There's no word on how Disney's recent acquisition of Marvel (or Dubai's recent economic woes) will affect the development of the Marvel park in Dubai, but reportedly the plan is to open its doors in 2012. Off-site testing has already begun on at least three attractions: Flying with Spidey, Fantasticar and X-Men: Danger Room.

These concept illustrations come from Chimera Design, and show several designs from the park's planned City of Super Heroes, as well as a map of the park.

Dubai World Marvel Super Heroes Theme Park Concept [Disney and More via Neatorama]

The Mole Man
The Fantastic Four's first villain, the Mole Man's modus operandi switched up from attacking humanity because they weren't monsters to one of ecological conservation, trying to get humanity to leave Monster Island alone and stop bringing the monsters therein to the brink to extinction. Who can't get behind that? He's like a shorter, uglier Al Gore who just happens to command an army of near-unstoppable genetic accidents. If we just let him win, who knows what kind of era of ecological paradise we could be letting ourselves in for?

Zoom
The second Reverse-Flash, Hunter Zolomon was a former police criminal psychologist who became unstuck in time and mind after an accident involving the Flash's Cosmic Treadmill. Obsessed with making heroes "better" by forcing personal tragedies on them so that they'll try harder, he's the poster boy for tough love... But he really is trying to make the world a better place, albeit in a twisted manner. Instead of beating him up for that, why not try and just convince him to soften his methods and let him run free? What's the worst that could happen? Well, besides him trying to kill your family as motivation, of course.

Lex Luthor
For years, Lex has been telling us that, if Superman would just get out of the way, he's turn the world into a beautiful utopia, curing diseases and ending all problems with science. Hell, he's even managed to cure cancer before, even if it was just a ploy to lure Superman into a false sense of security. All I'm saying is this: Would Superman really mind that much if we just asked him to step aside for a bit and let Lex run things his way? If nothing else, the recent Superman/Batman: Public Enemies movie suggested that he could sort out this whole financial disaster thing within weeks...

Magneto
All he wants to do is end genetic persecution! Is that really so wrong? Sure, you can argue with his ways of going about it - I don't think anyone here would be fully supportive of his controversial "enslave and destroy the human race" agenda - but the man's lived through Nazi concentration camps, been acquitted by an international court of evildoing and, if nothing else, is fully dedicated to his beliefs. Is there really any proof that a world controlled by Magneto wouldn't be one less filled with hate? We don't think so... even if it's because most of us would be dead.

Doctor Doom
Those unconvinced of Victor Von Doom's leadership potential need only look to his kingdom of Latveria for the proof: Crime is nearly non-existent! Illness equally so! And the people love their leader (Admittedly, because to admit otherwise may result in death, but still: Details, people). Sure, evidence also points to our having to put up with a merciless police force of Doombots and having to dress and act like Eastern European villagers from the late 19th century, but aren't those prices we're willing to pay for a reduction in crime and illness? Admit it: Maybe we could all benefit from being ruled by an iron (clad) hand or two.

Darkseid
Last year's Final Crisis showed a world under self-styled Ultimate God of Evil Darkseid's will-sapping regime, and aside from the complete absence of free will and slow devolution of the planet into a red-skied radioactive wasteland patrolled by mutated dogs and men with tiger heads, we can't help but notice that those submitting to the Anti-Life Equation seemed much less in emotional turmoil or upset about the direction that their lives had taken - In fact, they seemed confident and assured, unlike those who'd chosen to resist. And, yes; those who resisted eventually assisted in the recreation of existence itself, but still. Isn't having even will-sapped piece of mind about your place in the world worth some sacrifice?

Universo
Here's one we know works from experience. Futuristic hypnotist Universo managed to hoodwink the entire planet under his command in the 1987 Legion of Super-Heroes storyline "The Universo Project," and the result was a peaceful planet where superheroes weren't needed at all. Easily the best case scenario we've seen, it didn't even involve Darkseid-esque worldwide mind control - Only figures of authority (and some superheroes) were hypnotized, meaning that the common man and woman would happily have freedom to toil and work for The Man as usual, without knowing that it was a different The Man all along. Win win!

For those scared of books without pictures, we'll start with what else is available this week. Boom! Studios launches a new series based on Pixar's The Incredibles and a new series called Kill Audio that really has to be seen to be believed; it's a horror/sci-fi comic about a little indestructible man trying to destroy music? Maybe? You'll know what I mean when you take a look at this:

DC gets into the spirit of the season by putting out the first issue of a bi-weekly horror-centric Batman series, Batman: The Unseen, for Hallowe'en, and World War Z's Max Brooks keeps everything horrific with his new graphic novel The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks.

Marvel, meanwhile, goes entirely in the other direction, with the first issue of X-Babies. Or if you'd rather read more mature mutants, there's also the first collection of the 1990s retro guilty pleasure X-Men Forever and the first issue of the sure-to-be-fun X-Men Vs. Agents Of Atlas.

Non-X-Book launches from the publisher also include the collections of Dark Reign: Fantastic Four (Reed Richards comes to terms with the newly-grim outlook of the Marvel Universe) and Beta Ray Bill: Godhunter (Horse-headed alien version of Thor against planet-eater Galactus), as well as first issues of Doctor Voodoo: Avenger Of The Supernatural and Spider-Man 1602, which really does offer a 17th century version of Peter Parker.

