Back Issue #99 by TwoMorrows Publishing

Celebrating Batman: The Animated Series’ 25th Anniversary!

September 2017

Harley Quinn history! The Batman Adventures comic! The animated DC Universe in comics! And a tribute to the late, great Mike Parobeck! featuring Altieri • Burchett • Conroy • Dini • Pasko • Sorkin • Strong • Timm & more!

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“Batman AND Superman!” Bronze Age World’s Finest, Super Sons, Batman/Superman Villain/Partner Swap, Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane go solo, Superman/Radio Shack giveaways, and JLA #200’s “A League Divided” (as a nod to Batman v. Superman)! Featuring work by BRIAN BOLLAND, RICH BUCKLER, GERRY CONWAY, JACK KIRBY, GEORGE PÉREZ, JIM STARLIN, and more. Cover by DICK GIORDANO!

“Comics Magazines of the ’70s and ’80s!” From Savage Tales to Epic Illustrated, KIRBY’s “Speak-Out Series,” EISNER’s Spirit magazine, Unpublished PAUL GULACY, MICHAEL USLAN on the Shadow magazine you didn’t see, plus B&Ws from Atlas/Seaboard, Charlton, Skywald, and Warren. Featuring work by NEAL ADAMS, JOHN BOLTON, ARCHIE GOODWIN, DOUG MOENCH, EARL NOREM, ROY THOMAS, and more. Cover by GRAY MORROW!

“Bronze Age Adaptations!” The Shadow, Korak: Son of Tarzan, Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Worlds Unknown, and Marvel’s 1980s movie adaptations. Plus: PAUL KUPPERBERG surveys prose adaptations of comics! With work by JACK KIRBY, DENNY O’NEIL, FRANK ROBBINS, MICHAEL W. KALUTA, FRANK THORNE, MICHAEL USLAN, and sporting an alternate Kaluta cover produced for DC’s Shadow series!

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“Eighties Ladies!” MILLER & SIENKIEWICZ’s Elektra: Assassin, Dazzler, Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau), Lady Quark, DAN MISHKIN’s Wonder Woman, WILLIAM MESSNER-LOEBS and ADAM KUBERT’s Jezebel Jade, Somerset Holmes, and a look back at Marvel’s Dakota North! Featuring the work of BRUCE JONES, JOHN ROMITA JR., ROGER STERN, and many more, plus a previously unpublished cover by SIENKIEWICZ.

“All-Jerks Issue!” Guy Gardner, Namor in the Bronze Age, J. Jonah Jameson, Flash Thompson, DC’s Biggest Blowhards, the Heckler, Obnoxio the Clown, and Archie’s “pal” Reggie Mantle! Featuring the work of (non-jerks) RICH BUCKLER, KURT BUSIEK, JOHN BYRNE, STEVE ENGLEHART, KEITH GIFFEN, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and many more. Cover-featuring KEVIN MAGUIRE’s iconic Batman/Guy Gardner “One Punch”!

“Bronze Age Halloween!” The Swamp Thing revival of 1982, Swamp Thing in Hollywood, Phantom Stranger team-ups, KUPPERBERG & MIGNOLA’s Phantom Stranger miniseries, DC’s The Witching Hour, the Living Mummy, and an index of Marvel’s 1970s’ horror anthologies! Featuring the work of RICH BUCKLER, ANDY MANGELS, VAL MAYERIK, MARTIN PASKO, MICHAEL USLAN, TOM YEATES, and many more. Cover by YEATES.

“All-Captains Issue!” Bronze Age histories of Shazam! (Captain Marvel) and Captain MarVell, Captain Carrot, Captain Storm and the Losers, Captain Universe, and Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers. Featuring C. C. BECK, PAT BRODERICK, JACK KIRBY, ELLIOT S. MAGGIN, BILL MANTLO, DON NEWTON, BOB OKSNER, SCOTT SHAW!, JIM STARLIN, ROY THOMAS, and more. Cover painting by DAVE COCKRUM!

“Indie Super-Heroes!” NEAL ADAMS Ms. Mystic interview, Continuity Comics, BILL BLACK Captain Paragon interview, Justice Machine history, STEVEN GRANT/NORM BREYFOGLE Whisper “Pro2Pro” interview, and the ’80s revivals of Mighty Crusaders and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. Featuring BUCKLER, DEODATO, ELLIS, GRINDBERG, GUSTOVICH, ISABELLA, REINHOLD, ORDWAY, PÉREZ, and more. Cover by NEAL ADAMS!

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“Creatures of the Night!” Moon Knight’s DOUG MOENCH and BILL SIENKIEWICZ in a Pro2Pro interview, Ghost Rider, Night Nurse, Eclipso in the Bronze Age, I…Vampire, interviews with Batman writer MIKE W. BARR and Marvel’s Nightcat, JACQUELINE TAVAREZ. Featuring work by BOB BUDIANSKY, J. M. DeMATTEIS, DAVE SIMONS, ROGER STERN, TOM SUTTON, JEAN THOMAS, and more. SIENKIEWICZ and KLAUS JANSON cover!

“Marvel Fanfare Issue!” Behind the scenes of the ‘80s anthology series with AL MILGROM, interviews and art by ARTHUR ADAMS, CHRIS CLAREMONT, DAVE COCKRUM, STEVE ENGLEHART, MICHAEL GOLDEN, ROGER McKENZIE, FRANK MILLER, DOUG MOENCH, ANN NOCENTI, GEORGE PÉREZ, MARSHALL ROGERS, PAUL SMITH, KEN STEACY, CHARLES VESS, and more! Cover by SANDY PLUNKETT and GLENN WHITMORE.

“Bird People!” Hawkman in the Bronze Age, JIM STARLIN’s Superman/Hawkgirl team-up, TIM TRUMAN’s Hawkworld, Hawk and Dove, Penguin history, Blue Falcon & Dynomutt, Condorman, and CHUCK DIXON and SCOTT McDANIEL’s Nightwing. With GERRY CONWAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, GREG GULER, RICHARD HOWELL, TONY ISABELLA, KARL KESEL, ROB LIEFELD, DENNY O’NEIL, and others! Cover by GEORGE PÉREZ.

“DC in the ‘80s!” From the experimental to the fan faves: Behind-the-scenes looks at SECRET ORIGINS, ACTION COMICS WEEKLY, DC CHALLENGE, THRILLER, ELECTRIC WARRIOR, and SUN DEVILS. Featuring JIM BAIKIE, MARK EVANIER, DAN JURGENS, DOUG MOENCH, MARTIN PASKO, TREVOR VON EEDEN, and others! Featuring a mind-numbing Nightwing cover by ROMEO TANGHAL!

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Volume 1, Number 99 September 2017 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow

Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond!

DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER ARTIST Bruce Timm (Harley Quinn commission from the collection of John Hicks.) COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Rob Smentek SPECIAL THANKS Kevin Altieri Paul Levitz Brian Augustyn Judi Lewinson Brooke Barnett/DPN Elliot S. Maggin Talent Agency Tifiney McCullough Mike W. Barr Dennis O’Neil Norm Breyfogle Mike Parobeck Laren Bright Appreciation Society Rick Burchett Martin Pasko Alan Burnett Scott Peterson KC Carlson Mike Pigott Kevin Conroy Dr. Harleen Quinzell Gerry Conway Dan Riba Karen Crary Randy Rogel DC Comics Andrea Romano Sean Catherine Derek Nino Santiago Paul Dini Arleen Sorkin Chuck Dixon Len Strazewski Mark Evanier Tara Strong Lance Falk Rick Taylor Jordan B. Gorfinkel Steven Thompson Grand Comics Bruce Timm Database John Trumbull Heritage Comics Steve Vance Auctions Warner Bros. Animation John Hicks Glenn Whitmore Christopher Jones Marv Wolfman Karl Kesel Walden Wong Charlie Kochman World’s Finest Online Jon B. Knutson Philip Youngman James Heath Lantz

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PRO2PRO ROUNDTABLE: Batman: The Animated Series: An Oral History . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Animators, writers, and voice talent discuss the evolution of the classic Batman TV show EPISODE GUIDE: Batman: The Animated Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 BACKSTAGE PASS: Bob Hastings, the Voice of Commissioner Gordon . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 This actor/voice actor was no stranger to comics-related roles TOY BOX: The Animated Batmobile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Collectibles of the coolest cartoon car ever FLASHBACK: The Batman Adventures: An Enduring Legacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Behind the scenes of the BTAS comic-book spin-off FLASHBACK: The DC Animated Universe in Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Batman and family certainly didn’t have all of the “animated” fun FLASHBACK: Remembering Mike Parobeck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 A look at a life and career that ended much too soon BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: Harley Quinn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 A history of Mistah J’s main squeeze and BTAS’ break-out star BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Reader reactions BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 118 Edgewood Avenue NE, Concord, NC 28025. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Eight-issue subscriptions: $73 Standard US, $116 International, $31 Digital. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Bruce Timm. Batman: The Animated Series © Warner Bros./DC Comics. Batman and Harley Quinn TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2017 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing except ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 1

by J o h n T r u m b u l l y Steven additional transcription b utson Thompson and Jon B. Kn

In Batman’s 78-year history, 1992’s Batman: The Animated Series (BTAS) is regarded as one of the best-ever interpretations of the character. Its striking look, suspenseful stories, nuanced voice acting, and memorable music captivated audiences from the start, winning the show a total of four Emmys. BTAS adapted the best from the comics while also making several new contributions to the legend of the Dark Knight. Harley Quinn, Renee Montoya, and Mr. Freeze’s origin all debuted on the show. But the production of Batman: The Animated Series was not without its growing pains. Like any great Batman story, it featured character conflict, intense obstacles, narrow escapes, and ultimate triumph. This is the story of a modern classic of animation. In 1990, Warner Bros. Animation was at a crossroads. The massively successful Tiny Toons was winding down, and the studio needed new projects going forward. Jean MacCurdy, president of Warner Bros. Animation division, realized that WB had a perfect property for animation in the blockbuster movie of 1989: Batman. RANDY ROGEL, Writer: Jean MacCurdy ran the studio. Jean is “mom.” Jean was basically—I come from the military—she’s a commander. And what a commander does is marshal the troops and then gets out of their way. She ran an unbelievably big organization with lots of temperamental artists, composers, and writers and directors, and animators—people who get all crazy on you, because they’re artists—and she had the sensibility to just control all of that and put out one hit after another. MacCurdy announced to the 40-person team at Warner Bros. Animation that the company was developing four new animated shows based on WB properties: Gremlins, The Griswolds, Taz-Mania, and Batman. She asked everyone who was interested to submit ideas.

CREATING THE PILOT

Inspired, Tiny Toons storyboard artist Bruce Timm went back to his desk and spent the next hour sketching up character designs for Batman. Another Tiny Toons artist, Eric Radomski, created background treatments for all four potential shows. For Batman, he devised a new technique involving airbrushed highlights on black paper to emphasize a gritty, film noir look. BRUCE TIMM, Producer, Director: [Eric] had independently of me just started doing some experimentation with background treatments on black paper. So we both showed up at the same meeting and I had some character sketches, he had some BGs, and Jean liked both. She mixed his peanut butter with my chocolate. It turned out to be a smart choice on her part—I thought we made a really good team. It’s a shame Eric doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the series as he deserves—he and I were practically attached at the hip throughout those first couple of seasons, not just on the art direction, but every facet of production, from story development to casting and voice recording to post-production. Recognizing the strength of Timm’s character designs and Radomski’s backgrounds, MacCurdy asked the two artists, who only tangentially knew each other from Tiny Toons, to collaborate on a two-minute presentation reel for Batman. She recommended that the duo look at the 1940s Fleischer Superman cartoons for inspiration. BRUCE TIMM: They’d been in negotiations with Fox Kids to actually do the show, and the negotiations, I guess, had been dragging on for a while. Jean thought that might be a good way to kind of goose the process was to just show them some footage and say, “Hey! This is

2 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

The Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons of the 1940s were an inspiration for the look of BTAS. Superman and Batman TM & © DC Comics. BTAS © Warner Bros.

how cool it would be if you guys do this,” and then, unbeknownst to us, by the time we had actually finished the thing, it was a done deal. Timm and Radomski’s efforts weren’t wasted, however—their pilot sequence soon began to circulate around the animation and comics communities. DENNIS O’NEIL, Batman comics Writer and Editor: I was sitting in my office one day and these two guys from California came in and asked if they could show me something. And they put a tape on the machine, and what was on the tape was what became the opening of the TV show, the first minute or so of animated action. And I was impressed. I am not a big fan of animation and especially not of TV animation, but it looked to me like they were solving the problems I perceived. DAN RIBA, Director, Character Designer, Storyboard Artist: There was no Internet back then, [but] it went all over the world. Everybody in the industry knew somebody who knew somebody who still had a copy of this promo that was circulated! So I got a copy, like three or four generations away, from a friend, but I [thought,] “ I have to work on this! I’ve got to work on this thing!” SEAN CATHERINE DEREK, Writer, Story Editor: Let’s face it, that show looked awesome. It was awesome! Eric painting [backgrounds] on black? That had never been done! Genius! BRUCE TIMM: It kind of cemented Eric and I as being the frontrunners to actually produce the show, so that was a good calling card for us. Radomski and Timm’s efforts paid off, as MacCurdy named them producers of the 65-episode first season of Batman. The offer startled Timm, who at most was expecting to become art director of the new series. BRUCE TIMM: That was about as far as my ambition went. It didn’t even occur to me that I could possibly be offered the chance to actually be the showrunner. That was just… y’know, mega-gravy. It was an amazing opportunity and I was wise enough to not just get totally freaked out and say, “Oh, no! I can’t handle it!” I would be crazy to turn down an opportunity like that. But at the same time, yeah, it was definitely a whole lot of responsibility dumped on us out of nowhere. Yeah, it was daunting. Absolutely. H

BUILDING A CREW

Batman went into production in November of 1990 with a premiere date set for September 1992, a schedule that allowed almost no time for development of the series. BRUCE TIMM: Once the show was sold, we already had an airdate. We didn’t have any infrastructure. We didn’t have a crew, we didn’t have a story editor—nothing! Basically, when it started off it was Eric and I, and we frantically scrambled trying to assemble a crew ASAP. KEVIN ALTIERI, Director, Storyboard Artist: I was the first director hired. When I went in there, there was only a handful of people—me, Bruce, and Eric, and pretty much a couple of other people.

