States Postal Service recently released a sheet of stamps featuring an illustration of Batman from each of the four culturally designated periods of comic-book history:  Golden Age; Silver Age; Bronze Age; Modern Age.  In light of Entertainment Weekly’s recent observation that we seemed to have reached peak Batman saturation, I can’t help but feel a nostalgic longing for the Batman of my youth.  My Batman.  You know the one I mean:  The Batman that hopped behind the bubbled windshield of the Batmobile, an earnest Robin riding shotgun, fiery thrust of the afterburner blasting my heroes from the Batcave…

Hmm.  That could’ve been several different Batmans—even in those more innocent times (for him and me)—now that I’m thinking it over.  My first exposure to the Caped Crusader came in the form of syndicated afternoon reruns of the old Adam West series (which had ended its run over a decade earlier); at some point, my not-yet-literate mind recognized a correlation between the show’s splashy opening logo and repetitive choral chant that accompanied it, and “Batman,” to my mother’s surprise and delight, became the first word I could read and write.  (She was, mercifully, apparently either unaware of or unconcerned with the admonitions of Fredric Wertham a quarter century prior.)  Batman also had a strong animated presence at the time, appearing concurrently in a Filmation series that served as a de facto sequel to the ‘60s live-action show, as well as the long-running Super Friends franchise from Hanna-Barbera.  (That these aired on competing networks, something that would never happen today, only serves to illustrate how comic-book characters have gone, in my lifetime, from licensed-property afterthoughts to tightly leashed, billion-dollar corporate assets.  But, that’s a topic for another article…)

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