Book of the week, though, is a real, honest-to-goodness book: Peter & Max: A Fables Novel is, as the title suggests, the first prose novel to spin out of the Vertigo series Fables. Written by that series' creator and writer, Bill Willingham, it's everything a fan of the series could want - and everything a non-fan could need to get initiated. We'll have a review later this week, but for now, know that it's something you should be adding to your shopping list.

That list, as usual, can be built by visiting this list of everything being released to comic stores by Diamond Distributors tomorrow, and as ever, you can find your nearest comic store by visiting the Comic Shop Locator Service. As for my recommending a non-comic book in a comic book column...? I promise I'll try to do better next week... but you should take a look at Peter & Max nonetheless.

These are the science-fiction universes where you can transfer your consciousness into a robot body permanently, and wave goodbye to those annoying bones and excretory organs forever. And tomorrow, we'll have a list of the ten best robot bodies you can plug your brain into, and control temporarily.

Note: To some extent, there's some overlap here with the list we did a while ago of people who died and went to cyber-heaven. So we left out a few examples from the earlier list, like Dr. Ira Graves and Juliana Soong in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Mindscan, by Robert J. Sawyer
Wealthy Jake Sullivan is dying of a rare medical condition, so he pays the Immortex corporation to scan his brain and load him into a new, immortal robot body. There, he meets a children's author, Karen, who's also gotten a robot body so she can keep her copyrights for centuries. They fall in love — but Jake's original meat body, who's still not dead yet, decides to sue to get his personhood back from the robot duplicate. And after Kate's meat body dies, her son sues to get control over her estate.

Robotrix

In this bizarre, messed-up Hong Kong movie, an evil super-rich business man loads his brain into a robot body. And a sexy crime-fighting babe gets killed trying to stop him — so two female scientists, in shiny fetishy labcoats, put her naked body on a table with an also-naked robot body, and then transfer her consciousness into the robot. So she can go out there and kick some robo-butt. (We have a couple more clips from Robotrix here.)

8th Man aka 8-Man:

In this early Japanese anime series, Special Agent Brady gets killed, but downloads his brain into a robot body and becomes the 8th Man, a robot superhero who has superior speed, strength and reflexes, and he can change his appearance at will. His alter ego is Tobor, a private detective. Watch him deal with a Godzilla-esque robot from outer space, in this awesome clip.

Stargate: SG-1, "Tin Man"
The SG-1 crew winds up on a planet where a man named Harlen copies their consciousnesses into robot bodies. In an interesting twist on the usual "minds transferred into robot bodies" concept, it turns out that the crew's original bodies are intact, and they're eventually free to go. The robot duplicates meet their original selves, and the robots are a bit jealous of the "real" crew, who get to go home. Witness this exchange between robot Jack O'Neil and the "real" Jack:

ROBOT JACK: Somebody stole my life. That's what happened.

O'NEILL: You talking about my life?

ROBOT JACK: Hey, I've got every right to it that you do. I was kind of hoping I could figure out away to undo all this, get myself back into my body, where I belong.

O'NEILL: Well it's occupied, thank you.

The "Ware" series by Rudy Rucker
Cobb Anderson is an aging computer scientist who's best known for committing treason — he gave the robots free will and liberated them from the restrictive laws of robotics. Now the robots, who are living on the Moon, have come up with a scheme for Cobb to live forever — they've created a perfect robot duplicate of his body, and they want to digitize his consciousness and load it into the new shell. The only catch: to scan Cobb's brain and duplicate it, they have to slice it up, thus destroying it in the process.

Sliders, "State Of The Art"

The dimensional travelvers visit a world where robots have taken over — and the robots' creator, James Aldohn, has found a process to transfer a human consciousness into a robot body. The only downside: it's an untested procedure, and he needs to use the visitors as guinea pigs. Weirdly, the scene where Katherine McClellan's robot body gets switched on has inspired some really odd slow-mo Youtube fetish vids.

The Outer Limits, "The Brain Of Colonel Barham"

Colonel Barham, a dying astronaut, volunteers to have his brain loaded into a robot body so he can go to Mars before the Soviets — although, in this case, it looks like they keep part of the meat brain alive, so it's an edge case. In any case, the arrogant Col. Barham goes nuts once he's in a robot body, and he starts trying to kill anyone who messes with him. Somehow, his robot body has the ability to control people's minds and turn them into zombies.

Caprica

We couldn't leave this Battlestar Galactica prequel out — that plucky Zoe Graystone gets killed in a terrorist bombing, but luckily she's figured out a way to back up her brain electronically first, because the human mind only takes up about 300 MB of disk space.

Skinned by Robin Wasserman

Lia Kahn is rich, young and beautiful — unfortunately she's also fatally injured in a car accident. So her dad pays for her consciousness to be transferred into a new robot body. She no longer eats or has any sense of smell, and she doesn't feel touch the same way she used to. Is she still the same person she used to be? Even she isn't sure, and her old "popular kids" clique at high school isn't sure whether to accept her either. Think you had a hard time fitting in in high school? Imagine doing it with a robot body, in a culture that's uncomfortable with uploaded humans. (Read an interview with the author here.) Another novel with a similar theme is Nightmare In Silicon by Colette Phair.