BTAS’ Alan Burnett, Eric Radomski, Jean MacCurdy, and Bruce Timm, circa 1992. © Warner Bros.

DAN RIBA: I got a call from Kevin going, “Hey, I’m working on a new Batman thing, do you want to join us? Bring us your portfolio, show it to Bruce.” I had been directing at DIC, but I knew how hard the show was going to be. I was getting ready to get married that year, and I’d be busy, so I didn’t feel like I could put in the hours to direct something, but storyboarding or character design was something else. I didn’t push myself as a director at that time. As Batman gained personnel, the look of the show developed further. Background designer Ted Blackman defined Gotham City’s “Dark Deco” look with buildings inspired by architect Hugh Ferris. Comic-book artists Mike Mignola and Kevin Nowlan contributed to the character designs for Mr. Freeze, Man-Bat, Killer Croc, and others on a freelance basis, and animator Lynne Naylor brought a Tex Avery-influence to the female characters such as Poison Ivy, reporter Summer Gleeson, and police officer Renee Montoya. BRUCE TIMM: We wanted to get the best possible people we could and we also had to get a pretty distinct vision of what we wanted the show to be. Just because they were doing action-adventure stuff doesn’t necessarily mean they had the right point of view that we were looking for. [It] didn’t necessarily mean that they were good to go. We had to like go, like, instantly! DAN RIBA: I was expecting to be a storyboard artist on it, but [Bruce] looked at the character designs I’d been doing and went, “Okay, this guy can draw, [and] I need character designers really bad.” So he put me to work on that. And a lot of the guys that he had on that at that time were like used to working in Saturday morning stuff, and they weren’t used to doing this new kind of streamlined approach that Bruce was doing.

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 3

KEVIN ALTIERI: The real difficulty was in the layouts, because in the character layouts, you hire people with experience in layouts, and at that time, everyone was just doing goofy, funny, wacky cartoons. If people had drawn action-adventure, they hadn’t done it for a long time. Part of the reason the early shows looked so good was that we had total control over the layouts. It was totally done in-house. DAN RIBA: [If] the layouts were outsourced, you really didn’t get to see them. If they went to Japan, we didn’t deal with layouts at all. If they went to Korea, we rarely got to see layouts, and so, we would have to do them here. Most of the guys who were having trouble with understanding the show, a lot of these older guys who did the job of the layouts, didn’t understand it. The ones that did were all the young, hungry artists that were new, but were passionate about the stuff, and eager to learn, so we had a bunch of artists, and all these new people who either ended up becoming character designers, art directors, or storyboard artists for features later on. But these older guys just didn’t quite get the show. So, directing was really tough, because you spent a lot of time at night redoing layouts. KEVIN ALTIERI: It was actually hard to find board artists at first. There were not very many people who could actually draw action-adventure stuff at that time, surprisingly. There weren’t many people that could really draw like that. And then you have people’s egos that didn’t want to draw in that Alex Toth/Dan DeCarlo style that Bruce had. People would just draw any style they wanted.

DAN RIBA: There was some guy who would look at the Bruce models and add all sorts of musculature and all these extra lines, and I told him, “Don’t do that, just draw it the way it’s done.” “Oh, you mean this… I thought he wanted it good!” [laughs] Eventually, that guy moved on to layouts. KEVIN ALTIERI: I think that was the key with all the directors that were involved… they could look at the drawings and the boards and layouts and understand what was wrong, and they could make the corrections. Being a storyboard artist, a good one, you understand all the levels of animation. You have to understand layout, you have to understand what you’re asking animators to do, and you have to understand how much money you actually have [laughs], and you can’t just draw anything. And the directors on that show, at Warner Bros., would do the boards also. I boarded on almost all the shows, but I would give myself credit only when I did a substantial chunk of the boards by myself. I don’t know many directors worth a sh*t that can’t do storyboards. BRUCE TIMM: On the one hand, we were trying to assemble an art crew and directors. We had to find good directors and good storyboard artists and BG designers and all of that, and we really needed to find somebody to be the story editor of the show. That was probably the biggest stumbling block that we had for the first year of production. As it turned out, executives at Fox had their own ideas about who else to involve with Batman. BRUCE TIMM: There was this weird kind of passive-aggressive thing coming from Fox that because Warner Bros. had done Tiny Toons with Steven Spielberg, for some reason the people at Fox thought it would be a really cool idea if we had somebody big, a stunt-casting name like Steven Spielberg attached to the Batman show. This was after the first Tim Burton Batman movie had come out, so they thought, “Wow, it would be really great if we could get Tim Burton involved with the show!” And everybody went, “Yeah, that’s a great idea,” except for Eric and I. We were just kinda going, “You know, that’s probably not going to happen, and we don’t necessarily want another creative cook in the kitchen.” So we kinda reluctantly said, “Okay, yeah, sure. Whatever.” In the meantime, somebody through backdoor channels was trying to get Tim Burton interested in it and in the meantime, Fox said, “Don’t develop the show yet until we get Tim onboard.” So we’re sitting around. We’ve already started to hire people and we can’t get going, we can’t even get the scripts developed, because they said, “Let’s wait for Tim Burton.” So literally a couple months go by, and we realize we can’t wait, so under the radar we started getting some scripts in the pipeline. At that point, I was technically the story editor because we didn’t have a story editor. So I contacted an old friend of mine named Mitch Brian to write the very first episode. Actually, he and Paul Dini and I had actually written the rough bible for the show on a freelance basis. PAUL DINI, Writer, Story Editor: I did work on the series bible with Bruce and Mitch Brian, but after that I was not around the studio much. My contract had ended and rather than resign right away, I took a movie-writing assignment. KEVIN ALTIERI: I think the bible didn’t happen on that first show, I think it kind of happened as the show progressed. But everyone there, we were all kind of in sync about the kind of Batman we wanted to do. BRUCE TIMM: So Mitch wrote the first episode [“On Leather Wings”]. And I contacted some other people and Paul contacted some people to get some scripts going [and did] a little bit of unofficial rewriting on the side as well. One of the scripts that he had got going was the “Christmas with the Joker” episode, because he was good friends with Eddie Gorodetsky, and so he contacted Eddie and they kind of both worked out that show together.

Background layout drawing for Batman: The Animated Series, courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © Warner Bros.

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SEAN CATHERINE DEREK

BRUCE TIMM: Eventually we did hire a story editor named Sean Derek. One of our executives had worked with her, I think at Hanna-Barbera in the past, and recommended her highly. Sean Catherine Derek had worked with both Jean MacCurdy and exec producer Tom Ruegger before. The daughter of Hollywood actor and director John Derek, she’d broken into animation writing for The Smurfs for six years, but still felt an affinity for superhero action due to her family background. SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: My dad did all these swashbuckling films when I was a kid and I grew up watching him on the sets, and he liked to do his own stunts whenever they’d let him. He was always sword-fighting and flying around and doing supernatural things for that, kind of a superhero guy. And I just felt like I always wanted to write that. It didn’t feel unnatural for me to make the transition. I went over, found out about Batman, and then went to Bruce and Eric and said, “Okay, you’ve got enough testosterone around here. You need a woman’s point of view.” Batman, in my opinion, is the sexiest of all the superheroes. I mean, he just is. He’s so appealing. I said, “You need the other side.” So I pitched them a bunch of ideas about what I would do, and they bought it. They bought me, and took me. BRUCE TIMM: Sean came in and… let’s just say there were creative differences pretty much from day one. DAN RIBA: The very first thing that [she] brought up to Bruce and Eric was that, “Of course, the Batcave’s going to have to have a recycling bin.” And they kind of laughed and realized, “Oh, my gosh, you’re serious!”

SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: I look back laughing. I didn’t realize it was such a big deal to ask for a recycling bin. I’d been an environmentalist from the get-go. It just seemed so incredibly obvious that we needed to do something. At Hanna-Barbera, I went to the media to get the city to pick up all the paper we were using for scripts. They didn’t want to pick it up. It wasn’t as big as NBC. I caused a huge stink and I got ’em to come and get it. Another one of Derek’s suggestions also fell on deaf ears: a pet dog for Batman and Alfred. SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: And the dog! The two things that apparently frazzled everybody. I just thought Bruce Wayne had enough dark angst, and I really thought it would be fun to give the dog to Alfred. So he’d have someone to talk to other than to himself when he did asides. I just thought… it was a kids’ show. In my mind, it was a kids’ show, and that was my big mistake. Because that wasn’t the intent!

Comic artist Kevin Nowlan’s early sketches for Penguin (who was remade into the Danny DeVito/Batman Returns look) and Man-Bat. Courtesy of Heritage. © Warner Bros. Characters TM & © DC Comics.

Derek faced a tough situation going into Batman: The show was officially in production, but still didn’t have a full-time writing staff. One prospective writer, Paul Dini, was working on Tiny Toons and was hesitant to join Batman. BRUCE TIMM: [Paul] was excited about doing the show, but at the time, he kind of fell under the magical spell of Steven Spielberg. It was realizing that the second season of Tiny Toons was going to happen, and that could be really good for his career, to be attached to that show, and to kind of get in good with Spielberg. So he was reluctant to fully jump on board the Batman show. PAUL DINI: That was mainly my own stubbornness and comfort level. With Tiny Toons, I thought, “We’re on a

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 5

Early model sheets for BTAS’ Dynamic Duo and major villains. Note the Julie Newmar-ish look originally intended for Catwoman. Courtesy of Heritage. © Warner Bros. Characters TM & © DC Comics.

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SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: He was going back and forth between the show. We didn’t have any writers on staff. That’s why I was brought on. The staff writers were for Tiny Toons and they were Ruegger’s. And most of them just did comedy. So it was tricky. That’s why I was shopping for them, as we do with all shows. That’s why I ended up writing a bunch when I started, because that was the fastest way to get the thing going. LAREN BRIGHT, Writer, Story Editor: I was working at Hanna-Barbera, where I had known Sean Derek and Barbara Simon (who was the executive in charge of the writers). Sean had been hired on at Batman—as I understand it after they tried to do the show without writers but having the scripts all done by artists, which didn’t work. There was just too much for one writer/story editor to do, so they turned over some rocks and found me. I was excited to work on Batman because I had been a huge comic-book fan when I was a kid (around the time of the invention of fire). SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: Laren came in right away. I just thought it was good to get his name on [scripts] and get him out there, get him accepted, because he also did not have an action-adventure background. LAREN BRIGHT: While I hadn’t written action-adventure cartoons, I was reading a lot of sci-fi and had the sense of how it worked. It was different, but not too troublesome. It just exercised different muscles— but the muscles were already there. RANDY ROGEL: Laren and Sean came on, [and] they were thinking of it more like it was a kiddies’ show. Brightly colored, and I don’t think Bruce and Eric were receptive to that. They said, “No, no, that’s not the show we’re thinking of.” BRUCE TIMM: Eric and I had a pretty clear vision of what we wanted the show to be and Sean seemed to be on the same page with us, but the scripts that she supervised and wrote herself just weren’t quite what we wanted, so there was a lot of tension between Eric and I and Sean, so that didn’t really work out. SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: We were all a lot younger and this was [Bruce’s] first time out. It was new territory for me, because I was not having conflict up until this point with any director or producer I’d ever worked with. Looking back, I get it. It was his baby and he was protecting it and by God, he did a great job! I was thinking that we weren’t allowed to do what he wanted to do. I thought I was protecting him from the network coming down and firing his ass. But it was not the case. It was the opposite. It’s not what I was always hearing from the network, which was interesting. I was getting one thing and he was getting another, so I think part of the conflict between he and I was the fact that I was being told one thing—that they were not happy with the violence—and then he was being told another thing. That has all come out since.

BRUCE TIMM: Fortunately, Alan Burnett became available. He was somebody that Jean had worked with a lot at Hanna-Barbera and she had early on tried to get him involved in the show, and I think initially he wasn’t terribly interested. Burnett had prior history with Batman—he’d been a writer on Super Friends in the 1980s, including the standout episode “The Fear” in the final season. The episode featured the Scarecrow discovering Batman’s fear of Crime Alley, leading to the first onscreen depiction of Batman’s origin. PAUL LEVITZ, Executive Vice President and Publisher, DC Comics: We were working on Super Friends and Jeanie [MacCurdy] and Alan [Burnett] and Jeff [Segal] and I and God knows who else were all involved in doing an episode of Super Friends that was tentatively a pilot for a Batman animated series. ALAN BURNETT, Writer, Story Editor, Producer: “The Fear” was written as a pilot for an all-new Batman series for ABC Children’s programs. They liked it, but I guess felt it was a little too dark. But they allowed me to retool it for a Galactic Guardians story. Wonder Woman’s role originally was written for Vicki Vale. The diciest part of the story was the killing of Bruce Wayne’s parents. I decided use lightning bolts to cover for the shooting. I’m sure it was the first time on Saturday morning that parents were killed in a storyline. DAN RIBA: I was stunned, because ABC, yeah, they didn’t show a gun, but they clearly… anyone who knows the story knows what happened. You could see the lump in his jacket that clearly implies he has a gun. There’s lightning and thunder that covers the gunshot, but then you see a kid alone, his parents are gone all of a sudden. You don’t see the bodies, but it’s one of those things where you see them all in the alley, BOOM CRASH BOOM, the guy comes up and threatens them with the gun in the pocket. It’s implied. That was something that, working in Saturday morning, you could never get away with stuff like that. They were really, really tough, and the fact that he was able to talk them into allowing the implication—not showing it—and actually telling the story in a way that it read, without showing it, that was amazing! PAUL LEVITZ: That’s really the genesis for Batman: The Animated Series in a lot of ways. That’s what sparked, I think, Jeanie’s passion for doing it. Burnett’s experience, storytelling chops, and feel for Batman clearly marked him as the man for the job on BTAS. PAUL LEVITZ: Alan’s then-current deal with Disney was expiring, and Jeanie called one day—we shared the same boss at that point, Sandy Reisenbach—and said, “You’ve got to help me convince Sandy to spend the money to bring Alan over to work on Batman.” I said, “Well, my pleasure to chime in on that one. He’s ideal for it.” And I think that was probably the most useful contribution I ever made to Batman: The Animated Series. BRUCE TIMM: That two-minute pilot came to our rescue again. [Jean] showed him that pilot that Eric and I had done, and Alan was pretty blown away by it. He went, “Wow! Okay, if that’s the kind of show you guys are talking about doing...” Then yeah, he was interested. So ultimately, Alan came on board.