Star Trek: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

Captain Kirk's mind gets copied perfectly into an android body, except that he's obsessed with being sick of Spock's half-breed interference, because that's what Kirk was muttering to himself when his mind got scanned. I love the spinning table with the two naked Shatners on it (at around 5:20 in this video.) Of course, they don't destroy Kirk's original fleshy body, probably just because they don't get around to it.

Runners up:

The Red Skull And Zola both transfer their brains into robot bodies in Captain America Reborn

The Creation Of The Humanoids

Osama Tezuka (creator of Astro Boy) writes a story of a dying person whose consciousness gets transferred into a robot body in the Phoenix series.

Fragile Machine

Starr Saxon, aka Machinesmith, becomes a gay robotic supervillain in issues of Daredevil and the Fantastic Four. (See top image.)

Ghost In The Shell: Innocence shows a world where cyborgs have abandoned their last bits of humanity and have become fully robotic.

Battle Angel Alita also includes some of the best cybernetic bodies — thanks to Cash907Censored for suggesting it.

In Dragonball Z movie 2, Dr. Willow dies, but he downloads his brain into a robot body.

The story "The Robot Who Came To Dinner" by Ron Goulart features a detective who's downloaded his brain into a robot body.

Jens in Galidor: Defenders Of The Outer Dimension

Doozy Bots

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Oolong Island
Does an island count as a city? Possibly not, but as anyone who read DC Comics' 52 knows, Oolong is no ordinary island. Populated almost entirely by mad scientists (and maybe a couple of sane ones, too), Oolong Island is a place where the old laws (of physics) no longer apply, and there's no such thing as a bad scientific breakthrough, only one that needs to be stopped from destroying the world as we know it by resident superteam, the Doom Patrol. But what else could you expect from a place where scientists are encouraged to indulge in mind-altering substances to further free their minds?

Platinum Flats
Whereas the real world has Silicon Valley, former Batgirl Barbara Gordon and her Birds of Prey have Platinum Flats, which proclaims itself as "America's High-Tech Capital" and home to all manner of upstart start-ups like YouSpace, MacroWare, NetCracker, Findster (Well, it is an alternate Earth, after all) and has eradicated problems like crime and urban decay thanks to its well-heeled and inventive inhabitants. Better living through technology indeed.

Haven
What's the quickest way to suddenly have a city full of advanced technology in your backyard? Have an alien spacecraft crash into it. That's what happened in the DC Universe's version of California (As if having Green Lantern's "Coast City" midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles wasn't enough), which suddenly found itself with an extra-terrestrial prison full of political prisoners dumped onto its coast in the early '2000s series Haven. On the plus side, the US Government granted them city status, in exchange for some of their tasty new technology. Let's just work on that whole "retro-engineering so we can use it without tentacles" thing, shall we?

Big Town
In 2000, Marvel Comics wondered what would've happened if, instead of using their genius to fight crime, Reed Richards, Tony Stark and the rest of their superheroic scientist buddies actually invented things to benefit society. According to Fantastic Four: Big Town, the result is a futuristic New York, which quickly becomes the center of civilization, expands to include nearby cities in other states, and destabilizes society as we know it. But, on the plus side, unstable molecules really cut down on your laundry costs.

Atlantis
Whether it's Marvel or DC Comics, there's an undersea city of Atlantis, and they're more technologically advanced than us. Marvel's Atlanteans prefer to travel is super-science submarines while they consider their latest plans to invade the surface world for whatever unconvincing reason they've been duped into believing this week, while DC's undersea dwellers have the distinction of having a civilization that started long before man had even crawled from the sea, and therefore having a head-start on the rest of us. Of course, if they were really that smart, they'd have worked out how to stay out of the water for more than an hour at a time, but apparently they were too busy telepathically communicating with whales to be troubled by such thoughts.

Attilan
Maybe the only people who can deal with the world of tomorrow today are scientifically-advanced themselves... like Marvel Comics' Inhumans, whose millennia-old city is so advanced that it has not only withstood being transported throughout space (literally; for awhile, it existed on the moon) but has also proven capable of physically transforming itself into a spaceship when needs be. See? Humans end up turning scientifically-advanced cultures into disasters, but Inhumans are apparently smart enough to turn change to their advantage.

Electropolis
Dean Motter's most recent take on the idea of the futuristic city (from his 1999 series of the same name) offered a different take on the idea: the retrofuturistic city, founded on decades old ideas about the future that're still ahead of their time. "Cathedral-sized Van Der Graaf generators and towering Strickfadden machines" may sound oddly outdated to us now, but this city still managed to have robot detectives, flying cars and an on-time metro service unlike the modern world we live in.

Metropolis
What better home for the Man of Tomorrow than the self-declared City of Tomorrow? Superman's adopted hometown may be best known for its major metropolitan newspaper, but consider all of the mad scientists that Superman faces on a regular basis, to say nothing of the alien technology, scientific establishments to clean up after superbattles and even the wonderfully-named Science Police, and it's pretty clear that there's more to this forward-thinking city than depending on print media. The city even has a street dedicated to scientific institutions called The Avenue of Tomorrow. What could be more perfect than that?

It should be pointed out that, right now, no-one really seems to have a clear idea of what'll happen next. For one thing, the sale isn't even expected to be completed until the end of the year, shareholders and antitrust oversight approval pending, and for another, if Joe Quesada is to be believed, maybe there'll be no obvious change:

Everybody take a deep breath, all your favorite comics remain unchanged and [Marvel editor] Tom Brevoort remains grouchy.

So what do both companies actually get from this buyout? Marvel, for their part, go from being the fourth biggest worldwide entertainment brand to being part of the biggest, with all the distribution and licensing perks that come with that. Disney, as the official press release states, get access to Marvel's IP - which arguably gives them the potential to own the tween/teen male market in the same way that they currently own the female market with the Princesses brand, High School Musical and its like, and pop moppets like the Jonas Brothers. They also get Marvel Studios, which had been considered one of the most successful independent movie studios of recent years. Except... it's not necessarily as simple as all of that.
Here are existing licensing deals that Marvel has in place, that Disney said yesterday they would honor, and which place all of this outside of Disney's control (for now):

Film
Marvel's current distribution deal with Paramount (Viacom-owned) covers the next five Marvel pictures including Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor (2011), Captain America (2011), The Avengers (2012) and Iron Man 3 (2012/2013). Paramount confirmed the films to be produced under their Marvel agreement. These films would all flow thru to Paramount's new pay TV network EPIX, however, all new properties beyond these would likely flow through Disney's output partner (currently Starz).

X-Men property has been licensed to 20th Century Fox (News Corp. owned) while Spider-Man has been licensed to Sony, which seems to have plans for the next three installments.

Theme Parks
It appears that Universal Studios maintains geographical rights to Marvel IP for as long as they have Marvel-related rides/attractions at the park (unclear if this also includes merchandise that exists within its parks today). In other words, Walt Disney World in Orlando is unlikely to see a Spiderman/Hulk themed attraction for the foreseeable future. The following excerpt comes from Universal City Development Partners' (owner of Universal Studios Orlando) 10-K: "We have geographical exclusivity east of the Mississippi River with regard to the specific Marvel characters we utilize. The license for the Marvel properties does not prohibit its assignment and is for the duration of our use of attractions themed around Marvel characters."

Video Games
THQ: Multi-year deal signed in May 2008 for Marvel Super Hero Squad.
Activision: Deal signed Nov 2005 and goes through 2017 for Spider Man and X-Men
Sega: Multi-year deal signed in April 2007 for Captain America, Hulk, Thor and Iron Man

Toys
Hasbro 10K: "Subsequent to December 28, 2008, the Company entered into an agreement with Marvel that resulted in the extension of the current agreement from the end of 2011 through the end of 2017."

Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke has the list of characters specifically licensed for Universal's theme parks:

For starters, here's the main list of licensed characters at Marvel Island inside Universal Orlando's Islands Of Adventure (provided me by Universal): Spider-Man (also attraction), Dr. Doom (also attraction), Hulk (also attraction), Storm (also attraction), Captain America, Cyclops, Green Goblin, Rogue, Storm, Wolverine, "and lots more if you include stores and dining," a Uni exec tells me.
Paramount tells me Iron Man and Thor also are included.

According to other sources, here are the characters by Attractions, Walk Around, and Shop:

Attractions (Characters licensed for the attraction use, but not necessarily for walk-around. Some in the attractions list are also licensed for walk-around, but not all.): Spider-Man, Doc Oc, Scream, Electro, Hydro-Man, Hobgoblin, J. Jonah Jameson, Hulk/Bruce Banner, Dr. Doom, Fantastic Four (as a group, not individually), Storm, Magneto, Professor X.

Walk around and/or Shop: Green Goblin, Cyclops, Rogue, Wolverine, Fantastic 4 (restaurant / walk around), Captain America (restaurant / walk around), Kingpin (shop / walk around), Merch (shop)

So no movies until 2013, no toys until 2017, and no theme parks or videogames for the big name characters in the foreseeable future, either. What does Disney actually get for their $4 billion right now? Maybe television and comics? Former Marvel editor-in-chief and Disney Adventures creator Marv Wolfman thinks so, even if he's not too hopeful about that whole "comics" thing:

Publishing. Well, that's the big one, isn't it? At least for us. Actually, only for us. The big ones in reality are movies, TV and video games. One major video game hit can make more money than 95% of all movies. But let's talk comics. What division will that fall under? Publishing? Movies? Consumer Products? Something else? What happens to Marvel Comics will depend on which Disney company it falls under and as of 1:30PM, I don't know the answer to that.

With this level of uncertainty, it's no surprise that some feel that Disney paid too much for what they're actually getting (although others feel just the opposite).

There are other questions still left to be answered: What happens to Disney's existing comic deals with Boom! Studios and their own Kingdom Comics line? Will Disney and/or Marvel look for alternate distribution for their comics, and if so, are we looking at another Heroes World situation? With all this talk of Marvel's 5000-strong character base, does Disney really believe that there are multiple Iron Man-scale successes in there - and what happens when superheroes fall out of fashion? All of these will, undoubtedly, be answered at some point in the near future, but for now, as the dust settles, the most important question may end up being: Is it all worth it?

Wolverine/Donald Duck by SaiyaGina, Punisher/Mickey Mouse by AlexFugazi, Theme Park image by Fuzzcat.