BRUCE TIMM: We struggled with the scripts for a good long time, I don’t even know how many months, but it seemed like forever. We were kind of trapped in this world where we just couldn’t agree on the direction of the show.

SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: I found out later that Alan Burnett, who also was on The Smurfs with me as one of the story editors, was scheduled to come on as soon as his contract was over, and Jean MacCurdy was just biding time. She needed a story editor to get the show going because they had a schedule. So I was brought in, but the intention was always to put Alan in the number-one spot. And I didn’t know that at the time, but it made sense. It made sense. They were good friends, and he’s very good, and he’s done an exceptionally good job. So I just wish I had known that, because I think there would have been less conflict if I had.

DAN RIBA: Jean had this friend that she knew that went off to Disney, “This guy’s great, I love this man, he’s smart, he likes comics, I think he’s what we need, and he’s a wonderful writer.”

BRUCE TIMM: Eric and I were desperate for somebody to come in and get us out of our writer woes. We’d never worked with him. We only knew him by reputation. It was like, “Fine. Get somebody else in here and we’ll

ENTER ALAN BURNETT

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hit show. Why leave?” Working with Tom Ruegger and the great Tiny Toons team was a lot of fun, and had we done a few more seasons, I probably would have stayed simply because I knew the show so well. But even back then a syndicated cartoon show had a relatively short production life, regardless of how well it did in the ratings or how loved it was by fans. Tiny Toons was starting to morph into Animaniacs, which had different writers and a different sensibility. Still a great show, but one I could tell I was not going to mesh with easily. Same thing with Batman up to that point. The early scripts were too far afield from what I wanted to do with the character. Batman was too talky, Joker was too gaggy, and you could tell the artists were struggling to find some intensity and drama in what was looking to become a very soft show.

BTAS Bat-villains sericel. © Warner Bros. Characters TM & © DC Comics.

give it a try.” Fortunately, he hit the ground running and the first couple of scripts that he developed for us were kind of exactly what we wanted the show to be, so things were a lot smoother sailing from that point on. RANDY ROGEL: It was just a case where they brought the right guy in at the right time. PAUL LEVITZ: Alan came on board and began to build a writing staff. The combination of the writing team that he assembled and the visual team that was already there made for a wonderful piece of work. As the head writer and third producer on the series, Burnett persuaded Paul Dini to return to Batman, first as a freelancer, and then on a full-time basis. PAUL DINI: Once writer/producer Alan Burnett came on, Batman began to sound very exciting from a writer’s point of view. He really wanted me on the show and told me he and the artists were anxious to stretch action-adventure as far as they could take it. Alan was very encouraging and liked my scripts. He said I could work directly with him, writing and editing my own scripts, if I returned to Warners. It was too good to pass up. DENNIS O’NEIL: They obviously wanted to do the show and at one point they hired Marty Pasko as one of their editors. MARTIN PASKO, Writer, Story Editor: I was the story editor Alan Burnett brought in to help him “fix” it when he came aboard in spring of ’91. I was told I was hired, not just because of my samples and credit sheet, but because I also had had good, close working relationships with both the Fox guy overseeing the show, Sid Iwanter, and Denny O’Neil, who was DC’s sign-off (both of whom were, in fact, old buddies). This was key because the two story editors Bruce and Eric had brought in weren’t getting scripts approved; when I came in, I was handed a large cardboard box filled with manuscripts—outlines and teleplay drafts, with titles like (I kid you not) “Rockabye Batman”— that had been rejected by both Fox and DC Comics. PAUL LEVITZ: DC had approval rights for the series and the material. Obviously, we’re a sister company so it’s not really a matter of what the legal rights are, but our job within the company was to protect our property and that gave us certain powers of approval.

Alan Burnett’s entrance marked the beginning of the end for story editors Sean Catherine Derek and Laren Bright. Their more socially conscious take on Batman was now in the minority, and neither would return to the show after their options expired. LAREN BRIGHT: I was hired on for a year. By the end of the year I realized I wasn’t having fun for a lot of reasons. Part of it was that I prefer working on stories that have some sort of human value. My guiding principle in writing cartoons is that whatever we can inspire children to believe is what they will create in the world. While Batman was (obviously) an outstanding entertainment vehicle, the focus was on action and entertainment. But it was hard to work in pro-social stuff, and that wasn’t really supported by the decision makers. Even in silly, little-kid types of shows we could demonstrate positive values, like diversity, integrity, stuff like that. There simply wasn’t a lot of room in Batman for that. So I don’t think I was making the kind of contribution to Batman they were looking for and when my contract ended, we parted ways. RANDY ROGEL: I think Alan just said the show you want to make is different from the show I want to make, and Alan was the show runner. He took the reins, and the rest is history. SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: For me, it was a lot easier because then I was just busy in my office, writing. For me, that was easier because when you’re trying to juggle writers… I just finished out my contract and that was it. I left. And then the good news was I got to go back to Hanna-Barbera to do Captain Planet, which, to me, was just great. RANDY ROGEL: That was a great show for her. SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: If I were doing this today and I had just met Bruce, I would just be like, “You know, whatever you need, buddy. I am so there.” I just had this sense of duty to the children that they didn’t… which is probably why the show turned out well. A little bit of that did make it through, there was a little bit of heart. I mean, [Batman’s] an angst-driven character, which is why he’s so interesting. But there’s a point where it’s like, “You know what? Get over yourself!” and that’s how I felt a little bit. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Bruce!” RANDY ROGEL: I really liked Sean. And I liked Laren as well. But it just comes down to, sometimes, vision. Whose vision is going to prevail? And I think in this case, it really went the way it should have gone.

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MARTIN PASKO: What Alan’s vision was, was to make the show organic, with scripts that were tonally consistent with Bruce and Eric’s production design. And, as the politician that a supervising producer has to be, to clear up a lot of bureaucratic confusion: WBA execs and others at the studio saw it as a pre-teen kids’ show; Fox and the WBA creatives saw it as skewing older. To get it stripped in the late afternoon—in one of the post-college-classes, so-called “420 slots,” if you catch my meaning—Alan brokered a compromise that we would label it a “Tween Show,” meaning we didn’t have to dumb it down to accommodate the network’s opinion of moppets as idiots, and we would write it at the same “age-level” as the comics. This pleased DC in particular, as they’d been lobbying for the show to go in a different direction with regard to scripts, almost since the beginning. ALAN BURNETT: Those Super Friends shows were Saturday morning shows directed at 2–11-year-olds. BTAS was an afternoon show that included adult viewers, so it wasn’t strictly a kids’ show. It was also on a new network, Fox, which wanted to make a splash, so everyone in programming and broadcast standards at Fox were into helping us “push the envelope,” as they say. H

FINDING THE STORIES

BRUCE TIMM: I don’t remember concretely how many scripts that were pitched at us that got developed and then were abandoned early on. I know early on, before we had even hired Sean, we had developed a bunch of scripts with a bunch of different freelance writers that just didn’t happen. And that’s typical of any show. You get a lot of things in development and hopefully you realize early enough on that it’s not working, and you don’t have to spend too many wasted man-hours on it. SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: We had to get Fox happy with getting a lot of premises approved. It was just a matter, like with every show, you get started, you’re already late, get premises approved—and that’s what my primary goal was—and then to start writing them. MARTIN PASKO: There were over two dozen scripts in that box marked “Limbo” (TV writer jargon for a script that’s neither approved nor killed and written off; just “pending further action”). I was told they represented only a fraction of what was gonna be a 30–50K write-off unless we could salvage them. It ultimately turned out we could use only four or five of them with minimal polishing, so Alan made the executive decision that in the time it would take to do page-one rewrites on all those turds, we

would only fall further behind schedule. So WBA begrudgingly agreed to regard the cost of killing those scripts as a “cost of doing business.” ALAN BURNETT: I generally wanted to start over. We had one fairly dark script in the works that I liked quite a bit. It eventually became the first Poison Ivy story. RANDY ROGEL: The story editors could each have numerous scripts going at the same time and you need to have a unity of writing in a series. You don’t want to have episodes that are completely different in look and feel from others because then the series doesn’t have any kind of cohesion to it. So Alan’s job, and he did it very well, was to supervise the writers and make sure they understood the kinds of stories we were doing and how our characters behave. He made sure that all the stories came from the same universe of that show. MARTIN PASKO: Alan and I also made a trip to New York to scour the DC library for stories to adapt and to give Alan a crash-course in Batman lore. I was there to guide him through the past continuity and ask [Batman assistant editor] Kelley Puckett to pull certain stories for us. DENNIS O’NEIL: [They] spent days in DC’s library, just generally scarfing up 50 years’ worth of Batman stories and then sending heaps of Xeroxes back to L.A. So they were taking this very seriously. ALAN BURNETT: Marty and I sat in a room at DC in New York while Paul Levitz, the VP of DC Comics at that time and a former writer, went thru literally decades of Batman and Detective Comics beginning in mid-’50s. He had read them all and has an encyclopedic mind. I was quite impressed. PAUL LEVITZ: I had read every Batman story until that point, which not too many people had. That’s something that would be impossible if you read everything now, with more than twice as much material existing. So I had a fairly solid memory of some of the old stuff besides my own fun of reading it as a kid, as a reader. And, of course, Marty was very knowledgeable of the material as well and Burnett was an old comics fan. We probably picked the brains of some of the other people in the office as well. ALAN BURNETT: Volumes of comics would be brought down from archives, and we’d go thru them physically. Paul would give thumbnails

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on each one. It took two full days. I remember when we got to 1959 that I began to recognize the first ones I’d read. We came back from that visit with a mountain of ideas and areas to consider. MARTIN PASKO: In the course of this, without any prodding or action on my part, Alan came across some of my own Batman comics work (unexpectedly and coincidentally, as there were only a handful of stories) and expressed surprise. Privately, I just grinned and said, “I thought you knew that when you hired me.” The research paid off, as Burnett and Pasko emerged from the DC archives with more ideas and a new approach to the show. MARTIN PASKO: When Alan decided that, in terms of adaptations or villains to “reinvent,” we would cherry-pick from among what we found workable from any point in the continuity, without regard to pre-Crisis or post-, I dug up copies of Michael Fleisher’s Batman Encyclopedia that nobody at WBA had ever heard of. Once Alan got that thing into his hands, we were off to the races. ALAN BURNETT: We were interested in how the villains came to be— what twisted them up. We treated them like real people so to speak, as real as it gets in the Batman world. Burnett’s own “Two-Face” two-parter depicted Harvey Dent’s split personality bringing about his scarring accident, instead of the other way around. It was an early standout for the show. ALAN BURNETT: I always thought that Harvey should have already been a split personality before the accident, and whatever control he has over his psychosis ended when his face became disfigured. I also went to a child psychiatrist to ask about how multiple personalities were created. I thought there was some kind of sexually abusive element, which I wanted to avoid, and learned that there’s a variety of non-sexual reasons people develop these personalities. I always thought of Harvey as a rich, goody-good kid who felt guilty about a minor offense, and the guilt kept building within him like water from a dripping faucet. Out of this, a coarse and angry side of him emerged, which became the monster. The monster would castigate the good side. DAN RIBA: At that point, Bruce and Eric wanted to hold off on Two-Face as long as possible to establish Harvey Dent as a friend of Bruce Wayne, and unfortunately and fortunately, Alan came in with such a wonderful story, they went, “Oh, my gosh, we love this! We have to do it.” That idea of spending a season with Harvey Dent as a character before he was Two-Face kind of went out the window, because we had the story. They were desperate for stories that worked, and were the real Batman. So they went, “This is it. This, we have to do this.” So, the casualty was, we lost that aspect. But they were kind of desperate for a really good storyline that worked.