Variety is reporting that Green Lantern screenwriter and Kings producer Michael Green has been hired to reboot the franchise. If Fox's deal remains in place, can we assume superhero franchises like Spider-Man and Iron Man will stay at the same studios they are presently with?

Let's just hope that Fox learned a lesson from its previous PG blunder and will make an attempt to give a bit of depth to the foursome. Hopefully we'll get the Doug Jones Silver Surfer we've been waiting on forever.

Although it doesn't say so anywhere on the ad itself, the image is for the final issue of Jeph Loeb's Ultimatum series, which has gleefully been killing off characters and wrecking landmarks in Marvel's "Ultimate" universe for the last few months - The date of 7/29/09 (The release date of Ultimatum's final issue) and recognizable style of series artist David Finch being the giveaways.

The biggest tease in the ad is really whose skeleton that is in the bottom right of the image... but fans could try to work out who it is based upon the already-released solicitations for the following months' series in the relaunched Ultimate line that follow in August and September: Ultimate Comics Avengers shows Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye and Nick Fury, while Ultimate Comics Spider-Man teases "maybe even a new Spider-Man", whereas series for both X-Men and Fantastic Four are entirely missing post-August. Would Marvel really permanently kill off books based on two of their biggest franchises, even in the alternate-reality "Ultimate" world? Apparently, we'll find out on the 29th.

The End [Marvel.com]

Tuesday marks the exact anniversary (June 23rd) of Burton's movie - a film that broke box office records despite many people expecting it to disappear without trace as soon as it opened. Instead, it opened the door for three sequels with different levels of diminishing return, a classic cartoon series, numerous bad superhero movies and a summer where it seemed like everything had a Bat logo on it. If there truly was life before Burton's Batman (and we only have science's word and our own faulty memories that there was) one thing's for sure - it was certainly a lesser place without the sounds of Prince's "Batdance" available for us to listen to.

To do our part to mark the 20th anniversary of the movie, we've looked back at the making of the movie, remembered some of our favorite merchandise from the Summer of the Bat, thought about the disasters that were made as a result of its success, and tried to think of the good things about each of the sequels. Feel free to join in, but if we hear someone doing the "this town needs an enema" line, we're turning this nostalgiafest around right now.

Batman Returns

There are many who think that Burton's second Batman is his best, and I have to admit that I'm one of them. For one thing, it's just weirder, dropping a lot of the compromise from the first to form a messier, funnier movie where Keaton doesn't have to fight for attention next to a scenery-chewing Nicholson (Not that Danny DeVito's Penguin isn't almost as bad). Yes, it doesn't have the clearest narrative in the world, but I fully and only slightly shamefully admit that the 17-year-old me didn't care about that as long as Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman was onscreen.

Batman Forever

Burton vacated the director's chair for the third movie (He stuck around as producer, however), leading to Keaton also leaving the series to pursue "more interesting" roles. Enter Joel Schumacher and Val Kilmer, and the beginning of the end. You can see the potential in all of their choices, even as the execution didn't live up to it: Trying to go for a new visual aesthetic instead of aping Burton was a good idea, but the neon dayglo look they came up with definitely wasn't. Similarly, the media-mocking of the plot (The Riddler's television-replacement device literally being an idiot box and sapping the intelligence of its audience) had potential, but the overly broad acting of Jim Carrey as the Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face brought everything down to a farce-like level that reminded people a little too much of the Adam West days.

Batman and Robin

...And this was where the franchise ended, thanks to Schumacher's attempts to "homage" Adam West and Dick Sprang going horribly awry. To his credit, the director apparently wanted the movie to be much more like a cartoon than the earlier installments, but with toy companies having input into the design of the movie's costumes and characters this time around, maybe things got a little out of hand from his original intentions (Whether the toy companies were in favor of the much-ridiculed nipple additions to the Batsuits is unknown, if unlikely). Not helping things was the arrival of Batgirl, bringing the lead cast to a cramped five characters (Batman, Robin, Batgirl and two villains Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy, the last two masterclasses in overacting from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman). And yet, despite Schumacher himself apologizing for the movie on an extra from the recent DVD reissue, there's something weirdly compelling about it. I demand a critical re-appraisal!

(There's arguably a case to be made for the idea that Batman's success drove new readers and, perhaps more importantly, movie and television producers to the medium, leading to the early 1990s speculator boom and subsequent bust, but that's another article in itself.)

The Movies
If there's one thing Hollywood likes more than a hit, it's a formula for more hits, and Batman's success convinced movie executives that they could do exactly the same thing with whatever comic character they wanted (Even if, in Robert Townsend's case, he had to make him up). The result? Lots of bad movies, made with less love and less talent than Burton brought to Batman. Exhibit A: Warren Beatty's garish, flat Dick Tracy:


Also, see The Phantom:


...And Meteor Man?


Not all of the comic-based movies were terrible, of course; I still adore The Rocketeer:


Goths the world over loved The Crow:


And who can forget Marvel Comics' ill-fated early attempts to get into the movie biz? Look! Here's the direct-to-video Captain America:


Or even better, the direct-to-bootleg Roger Corman Fantastic Four:


Looking at some of these, I'm kind of glad that Batman and Robin accidentally killed the genre for a few years.

The Best Thing To Have Come From The Success Of The Movie
Surely there's no contest, right...?