The teleplay for “Two-Face, Part I” was by Randy Rogel, a playwright who was new to animation but whose spec scripts caught the attention of Burnett. He ended up writing the second part on his own. RANDY ROGEL: We left it on a little bit of a cliffhanger. I went back to [Alan] and I said, “Hey, do you have an idea for the second part?” He said, “No, actually, I haven’t thought of that.” I said, “Well, I have an idea.” He said, “What is it?” I told him and he said, “I really hate that.” I said, “Well, how about this?” and gave him another idea. He said, “Oh, now that I like.” He then said, “Tell you what, how would you like to be on my staff? We’ll bring you on temporarily and see.” So I was brought on staff and had to earn my stripes. There were four story editors and they kept me running. I learned an awful lot. KEVIN ALTIERI: The first one that Alan and Randy Rogel wrote, “Two-Face, Part Two,” I can’t remember any changes that were done to that. I just thought it was the best script I’d read up to that point. The two-part “Feat of Clay” presented a Clayface who combined the best elements of the comics’ three Clayfaces, as disfigured movie actor

Matt Hagen overdosed on an experimental facial cream that gave him a shape-shifting power ideally suited to animation. MARTIN PASKO: I asked Alan if I could put aside trying to rewrite these things and break some new stories to help us get caught up. I pitched him a two-parter (to get ahead faster; one approval for the price of the two), the Clayface intro (“Feat of Clay,” a title I’m very proud of). I plotted it and wrote the outline, and got it approved. I then brought in Marv Wolfman to script Part I and Michael Reaves to script Part II—guys Alan had never worked with before. MARV WOLFMAN, Writer: I’d been writing animation for a while by then and, of course, I also wrote the [Batman] comic. Besides, the material they showed me knocked me off my feet. It was beautiful. I wrote the first one and friend and fellow animation writer Michael Reaves wrote the second while [my wife] Noel and I sailed off to Tahiti on our honeymoon. For me it meant having to write it faster than I’m comfortable with, but it worked out. MARTIN PASKO: We got it done on time and the approvals sailed through—especially when Sid and Denny saw the names on the title page (I did not take credit for the story, though now wish I did). Alan told me he told Jean MacCurdy that he wouldn’t have been able to get on schedule without that first job, and that was how my option got picked up and I was at WBA for a year and a half afterward. When Alan decided the other story editors who were there when I came in would have to be let go when their deals ended, which meant we’d need at least one extra hand with stronger action-adventure chops, I recommended Michael Reaves, and he was brought in. Michael knew and recruited some really great writers—like Joe Lansdale and Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens—who did some of our best scripts in the first season; he brought in Gerry Conway (before I could get to him); and Michael’s own “I Am The Night” was, in my opinion, one of our very, very best shows. In addition, many of BTAS’ writers adapted classic comic-book stories to the show, such as Steve Englehart’s “The Laughing Fish” or Denny O’Neil’s “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge,” which Paul Dini combined into one. PAUL DINI: It’s hard to adapt a comic directly for animation. The storytelling and pacing are different, and there might be other elements like excessive dialogue or graphic violence that don’t translate well from one medium to the other. In the case of the Batman stories we adapted, we took elements from the comic book that made a great story and reworked them to fit the pace and tone of our series. It was a matter of knowing what to cut and what to save, and what to rework, to best suit our own versions of the iconic characters. DAN RIBA: “The Laughing Fish” was a wonderful concept, and Paul came up with the perfect punch line, because the original story was part of a bigger serialized arc. To adapt it to a film story it needed a bigger resolution. For him to take the ending of “Joker’s Five-Way Revenge,” the classic Denny O’Neil story, and stick the shark in there, “Well, of course! It’s genius! Absolutely! That’s the punctuation! That’s what you need!” He basically took the ending of one, popped it on the other, and now you have a show. RANDY ROGEL: Remember, you’re moving into a new medium. You can’t just take a comic book and plop it on the screen, you have to adapt it. In doing that, your obligation is to always ask yourself, not what is just the best story to tell, but also what is the best way to tell that story. Several comic-book writers ended up writing for BTAS, often translating their own comic stories to the television medium. Dennis O’Neil adapted his classic Ra’s al Ghul stories into the two-parter “The Demon’s Quest.” KEVIN ALTIERI: That one was like… I’d been waiting all my life since I read the Neal Adams comic. Ra’s al Ghul was so cool, I was like, his beautiful daughter Talia, it was like just one of my favorite things, and Denny O’Neil was just at the height of his powers writing that. So I get this script, I get a rough draft of the script that’s written by

10 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

Denny O’Neil, and I said, “We got Denny O’Neil to write an adaptation of his own thing!” DENNIS O’NEIL: I thought, “Okay, I’ve got me a 22-page comic book and the TV show’s about 20 minutes. This is going to be a piece of cake.” And I found that if I had done my comic-book story literally, I would have run out of material before that 20-minute mark. So, trying to be a reasonably disciplined professional, my job became to invent new scenes that looked like they were part of the original. KEVIN ALTIERI: It was a great script, and then I get a second draft, where all this stuff is just changed! I just went to Bruce and Alan Burnett and went, “Do you know what? I’m just going to use Denny’s script. It’s going to be great, and it’s a phenomenal script.” There were changes that were made to it, like, “No, no, you wouldn’t have an envelope delivered to Wayne Manor, it would be a fax machine,” something like that would be the argument in all this. “Nope, it’s on a piece of paper, you’re going to pull out a photograph, it’s the first time you’re going to see Batman take off the cowl and it’s Bruce Wayne.” Bruce Wayne’s still in the outfit, the Batman outfit. There was that image that, ever since… I always wanted to draw it, now I can, and I have a script that takes that away from me. I don’t want Batman looking at a fax machine! [laughs] Elliot S. Maggin adapted his story “The Cape and Cowl Deathtrap!” from Detective Comics #450 (Aug. 1975) into “The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy.” ELLIOT S. MAGGIN, Writer: Doing that story was my idea. I thought it would be a nice departure from the supervillain-of-the-week approach of all the other episodes. The producers agreed. I thought it would be good to have an adversary of my own device. The real challenge was writing to a new medium at all. The plot and my familiarity actually made the work easier. It was a kick writing on assignment to that form for the first time. On subsequent comic-book scripts— whose format is not a prescribed one—I even incorporated some elements from the preferred animation script presentation. Mike W. Barr had a very unpleasant experience with the show, finding his original pitch for “Paging the Crime Doctor” assigned to other writers after weeks of unreturned calls to story editor Marty Pasko. MIKE W. BARR, Writer: My original premise had all the characteristics of a good Batman story: a strong plot, a lot of action, character work between Batman and Robin, and a deathtrap for Batman. In the BTAS issue of Cinefantastique, one of the producers was quoted as saying they called this episode “the geezer show” because most of its cast was older than 25. This is the mentality I was dealing with. The only remaining part of my original story were the last five words of the episode. The series is a very sore spot because, besides the difficulties over “Paging the Crime Doctor,” the producers adapted a number of my stories without credit, and

These and other Batman and Detective Comics stories published by DC Comics inspired stories or story elements in some BTAS episodes. TM & © DC Comics.

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RANDY ROGEL: I’m sorry Mike feels his story wasn’t realized. That does happen. It’s a collaborative process. I do remember Marty would do extensive rewrites. That was his story-editing style. But that’s his prerogative as the story editor. If he’s not happy with it, then his job is to fix it. I do remember Marty would get a little more hands-on on some of those episodes. It’s funny, they were two different styles. Marty was really an animated character, flailing and making his point, and Michael [Reaves] was Mr. Zen. Calm, calm. Alan was the vision of that show. He was also the mediator. You know, Bruce Timm and Eric, they had a lot to say, but they would always take Alan’s counsel. Alan was the Godfather. If there was arguing or fighting, Alan could always step in and he would always have something intelligent to say. He’s a terrific writer. Alan can instinctively sense what’s right and wrong with a story. The Batman animated series would not be what it is were it not for him. MARTIN PASKO: To the point of my being an aggressive rewriter, I can only say that my job as a story editor was to get the script approved by the network, so we could stay on schedule. And if that meant I had to break an egg or two to make an omelette, that was my job. When writers become accustomed to seeing their writing intact in the finished product, it’s a bit of a shock when they see themselves heavily rewritten in TV. Some guys get used to it and get over themselves for the sake of the paycheck, as I had to do; some don’t. And how they call it, and what they do about it, is their own business—it’s their right. H

DEFENDING THE VISION

Another early standout was the Emmy-winning “Heart of Ice” (written by a still-freelancing Paul Dini) that re-imagined Mr. Freeze as a heartbroken scientist who considered himself dead to emotion after the death of his cryogenically-frozen wife. The episode was directed by Bruce Timm. BRUCE TIMM: It was 65 episodes so we had three in-house storyboard units working non-stop, and we were falling behind schedule even with that. So at a certain point, production decided that we needed to pick up the pace, so Eric and I both had to direct a handful of episodes ourselves. It was just a matter of trying to get back on schedule. I just had to squeeze those hours into the day. PAUL LEVITZ: The show was empowered by the fact that the unusual structure of the deal with Fox allowed them to invest in the show far more heavily than animated television had done for many years at that point. So they were burning money right and left doing two and three redos to get a scene perfect. While Timm and Radomski were young, first-time producers, they both had definite ideas about what made a great cartoon. Consequently, the BTAS directors and storyboard artists could take an

aggressive approach to reworking scripts, which caused conflicts with some of the writers. DAN RIBA: For the most part, those guys were tearing down scripts, because of over-description. It was an issue with some of the writers, where they would overwrite things, and the directors and board artists had to go, “We’ve got to cut, because it’s too much.” And we also want to create a show that has a visual snap to it, and move. Writers weren’t used to writing like that. They were writing stage plays, and they didn’t really understand that if you stopwatch an episode and you get to 22 minutes… “Look, it’s all under 22 minutes.” “Yeah, but it’s 22 minutes of dialogue! [laughs] That means it’s going to be a 40-minute show! You can’t do that!” So we had some of the writers that were still doing that, and didn’t quite understand. So they didn’t respect the changes that would be made in the voice. I feel kind of regretful, but they were people who in interviews would talk about, “Oh, we were told to write the scripts really short so the storyboard artists could vamp.” It’s not vamping, it’s an action show! You need to have room for action, you need to have room for mood. They didn’t get that. So, there was a little bit of tension there between artists and writers. Fortunately, this was worked out by the time I got to direct later in the series, so I didn’t really have to deal with that kind of problem. ANDREA ROMANO, Voice Director: What Bruce wanted to do was give his animators a lot of freedom to create those fight scenes themselves, so that it was not locked in by the writer as to exactly when certain things would happen. He wanted to let the animators also have some sense of ownership of these episodes so that they could say, “That’s my fight scene! I created that fight scene. That was not written. I made that happen.” KEVIN ALTIERI: There were scripts like “Feat of Clay,” I just didn’t want that script, it wasn’t the action and stuff, I just didn’t like what happened. I do remember that the writers were not happy with me at all in that one, because we really for the sake of the animation and the sake of the action, me and Mike Goguen, we just boarded completely different stuff from what was in the script. We basically kept the dialogue, just trying to make it doable for animation. We were also trying to make it more interesting. And then there was stuff like “Avatar.” Bruce and I just totally changed that one. That whole opening, with the Peter Cushing lookalike character? Totally invented by us. Storyboard artist and character designer Dan Riba got an opportunity to move up to directing when one of BTAS’s directors left the show unexpectedly. He soon became one of the series’ most prolific directors. DAN RIBA: About a year into the show, Dick Sebast got offered a job for HannaBarbera, and he decided to take it. So there was a vacancy, and Kevin was like, “You know, Dan has directed at DIC, he can do this.” And Bruce, he liked me, so he said, “All right, let’s give it a shot,” and they were very supportive, and very helpful. Dick left in the middle of “Zatanna,” so the board was mostly done, but not quite, so it needed to be finished. I helped finish it, and did some notes, did some revisions, finished the board, got it out, and so I got credit for co-directing it, because I helped finish it.

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Sericel courtesy of Heritage. © Warner Bros. TM & © DC Comics.

without notifying DC, so it was very difficult for me to get paid for their use. One of these was the later episode “Never Fear,” the premise of which was taken from the script for “Fear for $ale” from Detective Comics #571 (Feb. 1987).

BTAS’ voice cast. (seated) Diane Pershing (Poison Ivy), Arleen Sorkin (Harley Quinn). (center) Mark Hamill (Joker), Paul Williams (Penguin). (standing) Aron Kincaid (Killer Croc), Richard Moll (Two-Face), Kevin Conroy (Batman/Bruce Wayne). © Warner Bros.

VOICE CASTING

At the same time the Batman team was trying to get scripts up to par, voice casting was underway. For the voice casting and direction, Timm and Radomski turned to Andrea Romano. Romano had been an on-staff casting director for Hanna-Barbera for five and a half years before becoming a freelance director for Warner Bros. Animation in 1989. Among her successes for the company were Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, and Pinky and the Brain. BRUCE TIMM: She had done the Tiny Toons show, so she was already kind of in the Warner Bros. pipeline and Tom Ruegger had a really good working relationship with Andrea, so he suggested that we work with her. ANDREA ROMANO: I think it might have just been a lucky accident for me. I don’t think Bruce knew of that many other voice directors in town and I was already on-site, directing and working on projects that he was perfectly aware of. BRUCE TIMM: We didn’t really know any better. We didn’t have anybody else in our heads. We said, “Okay. Well, yeah. She did a great job on Tiny Toons. Let’s use her.” I was probably a little bit nervous, because Tiny Toons had such a different style to it with the vocals. So it was a little bit of a gamble. I’d never worked with Andrea and I had no idea what she’d do on a straight dramatic show, but she was great from day one, so that was a big plus. ANDREA ROMANO: What I liked about it, having come from an acting background myself, was that this was going to require a different kind of voice acting. This was going to require much more of a concentration on the actual acting, as opposed to the ability to do multiple voices. We were not really that concerned with getting multiple voices out of the actors for Batman: The Animated Series. We wanted, first and foremost, number one, good actors. And then, if we got the benefit of actors who could do multiple voices, that was gravy. KEVIN CONROY, Batman/Bruce Wayne: They really wanted to get a more film noir feel to the show, so they decided to expand past the usual stable of animation voiceover actors. ANDREA ROMANO: We started reaching out to actors who had theater experience. And what we learned was, actors who have theater experience have a better understanding of the energy required for voice acting, because it’s slightly boosted energy. If you work on camera, on film and TV, you can act very small, because the camera catches everything. When you act on stage, you have to act more broadly to get a broad performance, and that’s the type of performance that we need for animation. At that point I was quite comfortable with reaching out to not the rank and file. BRUCE TIMM: I don’t even remember how long our total casting process lasted. It was a good couple weeks, at least. The two hardest parts to cast were the Joker and Batman himself. Almost everybody else we pretty much got them nailed down pretty early on, but Batman was really tough. We probably auditioned a hundred different people. And probably nearly the same number for the Joker. ANDREA ROMANO: I think at the time I was dealing with about 15 different agencies. And we were casting a lot of roles. There was Batman, Alfred, Robin, Commissioner Gordon, Harvey Bullock, Catwoman… a lot of characters that we were intending to be major characters throughout the series. So I sent out to 15 agents and we