Batman: The Animated Series (AKA The Adventures of Batman & Robin and The New Batman Adventures, amongst other names it had during its brief but wonderful life) may have gained from the success of Tim Burton's movies - it premiered in 1992, following the release of Batman Returns, but had been in the works long before - but it wasn't a copy by any stretch of the imagination. Dark without being humorless, endlessly stylish thanks to the talents of Bruce Timm, Dan Riba and many others and much smarter than other Saturday morning cartoons (or, for that matter, many other incarnations of Batman), Batman: The Animated Series defined the character for a generation, and remains an example of how good an animated series can be.

Maybe you'd like to see the original animation that got the series greenlit...?

That summer was huge. You couldn't turn around without seeing the Bat-Signal somewhere. People were cutting it into their fucking heads. It was just the summer of Batman and if you were a comic book fan it was pretty hot.

Contemporary estimates suggested that over $500 million worth of merchandise was sold for the first movie, with some suggesting the number was closer to $750 million - but then, there was a lot of bootleg merchandise available at the time. While merchandise had been a large part of the summer movie business since George Lucas made a fortune from Star Wars' ancillerary products, the blanketing of the Bat was something different: Starting, perhaps, as uncertainty on behalf of Warner Bros over whether the film itself would recoup costs, it became a genuine craze somewhere along the line - leading to all manner of random Batproduct on the market. Even before the movie opened, analysts knew something big was happening:

''Batman'' does not reach theaters until June 23, but market research surveys have shown an extraordinary awareness on the part of moviegoers for the last month. '' 'Batman' is the movie equivalent of 'Phantom of the Opera,' '' said Jack Brodsky, the president of marketing and distribution at Morgan Creek. ''It jumped onto the research charts in first place. That's like being No. 1 on the best-seller list your first week.''

Mr. Vogel thinks ''Batman'' could sell $300 million worth of merchandise. The comic-book character has been around for 50 years and the Caped Crusader appeals to adults as well as children. Although Warner Brothers has been secretive about the merchandising of the movie before it opens, Licensing Corporation of America, a subsidiary of Warner Communications Inc., has already mailed out thousands of catalogues hawking everything from Batman playing cards to a $499.95 jacket with the Batman logo ''studded with rhinestones.''

And, even if you weren't willing to pay $500 for a rhinestone jacket - or just had enough taste to not want a rhinestone jacket in the first place - there was still an embarrassment of Bat-riches available. For example, you could buy a bumper sticker allowing you to pretend that you were really Bruce Wayne:

Alternatively, if you really wanted, you could just buy the Batmobile itself. It even has "2 concealed rockets"!

If you were hungry, there was always some Bat-cereal to get your day started properly -


- and if you needed a snack during the day, your Bathead candy dispenser was sure to help you out:


Batman could also help with your leisure activities - you could play the arcade game or the pinball game...


... and, if you felt the need to spend your evening dancing instead of fighting crime, Prince was there to help you out with what may have been one of his last hurrahs before disappearing into self-pleasuring obscurity (Sorry, Prince fans. But you know that I'm right):

And then, you could unwind before sleep with the movie's second soundtrack release, the Danny Elfman score. Which, I have to admit, reminds me much more of the animated series now than the movie... But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Images from Batman Movie Online

If Burton as director was seen as a risky move because of resume up until that point, his casting of Michael Keaton as the lead character was assumed by many to just be outright suicide. It also wasn't just the comic fans who were scared about the idea of someone known more as a comedic actor taking on the role (50,000 letters of complaint were apparently sent to Warner Bros as a result), as executive producer Jon Peters recalls:

One of the most powerful men in Hollywood went as far as to call Warners' chairman Steve Ross and tell him casting Michael was such a horrible idea it would bring Warners to its knees... The entire studio would crash. Heaven's Gate revisited.

(I have to wonder what the response would have been if Bill Murray, another of the actors under consideration for the role alongside more traditional candidates like Mel Gibson, Pierce Brosnan and Kevin Costner, had been cast.)

The casting of Jack Nicholson as the Joker, however, met with much less anger (Other actors considered included Robin Williams, James Woods and, in what could have been either awesome or the worst decision ever, David Bowie), even if many - including screenwriter Sam Hamm - disliked the retcon that revealed that Jack Napier, the young Joker, was the man that killed Bruce Wayne's parents; that change in the story happened during shooting, when the 1988 WGA Writers Strike prevented Hamm from working on rewrites himself.

(Here's the first production draft of the script and, for fun comparison, Hamm's original 1986 draft.)

The production was troubled, to say the least. As well as the Writers Strike, the four month shoot - described later by Burton as "[t]he worst period of my life" - also saw producers change the end of the movie without telling Burton, the budget spiral out of control - it was rumored to end up more than 50% higher than it was when it started - and footage stolen from the set, as the press fought to be the first to have pictures from the secretive set. Even in the movie's pre-release publicity, the stress was clear as this Time Magazine story demonstrates:

As in all megaprojects, the Batman people were just happy to have survived. "Tim is a pale guy," his friend Keaton says. "Put him in England and add the demands of the shoot, and he becomes transparent." But Burton soldiered on, and now offers a cautious commendation of his own work: "Given the scale, the number of people involved and how quickly we did it, it still has a personality, which big movies often lose. It doesn't feel like a cardboard clone."