were casting a minimum of 12 characters. I’d tell them, “Audition as many actors as you want to, but only send me the top ten submissions from your agency.” So let’s do the math. We have 15 agencies and just for the character of Batman, we are allowing the agents to do ten. So right then and there, that’s about 150. So, ultimately I listened to over 500 auditions just for the role of Batman himself. I called back, I believe, as many as 120 actors, and auditioned 120 actors for Batman, with Bruce in the room. BRUCE TIMM: If we didn’t get Batman right, then the show was doomed. So yeah, we were despairing. We literally had not heard a single person playing Batman that was even close. ANDREA ROMANO: Bruce and I had narrowed it down to probably five or six, maybe seven, actors that we said... the feeling was they could do it. If we couldn’t find anybody better, we could probably live with one of those five or six actors. And they were all very good actors and good contenders, but nobody made our jaws drop. BRUCE TIMM: Usually when you’re casting a show, you’ll end up with your top five picks and you’ll have to choose between them. We didn’t have a single decent Batman. Not one. So yeah, it was pretty scary. KEVIN CONROY: They were looking at everybody! They cast the net even wider, which is why I got in there. They were looking at people who’d never done any animation at that point. ANDREA ROMANO: As we were getting ready for the last round of callbacks, I spoke with one of my roommates who was either an on-camera agent at the time, or was an on-camera casting director at the time. His name’s Anthony Barnao and is still a dear friend of mine. I said, “Anthony, do you know anybody that I should see for this?” He said, “You know what? There’s a wonderful actor with a great voice that I’m aware of who’s been on a couple of soap operas and he’s got a lot of stage experience and he’s a Julliard-trained actor. His name is Kevin Conroy, and he might be horrible for your project, he might not understand animation at all, or he might be great and you might be able to get an audition out of him.” KEVIN CONROY: After [graduation], I went into the theater in New York. I worked for Joe Papp at the Public Theater. I did some Broadway, Off-Broadway. I was primarily a theater actor. But, you know, theater doesn’t pay! You can’t really make a living at it, so a lot of theater people in New York do voiceover and commercial work during the day to supplement their theater work at night. So that’s where I started doing voiceover work, in commercials. And then I moved to L.A. to do a series. And my voiceover agent said, “Look, they’re doing

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a new animated series for Warner Bros. You’ve never done an animated series. Why don’t you give it a shot? It’s Batman.” While Conroy had heard of Batman and had watched some episodes of the 1960s show with Adam West, he was largely ignorant of the character. He hadn’t even seen the 1989 Batman movie with Michael Keaton.

Courtesy of animator Lancelot Falk and appearing in print for the first time, a 1991 Batman gag done for Lance by Bruce Timm. Batman TM & © DC Comics.

KEVIN CONROY: I didn’t even read comic books as a kid, really, ’cause I went to very traditional Catholic schools and all that stuff was very frowned upon, so I came late to it all. Which was probably the strongest thing I had going for me. I had no preconceptions at all. So I went in to meet Bruce Timm and Paul Dini and Andrea Romano. And I was so naive to it all I didn’t even realize who I was meeting. I didn’t know that these were like the wunderkind of animation, you know? This was a really impressive group of people and I had no clue. And Bruce Timm asked, “What is your background on Batman?” and I said, “Well, I don’t have one. I know the Adam West show…” and he went, “No, no! That’s not the direction we’re going! Erase that! Erase that memory!” Despite being new to Batman, Conroy had his eye on one part in particular—police detective Harvey Bullock.

KEVIN CONROY: Whenever I tell that at comic-cons, everyone howls and they’re thinking, “What an idiot!” I was saying, “Why don’t you let me do a character…” ’Cause actors always want to do things that are farther from them. You want to do character roles! You want to stretch! Everyone wants to stretch. And then Andrea said, “Kevin, you will be in every show as Batman. Do you get it? Every show!” But I didn’t know it was going to go on for 25 years. I thought this was something that was going to be for a season! I just wanted to get the most interesting role, and the heroes are not usually the most interesting roles. Ultimately, Conroy was convinced to read for Batman/ Bruce Wayne… and Timm and Romano instantly knew that they had found their Dark Knight. ANDREA ROMANO: Bruce and I did have one of those jaw-dropping moments. That “Eureka!” moment! Bruce and I all but leaped up from our chairs and hugged each other. We were so happy that we had found exactly what we were looking for! BRUCE TIMM: This guy that none of us ever heard of came walking in and nailed it the minute he opened his mouth. I was like, “Ho! Okay, we’re done!” So that was serendipity. KEVIN CONROY: It was totally a fluke! It was a one-ina-million shot and I was just so lucky to have been in that booth that day and made that choice. A lot of people don’t realize how much of acting is about choices. There’s a dozen different ways to play a character. You can play the same scene and make it tragic or make it comic. It’s all about choices! And the director usually guides you in the choices he wants you to make, because he has a vision for how he wants the show to work, but when it’s a new show and new characters, they don’t really know what they’re looking for. I was just lucky that one day that I made that choice, and it led to 25 years of work. That’s amazing. ANDREA ROMANO: It began a very long love affair among Bruce, Kevin, and myself, and the entire production crew on that project. It was just dreamy. KEVIN CONROY: I think I’ve kind of fallen in love with the character over time. I really grew to love his sense of morality, his sense of dignity, his really… no gray zone between black and white, between good and evil. He’s so pure in that way. It would be so hard for any of us to achieve that in our daily lives. He’s a wonderful character to play and he’s a great character to have been associated with in any way. Although he was not versed in comic books or animation, Conroy didn’t look down on what some might consider low-brow source material. KEVIN CONROY: I had done soap operas in New York, so I learned a long time ago not to look down on any aspect of the business. It’s all legitimate. I certainly didn’t understand how serious it was and how important it was socially. I did think of it as an extra job that I was doing on the side. And as I got more involved in it, I realized, “Wow. This is an iconic character. This is like Hamlet! This is Orestes.” I grew to understand, playing the role over time, that animation in our culture is what the myths were to the Greeks and the Romans. The way they taught morality to their young people was by telling those

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stories, those myths of the great warriors, Orestes or Agamemnon; all those stories were ways of teaching morality. ANDREA ROMANO: He saw it as Hamlet! Which is such a great analogy. This is a man whose father/parents have been murdered, he’s all about vengeance and truth and finding out what really happened. And I thought, you know, for a Julliard-trained actor, that makes total sense that that would be the way that he approached the character. KEVIN CONROY: I just put myself in the place of this young man who’s grown up an orphan having watched his parents brutally murdered in front of him, raised in wealth but almost like a prisoner in that house, and then vowing to avenge their deaths and live his life to this moral code. I just went to this dark place and this husky sound and that’s what came out. Using two different voices was my idea because I thought… being new to the whole game, I thought, “Wait a minute. This guy is the wealthiest man in Gotham. He owns the biggest house on the hill. He’s the handsomest guy. Every woman wants him! And… he puts on a mask and no one knows it’s him? Seriously? That’s ridiculous!” I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if the disguise was a little more complete? Let’s alter the voice a little bit.” So they went with me on that. They thought it was a good idea. I used David Niven as my mental prototype [for Bruce Wayne]. I made him very, very ironic. He was very ironic and very kind of WASP-y. There was a lot of humor to it and there was a real lightness to him. A great counterpoint to the darkness of Batman. But when they saw it after it had been animated and they saw how dark the palate of the show was, and the stories were, they said, “It’s just too jarring. It’s like he’s in a different show. It’s too light.” They said, “We like the idea of the different sound. Just bring it closer to your own voice. Just bring it down. Just tone it down some.” So I went and I re-recorded… I think it was like four episodes or five episodes. And I just toned it down. ANDREA ROMANO: You’ll notice when you watch the series that the first few episodes were still a little bit broader than what we ultimately moved into. It took me several episodes, several weeks, to get into the groove, to get into Bruce’s mindset. Once footage started coming back in, that’s when I got better at my job, when I got better at casting the right characters, casting the right voices for the series, and getting the right kinds of performances for the series. H

RECASTING ALFRED

BRUCE TIMM: Clive Revill was our first Alfred, and he left to go do summer stock. So he was suddenly just unavailable to us for many, many, many, many months. ANDREA ROMANO: It was stage work, which was his first love. And we had recorded I think two or three episodes with him. We had no advanced warning. Probably I called to book Clive for the next episode and the agent responded with, “Ohhh, I was just going to call you. He just got this [other job] and he’s leaving.”

A rare photo-comic appearance by BTAS’ Alfred, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., on this 77 Sunset Strip issue of Dell’s Four Color (#1211, from 1961). But did you know that the show’s young star, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, inspired the JLA’s hipster hanger-on, Snapper Carr? © Warner Bros.

think that you’re shoving an actor down their throat. We gave them five or six choices and we did that for every character. So we went back to that list of five or six choices for Alfred, and our second choice had been Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. BRUCE TIMM: And that was again, just great. Good fortune on our part. I mean, Clive was great. He was fine. Nothing bad about him at all. But Efrem had just such a presence and such a warmth to him, that he was, ultimately I think, a much better Alfred for us. ANDREA ROMANO: We reached out to him and explained the situation to him exactly. And he was so delighted to come and play with us and actually not insulted that he had been the second choice. And anyway, he was only the second choice because Clive was genuinely British, and so the accent came more naturally to him. But acting-wise, they both were comparable actors. SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: One of the biggest things for me was they cast Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. to be Alfred. He was a dear friend of my father’s! And also I used to grow up watching his TV show, 77 Sunset Strip. It was just unbelievable to be the story editor at the time when he came in to do the first recording, to be able to put words in his mouth! I was so proud! So that was one of the highlights for me, as bizarre as that is. It was just so cool! RANDY ROGEL: Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.… what a great, cool guy to work with. Lot of great stories he could tell. A true gentleman. Think of Alfred, that’s him. He carried a lot of authority and class. And gentility. Very gentle, well-mannered.

Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., best known for The F.B.I. and 77 Sunset Strip, had been the second choice for the role of Alfred. More recently, he had been playing Don Alejandro de la Vega, the father of Don Diego, on the first season of the Family Channel’s Zorro series.

KEVIN CONROY: Oh, God. What a wonderful man! Such a gentleman. He was really an old-school Hollywood actor. He always came in impeccably dressed, ready to work, very professional. He was very generous with me. The nicest man. I had such a wonderful relationship with him. We had a father/ son kind of ethos in the room between us, which was great ’cause it fit the roles. And I also was friends with Stephanie, his daughter, at Julliard. She was just a year behind me, so I knew her. So I had a little exposure to the family. But working with Efrem was really a privilege.

ANDREA ROMANO: When it comes down to the end of the casting procedure, you have a network sign off on the casting. You typically like to submit multiple choices because you don’t want the network to

ANDREA ROMANO: What a wonderful actor, what a wonderful human being. Truly one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. His fame did not touch him in any kind of negative way. I adored the man.

BRUCE TIMM: We decided at that point to recast, and that’s when we found Efrem.

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(top) Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy in a recent photo, courtesy of Kevin Conroy. The voice of Batman invites BI’s readers to follow him on Twitter at @RealKevinConroy and at his website, www.realkevinconroy. com. (bottom) From the book Batman Animated, an early Joker rough by Timm, from 1990. Joker TM & © DC Comics.

EXIT CURRY, ENTER HAMILL

Another member of the original Batman cast also proved to be very short-lived: Tim Curry, whose interpretation of the Joker received a mixed reaction among the crew. ANDREA ROMANO: This was very, very hard for me, because I loved what Tim Curry was doing. I loved Tim Curry. He was lovely! He was so great and I loved working with him. And he was so generous with his stories, his Rocky Horror stories and his music video stories. Just great! So when I did the initial casting for the Joker and he was the top choice, I was delighted! BRUCE TIMM: I think what Tim was doing was very, very interesting. It didn’t seem terribly organic to us. A lot of his line readings were just… they felt almost nonsequitur. They were just really weird and quirky but without really any deep meaning behind them. Again, not to knock him, because I’m a huge fan. Still am. But it didn’t seem—and it sounds weird to say this about the Joker—but it didn’t sound natural. It didn’t sound organic. Specifically, his laugh. It never really sounded like he was genuinely amused by anything. It just sounded like this weird, odd laugh. So that was the main thing. ANDREA ROMANO: Then a new producer was brought on board and he just didn’t like what Tim was doing. So I brought Tim back several times because I really don’t ever like to replace actors and I certainly don’t like to ever replace celebrity actors. And because I really didn’t mind what Tim was doing. BRUCE TIMM: It was Alan Burnett who kind of forced the issue. I was already kind of on the fence about Tim as the Joker anyway, but Alan was the one who made an issue out of it. He came to me one day and said, “You know, I think we have to replace Tim.” And I didn’t want to, just because I knew it was going to be a really tricky situation to do, but I couldn’t disagree with him, so… ANDREA ROMANO: I really, really wanted to fight for Tim to save the role. So I called him back two, three times I think, with that producer in the room and Bruce in the room. We did a couple of different versions and played with the voice and see if there was some way I could save this job, but ultimately I just could not please the producer. So I had to recast the role, which was heartbreaking for me. Literally, literally heartbreaking. Now, we’re dealing with several levels of complication, which is, we’re recasting a celebrity. Tim Curry was a known entity. I’ve got to find somebody of equal stature to kind of fill out that role because that’s a really choice role! I have to find someone who is a really good actor and can do the really kind of bizarre, strange, unusual twists that we want from this kind of Joker. Thankfully, a celebrity who proved to be an unexpected yet perfect choice for the Clown Prince of Crime had just recently done the show. Having heard about the new Batman cartoon in the works, Star Wars star and comicbook fan Mark Hamill had his agents submit him for a guest-starring role. Romano cast Hamill as Ferris Boyle in “Heart of Ice.” ANDREA ROMANO: [Boyle] was an executive who turns out to be the bad guy. I also gave Mark a secondary role. And he was lovely! Absolutely fantastic! We had a great time at that session. He totally understood the energy. He could rattle off ridiculous bits of minutiae—trivia— about the Batman world and this version of Batman and this version and this artist and this artist and… I mean,

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BRUCE TIMM: Part of the difficulty of replacing Tim in mid-stream [was] that we had already recorded and shipped overseas I think like the first three or four episodes with Tim. But whoever we ended up casting as the new Joker needed to not only be a really good actor, but needed to do good ADR [Automated Dialogue Replacement]. ANDREA ROMANO: I had to find an actor who could do ADR and do voice replacement, matching the mouth flaps of Tim Curry! So this was going to be an actor who could bring his own twist to the Joker but do that within the confines of Tim Curry’s rhythms, ’cause we were stuck with those mouth flaps. BRUCE TIMM: That’s something that a lot of actors just aren’t good at. So Mark’s audition literally was to picture. At that point, we’d gotten back I think the first Joker episode. The first couple. So everybody on our second round of auditions, they had to audition to the picture and actually had to match Tim’s mouth flaps and give us a new performance. So, pretty tricky! ANDREA ROMANO: And Mark was… stunning! Head and shoulders better than any of the other actors that came in. BRUCE TIMM: Fortunately for us, Mark was a) really good at ADR and b) terrific at giving us a new “organic” Joker that was just exactly what we wanted. So it was all good. ANDREA ROMANO: I believe Bruce Timm and I are the only two people who have a half-inch videotape of an episode of Batman, it is not mixed, it’s a really rough cut, with Tim Curry as the Joker. I think he and I are the only two who have a copy of that. For a long time, I was the only one that had it and then Bruce asked to borrow it and made a copy for himself because he was doing some speaking engagement somewhere and wanted to play it. So that’s kind of a really cool prized possession of mine. H

GUEST VOICES

In the spirit of collaboration, Romano was open to casting recommendations from others on the BTAS team. ANDREA ROMANO: It wasn’t like I said, “You guys give me all your suggestions,” but if somebody had a really strong feeling and wanted to express that they would really like this actor, I was quite open to that. It was very collaborative, “Let’s brainstorm this together, let’s talk about who we think,” and we may end up with four or five actors that are appropriate for the role and then we would list them in order as to what order we would like to approach them. DAN RIBA: The only time that I actually recommended anybody was a show that wasn’t even mine. It was when they were doing the Gray Ghost, and I remember Bruce coming into the office while we were designing stuff, and he said, “Oh, and we’re getting Gary Owens to do the voice of the Gray Ghost.” I said, “That’s good, but you know, it would be kind of neat if it were Adam West!” And he was like, “Yes!” And he walked out of the room, and it became Adam West! [laughs] And the funny thing is, Bruce probably has no recollection of this at all. He probably thinks it was his idea, and that’s okay. It’s his show. KEVIN CONROY: I was so nervous the day [West] came in to do the Gray Ghost, you know? Because you’re kind of treading in someone else’s territory. He couldn’t have been more gracious! He, like Efrem, is from that old Hollywood school of just classy gentlemen. He’s dignified; he’s respectful of other actors. He’s a class act. Adam West is just a class act. That’s how I would describe him. And I loved working with him.

KEVIN ALTIERI: With Ra’s al Ghul, [Andrea] was like, “You have any ideas for actors?” “Yeah! Patrick Stewart!” “No, we can’t get Patrick Stewart.” So I was listening to books on tape, and Michael York was doing a book on tape of Caesar’s Women, by Colleen McCollough. I thought immediately he’d do the vocal. So I said, “Hey, how about Michael York!” And she said, “Okay,” and she got him, and she went, “I got a better idea... how about David Warner?” “Even better!” Michael York ended up doing Count Vertigo, which is the first time we meet Talia, and see Ra’s al Ghul. ANDREA ROMANO: That happens all the time, that kind of thing. You just go, “You know, he’d be better at this role than this one,” or we would move him around this way. I really want this to be a collaborative effort. Every single project that I work on, I want everybody to feel like they can throw their ideas out, good, bad, or indifferent. It was a very highly collaborative experience and what it also allowed for was things like Kevin Conroy or Mark Hamill, or somebody— anybody, really!—to say, “I want to pitch you an idea for this scene. What would happen if I played it as if I have a chip on my shoulder for the whole thing?” “Let’s try it!” And then we would run through it. So it really made for everybody having a sense of being a part of the process, not just being a tool or just being a voice that I, the director, manipulate. Rather, everybody is an active participant. And I think that’s what helped make the series so great, is that everybody felt like they had kind of a controlling interest in the project. What was so cool about Bruce Timm was watching him occasionally bring in artists to recording sessions to say, “Watch that actor when he performs that scene. That’s what I want the animation to look like. That’s the facial expression. That’s physical movement I want from that character.” [One time] we were directing an actor in a scene and the actor was just not getting it. I was trying to describe it and the script described it very well but the actor just wasn’t grasping it. Bruce said, “Hold on just one second,” and sketched out the fastest drawing and stuck it up against the glass between us and the actor and the actor looked at it and went, “Got it!” And it was spot-on! Absolutely spot-on. All he needed was that physical drawing to tell him what the expression was going to be on the face of the character and he got it. He totally understood it. Those little gems of moments are because Bruce was a really willing participant in this process. RANDY ROGEL: Richard Moll… he just blew me away. He came in, and he’s this funny guy, I’m thinking he’s a comedy guy, and then when I had all that tragic stuff going on, he would just deliver it. ANDREA ROMANO: There’s only a handful of actors that I wanted to work with that I didn’t get to that have since passed. And one of them is Christopher Lee. I wanted so badly to use him. I thought he would have made a great Ra’s al Ghul. He would have been wonderful but for whatever reason, I couldn’t make that happen. It would have been so great. The other problem with that, too, was that Ra’s showed up often, so to try to get Christopher Lee that often would have been really, really difficult. David Warner, I adore! I love him so much and I love what he did with Ra’s al Ghul. I was very sad when he chose to relocate back to London, but we were lucky to get him for as long as we did. History repeated itself as, just like the Adam West show of the 1960s, Batman once again became an “in” show to do. KEVIN CONROY: Word got out very quickly that there was this very high-quality show being done so… I think Andrea Romano’s job became easier because everyone wanted to be in this show. ANDREA ROMANO: Everybody wanted to be on the project, every actor in Los Angeles knew about the project. Every voiceover actor, every on-camera actor. Everybody knew and asked to come and read, either through an agent or reached out to me directly or however they got through, to come and be a part. KEVIN CONROY: Before he started working on Law and Order, Ice-T came on and was doing a voice. I said, “You’re a rapper! What are you doing here?” He said, “Are you kidding? My kids are going to go crazy when they hear my voice on this show! Everybody wants to be on this show!”

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it was remarkable. He was also very generous with his stories about Star Wars and Broadway work and all of that. So at the end of the session he pulls me aside and says, “Andrea, thank you so much for this gig! I had such a good time but what I want to really verbalize to you is… I want to be a part of this series. I just don’t want to come in and do a guest here and there. I really want to be a part of this project! And now, having experienced a session, I really want to be a part of this creative process.”

Another neverbefore-published Timm piece from the collection of Lance Falk, illustrated in 1991, before BTAS aired. Batman and Joker TM & © DC Comics.

TOO DARK FOR TV?

RANDY ROGEL: I remember one of the artists, she did all the ink and paint, before the show came out, she’s saying, “I’m thinking this is going to be too dark!” Visually. Not dark in terms of story, but people aren’t able to see what’s going on! BRUCE TIMM: We had to retake some shots because it was literally really, really dark characters on really, really dark backgrounds and you couldn’t tell what was going on, so we’d have a certain amount of retakes. We didn’t want to do a show that was just black-onblack-on-black. That was one of the things that Eric and I both were in total agreement early on. It was a weird kind of unwritten rule in animation—especially for TV animation—that you could not actually use true black anywhere. For some reason it looked dull on TV. That’s what everybody always said. “Oh, yeah, it just looks dull. You have to use a really, really dark blue or a dark brown or something. You don’t actually use true black,” which just seemed ridiculous to me. We could never figure that out. So that’s kind of why Eric started his first early BG experiments with actually starting with black paper and adding color to it. If you look at classic cinematography, that’s the sweet spot is when it’s so dark, that it’s almost too dark. I think that’s what Gordon Willis was quoted as saying one time: That’s when you know you’re right in that magic zone—you push it so dark that it’s almost too hard to see, but just barely. As we were doing the telecine [video transfer] on one of our first episodes, the operator said, “You know this show is actually illegal.” “Whaddaya mean, it’s illegal?” “Yeah, the show’s too dark.” It had to be within a certain technical range to be airable in the United States.” “Oh, okay. So what does that mean?” “That means we have to artificially boost the luminance level a little bit.” “Well, okay. Just make sure it still looks cool.” So they had to do a little bit of fine tuning on it, but yeah, we were actually told that our show was too dark to be legally shown in the United States, which was just hilarious to us.

BS&P

Although BTAS successfully pushed the envelope in many areas, they still had to deal with a necessary obstacle before going on air: Broadcast Standards & Practices. BRUCE TIMM: Here’s the thing: I don’t want to make it seem like they were the bad guys. Because clearly their job was to make sure that they didn’t warp kids or start an angry protest from parents groups or whatever, or be sued. So, they basically did what they’re supposed to do, you know? And at the same time, in retrospect, they allowed us to do a lot of things other shows probably would not have gotten away with, because of the prestige of the show. PAUL DINI: There were little things here and there—don’t show impact punches to the face, not so much gunplay, things like that. Usually we policed ourselves pretty well. Also, we would look for more creative ways to indicate tragic action, like the death of Robin’s parents. We never see them fall; the broken trapeze rope just swings back into view. Your imagination fills in the rest and that’s vivid enough. RANDY ROGEL: Sometimes what you don’t show is just as effective as what you do show. You can find clever ways without actually showing

Catwoman and Batman tell BS&P to kiss off in this undated hilarious Timm toon. Courtesy of Heritage. Batman and Catwoman TM & © DC Comics.

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Batman bemoans an Emmy loss in this Bruce Timm toon. (inset) The highly recommended graphic novel Dark Night: A True Batman Story by Paul Dini and Eduardo Risso tells the story of Dini’s assault and recovery. Tiny Toons © Warner Bros. Dark Night © Paul Dini and Eduardo Risso. Batman and Joker TM & © DC Comics.

the violence that will be just as horrible or impactful to the audience. You’ve just got to be smart about it. SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: One of my favorite things that happened on the show… the irony of this is just incredible. I wanted to get Catwoman to be more on the fence. That you really loved-to-hate-her kind of thing. So I have this great scene where they’re having a big fight the first time they’re meeting and she’s gonna die and he grabs her and they end up in an embrace, okay? So I have them kiss. It goes to the network, comes back. no kissing! Not allowed. I thought that was the most absurd thing in the history of any note I’d ever gotten and everybody at Warners did, too. So the next day there are all these drawings. All the artists drew all these hysterically funny pictures of the two of them kissing. One of ’em… I think Eric drew it, or maybe it was Kevin, had their tongues coming out each other’s ears. [It was Bruce—see previous page—ed.] This stuff was hysterical and brilliant and everybody was, like, “Okay, we can shoot ’em, we can kill ’em, but we can’t kiss ’em.” PAUL DINI: One incident I do recall was in “Harley’s Holiday.” After Harley was released from Arkham, she’s shown rollerskating down the street with her hyenas as frightened people jump out of their way. Originally, when Harley paused to look at her reflection in a store window, I had the hyenas wander over a baby carriage, stick their muzzles in, and start munching. The gag was Harley was obsessing so much over what she was wearing that she never noticed that her pets were gobbling up a kid. The payoff was when Harley called the hyenas away, we showed they were just drinking milk out of the baby’s bottle and the kid was okay. Still, the censor thought it was too gruesome a setup, so it was cut. BRUCE TIMM: I definitely had some heated exchanges with the BS&P people, because sometimes I thought they were just being ridiculous… but for the most part, it’s all good. They never ruined the show. Any time they came down with an edict, that we had to figure out a creative way to work around it, and it usually ended up being for the better. So it was never, “Oh, they wouldn’t allow us to make the show we wanted to do because it was a kids’ show.” It just forced us to be more creative in some aspects. So ultimately, it was all good. Batman premiered on Fox Kids on Saturday, September 5, 1992, with the first part of “The Cat and the Claw.” Its regular weekday afternoon airings began the next Monday with “Heart of Ice.” ANDREA ROMANO: It didn’t take long for us all to realize that we made something really special and there was no way that people weren’t going to respond to this. They would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to not respond to what it was that we were making. It was quality! It was action! It was energy! It was wonderful! It was all those things! RANDY ROGEL: It quickly took off. That show, the day it went on the air, it was a hit. Instantly, on a major network. We got people in their 20s; we got all the teenagers—in other words, the demographic from Batman skewed so much higher than Warner Bros. had ever thought. I remember listening to Howard Stern, and he was going on about Batman: The Animated Series, and how he’d lock everybody out so he could sit there and watch it. “Wow, Howard Stern’s watching Batman: The Animated Series?” So it was kind of a delight to me to see it really appeal to an older crowd, not just the younger crowd.