Early reviews for the movie were mixed; while some enjoyed the dark tone, others felt as if the darkness overwhelmed everything else. Roger Ebert, for example:

[D]id I care about the relationship between these two caricatures? Did either one have the depth of even a comic book character? Not really. And there was something off-putting about the anger beneath the movie's violence. This is a hostile, mean-spirited movie about ugly, evil people, and it doesn't generate the liberating euphoria of the Superman or Indiana Jones pictures... The movie's problem is that no one seemed to have any fun making it, and it's hard to have much fun watching it. It's a depressing experience.

Time Magazine's take was similarly damning:

Batman's style is both daunting and lurching; it has trouble deciding which of its antagonists should set the tone. It can be as manic as the Joker, straining to hear the applause of outrage; it can be as implosive as Batman-Bruce, who seems crushed by the burden of his schizoid eminence. This tension nearly exhausts the viewer and the film.

Nonetheless, the film was a runaway success, much moreso than Warners had anticipated - its opening broke box office records (It was the first movie to earn more than $100 million in its first ten days), and by the end of the year, it had become the sixth most successful movie of all time. The moral of this story? Perhaps, to let Tim Burton do whatever he wants - unless that happens to be remaking Planet of the Apes.

Santoro was a senior visual effects artist on movies like Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem and Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer. But Offline looks like it has the potential to be way better than either of those films, thanks to its weird, off-kilter visual style. Here's the trailer, which Santoro told Slashfilm he made to raise interest (and money) for a feature-length film:

Here's the plot synopsis for Offline, which I'm really hoping does get made into a feature film:

"The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating."

In this future, the world is dying a slow and ugly death. In an effort to cope or perhaps out of pure denial, humanity has become increasingly obsessed with mass media.

The Internet has evolved into an all-consuming visceral experience where every one's perception of the world around them is fully customized. The brown smog in the sky can be easily ignored when a beautiful sunset is projected through your optic nerve, courtesy of the Naneuron Corporation.

But like all systems there are glitches. Someone or something is disrupting the feed; a Ghost in the machine. A group of extremists have risen up, led by young man named Maro. Defiant and charismatic, he has seemingly endless promise until he unexpectedly surrenders.

All enemies of the state are processed for reprogramming. Those like Maro who are physically and mentally gifted enough are transformed into counter-terrorism soldiers. His memories are erased. His body is enhanced. His humanity is destroyed. Maro has become the perfect weapon.

Until he begins communicating with the glitches, hearing whispers that lead him on a journey through the depths of his own subconscious. Trapped in the midst of a hellish nightmare, he must find a way to regain his identity and take down the system once and for all. But at what price comes freedom?

WHEN A MAN'S MIND BECOMES ONE WITH A MACHINE... WHAT HAPPENS TO HIS SOUL?

The movie's official website is here.

It's weirdly fitting that The Dark Knight and Watchmen look like they're going to end up serving the same purpose for movies that The Dark Knight Returns and, well, Watchmen served for comics twenty-plus years ago; namely, misdirecting creators into thinking that superheroes have to be "dark" and "realistic" in order to be successful. There's every possibility, of course, that Watchmen's theater bow will end up far lower than expected (That 78% drop this Friday doesn't look good, let's face it) and shift this expectation - just as there's the possibility that Warners and Fox execs are right in assuming that the mainstream movie audience really does just want grumpy, moody superhero movies. But somehow, I doubt both of those possibilities.

That Hollywood wants another Dark Knight is completely understandable, even ignoring the exceptional box office take of the movie; Chris Nolan's second Batman flick was artistic, sincere and adult (even if it was also twice as long as it should've been), and showcased a new way to approach superhero movies without traditional sensationalism and cliche, after all. But that doesn't mean that it needs to become the template for all superhero movies from now on. Part of what made Dark Knight work so well was that the darkness and the stabs at moral ambiguity were entirely in keeping with the world of Batman as we've all come to accept it in recent years. It wasn't an attempt to graft something that didn't belong onto the character - as, I think could be argued, Superman Returns tried to do with the "Lois has moved on/Clark is a stalker" angst that hit such a false note - but an indulging in the greyness that Batman has become increasingly surrounded in since his day-glo '60s TV show heyday.

(The same with Watchmen's grit, which was always in the source text. In fact, there's definitely an argument that what makes Watchmen unsuccessful to some degree - and, of course, there are all manner of arguments over just what that degree may be - are the deviations from the original, whether it be in plot of the slick glossiness that Snyder's movies seem to have no matter what.)

The original two Fantastic Four movies weren't financial failures, per se, but they weren't Spider-Man or X-Men, either; the reason for that, though, wasn't that they were too happy. Creatively, they were... fun enough in a "I'm half-watching them on an airplane because there's nothing else to do" way, perhaps, but they weren't really the Fantastic Four, either. The key to those characters and that series is, ultimately, still in the tone that was established in the first 100 issues of their comic - a strange mix of sentiment, soap opera and invention that, to be honest, is much closer to the Back To The Future movies (or, more obviously, Pixar's The Incredibles) than Fox's previous attempts... and something that's a million miles away from the "dark" reinvisioning that rumors are suggesting that Fox is considering.

(The mind boggles, in a way, at the idea of a dark Fantastic Four franchise; the characters are so amazingly undark - they're called the Fantastic Four and their main nemesis calls himself Doctor Doom, for the love of God; there's a childlike suspension of disbelief necessary to buy into the concept as something other than parody in general, surely? - that I can't really imagine how it would even work for an entire movie never mind the reinvention of a franchise. If it is being seriously considered, it speaks to the assumption that it's a result of desperation to keep movie rights than anything else.)

The key to successful superhero movies, ultimately, is in faith to the spirit of the original (Case in punny point: The Spirit may have shared character names with Will Eisner's comic strip, but little else, and was an artistic failure because of that. Of course, it was a financial failure because it was a terrible movie), but that point - maybe the real lesson of The Dark Knight, especially if taken in tandem with last year's also-successful, but much more playful, Iron Man - is perhaps lost behind the dollar signs that appear in movie executives' eyes whenever Dark Knight is mentioned, particularly in light of all the publicity push of the equally gloomy Watchmen. It's a shame, because the superhero genre - for all its faults - is something with so much more potential than any amount of gritty deconstructionist, "realistic" takes could properly demonstrate, and various characters already headed to the big screen - whether they're Green Lantern, Thor or even Captain America - deserve stories that are much, much bigger than real life.

DC Comics have a pretty hefty week of important launches hitting stores tomorrow. (And, no, I'm not including "WWII Heroes Fight Dinosaurs" book The War That Time Forgot, the first collection of which is released this week.)

You can catch a glimpse at how Gotham City has been affected by the disappearance of Batman in Gotham Gazette: Batman Dead?, or follow Superman as he abandons Earth to kneel before Zod in the first issue of Superman: World of New Krypton. You can even catch up with the storyline that led to the creation of New Krypton in the hardcover collection Superman: Brainiac, which also includes the last days of poor Pa Kent. There's even a brand new space superhero series launching from the cosmic-awareness addled mind of Jim Starlin, called (appropriately) Strange Adventures.

Marvel are heading into space themselves, with the launch of their new "Intergalactic War - Again!" series, War of Kings; it's one of a number of launches from the House of Ideas this week, which include the Hulk anthology mini-series Hulk: Broken Worlds, a continuity-heavy Dark Reign: Fantastic Four, the wonderfully goofy one-shot Spider-man & The Human Torch in Bahia De Los Muertos (The plot of which is "Spidey and the Human Torch go to Puerto Rico and meet monsters." Seriously, how could you resist?) and the surprisingly fun New Avengers: The Reunion, which offers marriage counseling via superheroes and evil mad scientist cults.

(If you're jonesing for some Wolverine ahead of the upcoming movie, Marvel are there for you as well; they're re-releasing both Barry Windsor-Smith's classic Weapon X and Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's even-more-classic Wolverine mini-series in new editions, just in case you've never read them before.)

Of course, all of the above pales before IDW's Galaxy Quest: Global Warming, which proved that apparently comic book spin-offs of minor SF comedy movies years after they came out can still manage to be more fun than the movies themselves. Just don't let writer Scott Lobdell know I said that.

All of these releases, and many more, can be found by perusing the complete list of this week's new comic releases, and then purchased - if you have "the green" - at your local store which can, as ever, be found using the Comic Shop Locator Service. Although, really, you should know where it is by now. What're you waiting for?

Still here? Okay.

As anyone who's paid attention to our coverage of Watchmen undoubtedly knows by now, the end of the Watchmen movie does not include the giant alien squid destroying Manhattan that the book climaxes with. Admittedly, when you put it like that - "the giant alien squid destroying Manhattan" - it sounds ridiculous, like a bad monster movie or something, but that's kind of the point, both inside and outside of the story.

It's the ridiculous, surreality of an alien squid that is required to shock the various superpowers out of their Cold War mindset in Ozymandias' plan; something so literally beyond the realms of possibility that its very appearance makes everything else seem equally absurd and forces political powers to reassess their priorities and put aside prejudices to deal with this new perceived threat. The squid doesn't just provide the climax to the story, it also provides the start; it was the Comedian seeing experiments that led to the squid's creation that led to his murder.

From a meta context, the squid provides a reference to the monster comics that pre-dated the Silver Age where superhero comics became the dominant force in the marketplace (What better to provide an end to superheroics in the Watchmen world? The narrative almost reads as a backwards comment on the maturation of the medium, opening with a brutal, realistic murder and then ending with a cartoonish monster apocalypse) while also exploding both the world that Moore and Gibbons had created and the rules that they had imposed on it with something so unrealistic - and, yes, unfilmable - that it could only work in comics, where imagination and conviction are all that's needed to make an idea work. By bringing in the idea of an alien giant squid - Interestingly enough, just like Starro The Conqueror, the first villain fought by the Justice League of America, DC Comics' premiere superhero team and the direct inspiration behind the creation of the Fantastic Four, which in turn led to the creation of Marvel Comics as we know it today - to a story that, Dr. Manhattan aside, had remained mostly grounded, the possibility and idea-driven nature of comics is restated, as is (in a strange way) the need for superheroes to battle such outlandish threats. The story comes full-circle, and the critique of superheroes closes with a return to imagination and the impossible, albeit one done in a downbeat tone consistent with the rest of the book.

Meredith is right; the loss of the squid, and the destruction that it brought with it, is a loss to the movie. Perhaps what replaces it fills a plot hole, but it's unlikely that it will hold as much meaning as what was removed.

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