EMMY AWARD-WINNING

A big event for the writers of BTAS came on May 26, 1993 when the episode “Heart of Ice” won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing in an Animated Program at the 20th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards. Story editors Paul Dini, Martin Pasko, Michael Reaves, and Sean Catherine Derek accepted the award. PAUL DINI: “Heart of Ice” was the episode we submitted as a gauge of writing for the entire series. It felt incredibly good to win, though. My dad was with me that night and he was very proud, so that made it special. It also happened some months after I had been attacked and worked my way through that experience, so that was nice affirmation of a sort. [Author’s note: The story of Dini’s recovery from his assault can be found in his DC Comics graphic novel Batman: Dark Night.] SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: One of the highlights of the Emmys was the night that I won—with the boys—and it was considered by most of the art side of Batman that the show would win and the writing was unimportant. It was the look of the show that was what made it a hit, not the writing. So, of course, that year the show did not win. The writing won. We were so proud of ourselves. [laughs] As usual, Tom Ruegger won the Emmy [for Tiny Toons] that year, and we were thrilled for him and thrilled for us. It put to rest the concept that nobody was watching the show for the stories, they were watching it for the look. Well, apparently the people on the Emmys were watching it for both reasons! We were affirmed as special, you know. It was really good. We could no longer be taken for the second citizens on the show. [laughs] Not that the boys treated Paul Dini or any of those guys like second citizens, but you know. It was just very exciting for us. And then, of course, the show won later. A brief primetime run from December 1992 through March of 1993 qualified the show to compete at the 45th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards in September, where BTAS won the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program for the episode “Robin’s Reckoning, Part I,” written by Randy Rogel and directed by Dick Sebast. PAUL DINI: That Primetime award was given for an individual episode, and not for the entire series. Of course, I was incredibly happy the show won and was thrilled for Randy Rogel and Alan Burnett. RANDY ROGEL: I remember it was the first Emmy of the night, and they said, “And for Best Animated Series…” and they show the little clips up there, I was sitting with Jean MacCurdy, Bruce Timm, Alan Burnett, and our partners and all that, and they said, “Batman: The Animated Series!” So it was like, Holy cow! And my wife looked at me and she said, “Hey, you just won an Emmy!” And it was a Primetime Emmy, so we went up. So that was kind of a magical night. We since went on to win others. But that was the

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cool one, because that was the Primetime Emmy. And it really set Batman off, because this was the first year of Batman. It was a brandnew show. It wasn’t like, “Oh, we got nominated and lost three times, and now the fourth time, we get it.” It was just right out of the gate, and we won the Primetime Emmy. So that really helped the studio in marketing it. It gave some awareness to the show. H

NEW EPISODES AND MASK OF THE PHANTASM

By the time the show won the Emmy, Fox had ordered a second season of 20 additional episodes. Production continued much as before, with one difference. Hoping to increase the series’ kid appeal, Fox requested Robin to be in every episode—and BTAS’ title was changed to The Adventures of Batman and Robin to reflect the change. In addition to new episodes, a spinoff of BTAS was greenlit. The movie Batman: Mask of the Phantasm was originally intended as a direct-to-video release, but Warner executives were so impressed with what they were seeing that it was upgraded to a theatrical release. PAUL DINI: We had to work on Phantasm while breaking stories for a new order of episodes. I’m sure it was doubly hard on the board artists, directors, and designers. Still, it was a lot of fun, even if the deadlines were tight. We all loved the show and felt we were doing something we’d be proud of years later. However, comic writer Mike W. Barr found the story of Mask of the Phantasm a bit too close for comfort to his own Batman: Year Two. MIKE W. BARR: When I was searching for Pasko when he wasn’t returning my calls, I dropped by the offices of the BTAS staff twice. I never found Pasko, but each time I dropped by I saw a guy—a different guy each time—industriously typing away, with a copy of Batman: Year Two open beside him. That was when I first became aware of their use of Year Two. When I began to see character sketches on the “Phantasm” character, I immediately approached Paul Levitz, claiming the story and characters I created were being used without payment. Paul at first gave very little credence to my claims until I told him, “I really want to keep this in the family.” I was then given a share in the profits of Mask of the Phantasm and in the Phantasm character itself. By the way, the name “Phantasm” was first used for a DC character in the “Dial ‘H’ for Hero” feature in Adventure Comics #485 (Sept. 1981), credited to a Sixto Miguel. I have no idea if Sixto Miguel was paid any compensation. I have just seen an announcement that Funko will release a “Phantasm” figure. I was told it wasn’t possible to give me and Alan Davis a credit on the cartoon. I have no idea if this is true. H

SUB-ZERO

In 1997, a second direct-to-video spinoff, Sub-Zero, was produced in conjunction with the live-action feature Batman and Robin. The feature was co-produced by Randy Rogel and Boyd Kirkland. RANDY ROGEL: Boyd Kirkland was one of the directors, a very fine director. They were trying to make a deal with him to stay on to do a couple more seasons of Batman. So in that deal, he said, “Well, I want to do a Batman movie, direct to video.” They gave him that deal. Boyd wasn’t really a writer, but he had a real great sense of story. He came to me, he said, “Hey, I want to do this thing. Would you want to write it?” I said, “Well, what’s the story?” He said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Okay,” and we sat down together. The reason WB was motivated at that time is that there was a new Batman movie coming out. You have to understand that in those days, Batman movies were Warner Bros. Studio’s biggest investment every two years. Those movies were hundreds of millions of dollars. The studio does not mess around. They’re very serious about those kinds of movies. So they thought, “Well, let’s get a companion piece to it, too, the animated series, and we’ll release it at the same time.” So you get the animated movie, you get the big movie, and they make a killing, right?

(top) The poster announcing BTAS’ primetime premiere. (bottom) BTAS on the big screen: Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Poster courtesy of Heritage.

Knowing that Bane would be featured in the Batman and Robin film, Rogel and Kirkland devised a story with Bane as an unstoppable Terminator-like villain, along with a subplot exploring Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon’s romance. RANDY ROGEL: So we wrote this terrific script. I mean, I really loved this story. And there was this lovely B-plot going on between Dick Grayson and Barbara. Bruce asks Dick, “Does she know? You’re going to tell her the truth about yourself. It wouldn’t be fair to her. She has to know you’re going out and fighting crime at night and you might get yourself killed.” So that was all building underneath.

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And somewhere in the middle of all that we got called over to Warner Home Video. I remember this meeting very well. They said, “Hey, the studio just signed Arnold Schwarzenegger to do the Batman movie, and he’s going to play Mr. Freeze, so that’s who we want the villain to be.” I said, “We already wrote it with Bane.” One of the other guys in the room said, “Well, can’t you just use your word processor, and where it says ‘Bane’ just switch it with ‘Mr. Freeze’?” I looked at him and said, “It doesn’t work that way. He’s a completely different villain.” I shook my head, “Never mind, we’ll just write a new script.” Rogel and Kirkland wrote a new script with Mr. Freeze as the antagonist, keeping the Dick and Barbara subplot. Originally planned to be a simultaneous release with 1997’s Batman and Robin, the home video release of Sub-Zero ended up being delayed until March 17, 1998. RANDY ROGEL: [laughs] I can tell you why it was delayed. We were excited, it was all set, we even had a preview showing on the lot that was packed out. Everyone said, “Yeah, great, great!” But then we get a call from Warner Home Video. They said Warner Bros is going to delay the video release of your film. I asked why. They said because the Batman and Robin live action movie was not going well and the studio was getting nervous. They don’t want any confusion in the marketplace between the two films. I said, “But theirs is live-action. Ours is animated.” He snapped at me and said, “Your film is not getting released right now and that’s it! I don’t want any sh*t, okay? If your film comes out and takes any money away from the bigger-budget movie, it will definitely be a problem, especially if the live-action movie gets bad reviews.” That’s why our release date was delayed. I kind of understand the studio’s position. They own both properties, they go, “What’s the smart move here?” They’ve got a big investment. They say, “Let’s pull back here. Let’s not do anything that can upset the release of this major motion picture.” And if I was in their shoes, I’d have done exactly the same thing. BRUCE TIMM: The one story point that always kind of sticks in my craw is that they brought Mr. Freeze’s wife back to life. That’s something that I never would have done, because in my head, she was dead. She wasn’t just like, preserved and on ice, she wasn’t like, in suspended animation. She was dead! So to be bringing her back to life, even though they did it for poignant reasons… it kind of made sense in the story they were telling, but it was—well, that’s kind of like Mr. Freeze’s whole thing, is that his wife is dead. He froze emotionally because of it and everything. Well, now, if she’s back to life, it’s like, “Well, now what is he?” So that was weird. But I wasn’t asked to be involved with that project so I didn’t get to say my two cents’ about it and fine. Whatever. But it did make it tricky when we went back and did The New Batman Adventures. Now we had to deal with Mr. Freeze differently because they ended up doing something in Sub-Zero that we didn’t have any control over. For instance, in the “Holiday Knights” episode, we really wanted to do that Mr. Freeze story that we had done in the comics. And we couldn’t, because the whole point of that story was that Nora Fries was dead, you know, and, well, no, she’s not dead anymore, so that story is no longer canon.

WB REVAMP

In 1997, when Fox’s five-year contract to air BTAS was up, the series switched to the Kids’ WB network. Utilizing what they’d learned on the 1996 Superman: The Animated Series cartoon, Bruce Timm and new art director Glen Murakami took the opportunity to redesign all the Batman characters in a sleeker, more streamlined look. Story-wise, the creators moved the Batman series forward in time, with Dick Grayson becoming Nightwing and street kid Tim Drake becoming the new Robin. In addition, Batgirl Barbara Gordon became a full-time partner to the Dark Knight. BRUCE TIMM: When the WB suggested that they might want to do more new Batman episodes, they did specifically request that we do something— they didn’t say what—some way to kind of rebrand the show. They said they wanted to make it very clear that this was not just more episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. So this fortunately was kind of right in line with what they wanted to do. So besides the fact that we brought in Batgirl on a regular basis… we pretty much had either Batgirl and/ or Nightwing and/or the new Robin, Tim Drake, in every single episode. They really thought that would be a really good kind of way to help increase their kid audience. And we liked the idea anyway. We just thought it would kinda be fun to do. So it started off as kind of a lark, but also kind of right in line with the Kids’ WB wanted us to do. H

UNTOLD STORIES

Even in as successful and long-running of a show as Batman: The Animated Series, there were stories that, for one reason or another, didn’t end up happening. KEVIN ALTIERI: I always wanted to do Batman versus Dracula. BRUCE TIMM: The one that’s kind of the famous one is the female vampire story. At that time, vampires were just absolutely forbidden in children’s programming. For whatever reason, they just said, “Vampires are off-limits. You cannot do vampires.” There was a character that Doug Moench had created for the comics, named Nocturna. I don’t think that she was actually a vampire, but she was definitely a vampire type. I really wanted to do something with that character. I don’t remember which writer I was just kind of banging ideas around with, I don’t know if it was Paul or Alan or whoever, but I kind of came up with a quick rough sketch for a Batman/ vampire story with Nocturna. Alan verbally pitched it to Fox, and they just said, “Nope. What else you got?” Just literally, flat-out “No.” So… okay. “Well, what if it was…?” We came up with all kinds of rationalizations. And they said, “Nope. Flat-out no. No vampires. You can’t do it.” So that was it. It wasn’t like “Oh, The Great Unmade Episode.” We just kind of had a notion. We didn’t actually have the whole story worked out or anything. But at the same time, we were kinda like, “Aw, that’s disappointing.”

The revamped Bat-cast, as seen in this Warner Bros. limited collectors’ cel, Gotham’s Finest. Signed by Bruce Timm. Courtesy of Heritage. © Warner Bros. Characters TM & © DC Comics.

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From the collection of animator Lance Falk, a 1992 Batman illo by Bruce Timm. TM & © DC Comics.

KEVIN ALTIERI: There’s so many characters that I would’ve liked to have done. That’s just a bottomless pit. I’m like, “Hey, I’d love to do Enemy Ace.” I don’t know how we could change it to make it work. I don’t know how we’d get Batman in. Sgt. Rock, the Haunted Tank… we hammered out the story of how to get Jonah Hex there because of Ra’s al Ghul! ALAN BURNETT: [There was] a story about the history of the gun that killed Bruce’s parents that again was too strong. H

THE LEGACY OF BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES

BRUCE TIMM: There’s a lot to be proud of. Here’s a weird thing— I haven’t watched an episode of BTAS in probably ten years now. It’s been a long time. I don’t make a habit of going back and rewatching them. But my memory of it is... I’m hoping they still hold up. People tell me they do, which I’m grateful to hear. It certainly had a big impact on a lot of people’s perception of superheroes. I can’t tell you how many people, every time I go to a convention—people in their early 30s and older—are constantly telling me Batman was their gateway show to the whole world of comic books and superheroes, which is really awesome. RANDY ROGEL: Eric went on to other studios doing other things, but Bruce Timm has stayed at Warner Bros., and I think he’s pretty much a legend now. I think just as there was a Chuck Jones era, people will look back at the Bruce Timm era of the superhero stuff. He’s a brilliant, brilliant artist. Bruce is just an unbelievable talent to me.

KEVIN CONROY: After the 100th episode was recorded, Warner Bros. took out a full two-page ad in Variety to thank everyone who had been involved in the show and they listed every actor who had been in the show. My God! It was like a Who’s Who of the Screen Actors Guild. When you looked at the number of people who had been involved with the show over the years—whatever it was—it was amazing. ANDREA ROMANO: I remember watching the episode “Perchance to Dream” and I finished watching the episode, and I called the staff into my office, I sat them down, and I said, “You have to watch this episode with me,” and I played them the whole episode. You could see in their faces how impressed they were with it and I remember saying to them, “We will all be lucky if we ever get to work on another project as good as this. In our entire careers, we will be lucky if we ever get to work on a project as good as this!” JOHN TRUMBULL has been a fan of Batman: The Animated Series since it premiered, and is currently working on a book about the history of the DC Animated Universe. Thanks to Kevin Altieri, Mike W. Barr, Norm Breyfogle, Laren Bright, Alan Burnett, Kevin Conroy, Gerry Conway, Sean Catherine Derek, Paul Dini, Chuck Dixon, Mark Evanier, Paul Levitz, Dennis O’Neil, Martin Pasko, Dan Riba, Randy Rogel, Andrea Romano, Bruce Timm, and Marv Wolfman for all their assistance with this article.

DENNIS O’NEIL: It was the best transference of comic-book materials to another medium. With the way the show turned out, I was completely happy. SEAN CATHERINE DEREK: When you work for a group like that and you’re writing, and you know that these are unbelievable artists and directors, it is such an amazing feeling to know that—and it’s very rare today—because God knows where it’s going to be animated anymore. I mean, it used to be we knew who was doing what. But that was one of the great joys, knowing that whatever I wrote, it was going to come out looking better than my mind could even imagine it, ’cause these guys were the best. 22 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

PAUL DINI: I had an idea for a Sandman story that never happened, though I did depict it in my book Dark Night, so fans did get a sense of what it would have been like. There was a fun Black Canary/Catwoman story we wanted to do, but the network really wanted to see more Robin episodes, and since there was no place for Robin in that one story, they torpedoed the premise. I really wanted to do a story about Poison Ivy enslaving Swamp Thing and forcing him to fight Batman, but the rights to Swamp Thing were tied up elsewhere at that time. I was able to eventually do a version of that story in Justice League Action.

BTAS VOICE CAST

h n Tr u m b u l l

Michael Ansara (Mr. Freeze/ Victor Fries) Edward Asner (Roland Daggett) Adrienne Barbeau (Catwoman/ Selina Kyle) Jeff Glen Bennett (The Creeper/ Jack Ryder) Lloyd Bochner (Mayor Hamilton Hill) Jeffrey Combs (The Scarecrow, 1997–1999) Kevin Conroy (Batman/Bruce Wayne) Robert Costanzo (Det. Harvey Bullock) Mari Devon (Summer Gleeson) George Dzundza (Ventriloquist/ Scarface) Brooks Gardner (Killer Croc, 1997–1999) Melissa Gilbert-Brinkman (Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, 1992–1995) John Glover (The Riddler/ Edward Nygma) Mark Hamill (The Joker) Bob Hastings (Commissioner Gordon) Marilu Henner (Veronica Vreeland) Aron Kincaid (Killer Croc, 1992–1995) Loren Lester (Robin/Dick Grayson/ Nightwing) Roddy McDowall (The Mad Hatter/ Jervis Tetch) Richard Moll (Two-Face/Harvey Dent) Diana Muldaur (Leslie Thompkins) Ingrid Oliu (Renee Montoya, 1992–1994) Ron Perlman (Clayface/Matt Hagen) Diane Pershing (Poison Ivy/ Pamela Isley) Brock Peters (Lucius Fox, 1992–1995) Henry Polic II (Scarecrow, 1992–1995) Liane Schirmer (Renee Montoya, 1994–1999) Henry Silva (Bane) Marc Singer (Man-Bat/Kirk Langstrom) Helen Slater (Talia) Arleen Sorkin (Harley Quinn/ Harleen Quinzel) Tara Strong (Charendoff) (Batgirl/ Barbara Gordon, 1997–1999) Matthew Valencia (Robin/Tim Drake, 1997–1999) John Vernon (Rupert Thorne) David Warner (Ra’s al Ghul) Paul Williams (The Penguin) Mel Winkler (Lucius Fox, 1997–1999) Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (Alfred Pennyworth)

BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES

Episode 1: “On Leather Wings” (Airdate: 9/6/92) Synopsis: Batman is accused of thefts committed by a bizarre Man-Bat. Guest-stars: Clive Revill (Alfred), René Auberjonois (Dr. March), Pat Musick (Female Lab Technician), Meredith MacRae (Francine) Writer: Mitch Brian Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Spectrum Episode 2: “Christmas with the Joker” (Airdate: 11/13/92) Synopsis: The Joker kidnaps Commissioner Gordon, Harvey Bullock, and Summer Gleeson on Christmas. Guest-star: Clive Revill (Alfred) Writer: Eddie Gorodetsky Director: Kent Butterworth Animation: AKOM Episode 3: “Nothing to Fear” (Airdate: 9/15/92) Synopsis: The Scarecrow debuts, trying to get revenge on the University that fired him. Guest-stars: Clive Revill (Alfred), Kevin McCarthy (Dr. Long), Richard Moll (Computer) Writers: Henry T. Gilroy, Sean Catherine Derek Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Dong Yang Episode 4: “The Last Laugh” (Airdate: 9/22/92) Synopsis: On April Fool’s Day, the Joker laces a garbage barge wit laughing gas, creating havoc throughout Gotham City. Guest-stars: Pat Fraley (Jest), Richard Moll (Computer) Writer: Carl Swenson Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: AKOM Episode 5: “Pretty Poison” (Airdate: 9/14/92) Synopsis: Harvey Dent is poisoned by his new fiancée, Pamela Isley.

Guest-stars: Melissa Manchester, Neil Ross (Additional Voices) Story: Paul Dini, Michael Reaves Teleplay: Tom Ruegger Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Sunrise Episode 6: “The Underdwellers” (Airdate: 10/21/92) Synopsis: Batman discovers a band of children living in the Gotham sewers committing crimes at the behest of the Sewer King. Guest-stars: Victoria Carrol (Matron), Michael Pataki (Sewer King) Story: Tom Ruegger Teleplay: Jules Dennis, Richard Mueller Director: Frank Paur Animation: Studio Junio Episode 7: “P.O.V.” (Airdate: 9/18/92) Synopsis: Det. Bullock, Officer Montoya, and Officer Wilkes all give conflicting accounts of an encounter with Batman. Guest-stars: Robbie Benson (Wilkes), John Considine (Hackle), Ron Perlman (Driller), Marc Tubert (Scarface) Story: Mitch Brian Teleplay: Sean Catherine Derek, Laren Bright Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Spectrum Episode 8: “The Forgotten” (Airdate: 10/8/92) Synopsis: Batman loses his memory while investigating the kidnappings of Gotham’s homeless population. Guest-stars: Lorin Dreyfuss (Salvo), Dorian Harewood (Dan Riley), George Murdock (Boss Biggis), Ian Patrick Williams (Ivan), Richard Moll (Computer), Jay Thomas (Guard I) Writers: Jules Dennis, Richard Mueller, and Sean Catherine Derek Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Dong Yang, Noa Animation

Episode 9: “Be a Clown” (Airdate: 9/16/92) Synopsis: The Joker takes Mayor Hill’s young son Jordan under his wing. Guest-stars: Jim Cummings (Real Jenko), Justin Shenkarow (Jordan Hill) Writers: Ted Pedersen, Steve Hayes Director: Frank Paur Animation: AKOM Episode 10: “Two-Face” (Airdate: 9/25/92) Synopsis: Blackmailed by Rupert Thorne, Gotham D.A. Harvey Dent is transformed into Two-Face. Guest-stars: Murphy Cross (Grace), Bob Doqui (Doctor), Matt Landers (Frankie), Diane Michelle (Candace), Linda Gary (Dr. Nora Crest), Marc Tubert (Carlos) Story: Alan Burnett Teleplay: Randy Rogel Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: TMS Episode 11: “Two-Face, Part II” (Airdate: 9/28/92) Synopsis: Rupert Thorne works to find a way to stop Two-Face’s attacks on his operations. Guest-stars: Murphy Cross (Grace), Bob Doqui (Doobie), Micky Dolenz (Min, Max), Matt Landers (Frankie), Diane Michelle (Candace) Writer: Randy Rogel Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Dong Yang Episode 12: “It’s Never Too Late” (Airdate: 9/10/92) Synopsis: Aging mobster Arthur Stromwell faces the consequences of his life of crime as Batman tries to prevent a gang war between Stromwell and Boss Rupert Thorne.

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 23

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Guest-stars: Townsend Coleman (Chick), Paul Dooley (Father Michael), Jeff Doucette (Gabe), Linda Gary (Constance Blaine) Katherine Helmond (Connie), Peter Jason (Mason), Alan Roberts (Young Arnie), Eugene Roche (Stromwell), Josh Weiner (Michael) Story: Tom Ruegger Teleplay: Garin Wolf Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Spectrum Episode 13: “I’ve Got Batman in My Basement” (Airdate: 9/30/92) Synopsis: An injured Batman is protected from the Penguin by some neighborhood children. Guest-stars: Matthew Brooks (Sherman), Adam Carl (Nick), Lindsey Crouse (Mrs. Grant), Richard Gilliland (Frank), Denise Marco (Roberta), Rob Paulsen (Jay) Writers: Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell Director: Frank Paur Animation: Dong Yang Episode 14: “Heart of Ice” (Airdate: 9/7/92) Synopsis: Batman encounters Mr. Freeze, a freeze gun-wielding scientist who considers himself dead to emotion since the death of his wife. Guest-stars: Mark Hamill (Ferris Boyle), Michael Bell, Robert David Hall, John Mariano (Additional Voices) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Bruce W. Timm Animation: Spectrum

Episode 15: “The Cat and the Claw” (Airdate: 9/5/92) Synopsis: Batman meets the Catwoman, a cat burglar working to save a mountain lion preserve outside of Gotham City. Guest-stars: Herb Edelman (Stern), Kate Mulgrew (Red Claw), Mary McDonald Lewis (Maven), Neil Ross, Frank Welker (Additional Voices) Story: Sean Catherine Derek, Laren Bright Teleplay: Jules Dennis, Richard Mueller Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Sunrise, Noa Animation Episode 16: “The Cat and the Claw, Part II” (Airdate: 9/12/92) Synopsis: Batman and Catwoman battle the terrorist Red Claw. Guest-stars: Mary McDonald Lewis (Maven), Kate Mulgrew (Red Claw), Herb Edelman (Stern), Steve McGowan, Neil Ross, Frank Welker (Additional Voices) Story: Sean Catherine Derek, Laren Bright Teleplay: Jules Dennis, Richard Mueller Director: Dick Sebast Animation: AKOM, Noa Animation

Episode 17: “See No Evil” (Airdate: 2/24/93) Synopsis: Batman combats Lloyd Ventrix, a thief who’s stolen a suit that gives its wearer invisibility. Guest-stars: Dick Erdman (Elliot), Danny Goldman (Sam Giddell), Michael Gross (Lloyd Ventrix), Ken Howard (Hartness), Elizabeth Moss (Kimmy), Chuck Olson (Security Guard), Jean Smart (Helen) Writer: Martin Pasko Director: Dan Riba Animation: Dong Yang, Spectrum Episode 18: “Beware the Gray Ghost” (Airdate: 11/4/92) Synopsis: Batman teams up with the actor who played his childhood hero, the Gray Ghost, in order to take down a mad bomber. Guest-stars: Joe Leahy (Narrator), Bruce W. Timm (Ted Dymer), Adam West (Simon Trent/Gray Ghost) Story: Dennis O’Flaherty, Tom Ruegger Teleplay: Garin Wolf, Tom Ruegger Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Spectrum Episode 19: “Prophecy of Doom” (Airdate: 10/6/92) Synopsis: Batman tangles with Nostromos, a fraudulent psychic who’s bilking Gotham’s elite out of millions. Guest-stars: Michael Des Barres (Nostromos), Aron Kincaid (Lucas), Heather Locklear (Lisa), William Windom (Ethan) Story: Dennis Marks Teleplay: Sean Catherine Derek Director: Frank Paur Animation: AKOM Episode 20: “Feat of Clay” (Airdate: 9/8/92) Synopsis: Disfigured actor Matt Hagen is transformed into Clayface when he’s given an overdose of a restorative formula manufactured by Roland Daggett. Guest-stars: Ed Begley Jr. (Germs), Dick Gautier (Teddy), Scott Valentine (Bell) Story: Marv Wolfman, Michael Reaves Teleplay: Marv Wolfman Director: Dick Sebast Animation: AKOM Episode 21: “Feat of Clay, Part II” (Airdate: 9/9/92) Synopsis: Batman tries to prevent Clayface from taking revenge against Roland Daggett. Guest-stars: Ed Begley, Jr. (Germs), Dick Gautier (Teddy) Story: Marv Wolfman, Michael Reaves Teleplay: Michael Reaves Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: TMS Episode 22: “Joker’s Favor” (Airdate: 9/11/92) Synopsis: Motorist Charlie Collins becomes embroiled in one of

the Joker’s schemes after an unlucky encounter on the road. Guest-stars: Ed Begley, Jr. (Charlie Collins) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Dong Yang, Noa Animation Episode 23: “Vendetta” (Airdate: 10/5/92) Synopsis: Harvey Bullock is framed by Killer Croc to settle an old score. Guest-stars: None Writer: Michael Reaves Director: Frank Paur Animation: Spectrum Episode 24: “Fear of Victory” (Airdate: 9/29/92) Synopsis: The Scarecrow returns, fixing sporting events by dosing star players with his fear toxin. Guest-stars: Brian Mitchell (Brian), Chuck Moshontz (Boseman), Tim Curry, Laurie Johnson, Tom Williams (Additional Voices) Writer: Samuel Warren Joseph Director: Dick Sebast Animation: TMS Episode 25: “The Clock King” (Airdate: 9/21/92) Synopsis: Clock King Temple Fugate tries to take revenge on Mayor Hill for ruining his life. Guest-stars: Jeff Bennett (Office Boy), Alan Rachins (Temple Fugate/The Clock King) Writer: David Wise Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Sunrise Episode 26: “Appointment in Crime Alley” (Airdate: 9/17/92) Synopsis: Batman journeys to Crime Alley for his yearly meeting with Leslie Thompkins— just as Roland Daggett is planning to blow up several buildings in the area. Guest-stars: Angel Harper (Woman), David L. Lander (Nitro), Bob Ridgely (Madman), Alexander Simmons (Girl), Jeffrey Tambor (Crocker) Writer: Gerry Conway Based Upon: “There is No Hope in Crime Alley!” by Denny O’Neil – Detective Comics #457 (Mar. 1976) Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Dong Yang Episode 27: “Mad as a Hatter” (Airdate: 10/12/92) Synopsis: Unrequited love drives Wayne Enterprises scientist Jervis Tetch to become the mindcontrolling Mad Hatter. Guest-stars: Steve Bullen (Police Dispatcher), David Haskell (Billy), Kimmy Robertson (Alice), Loretta Swit (Marcia Cates) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Frank Paur Animation: AKOM, Noa Animation

Episode 28: “Dreams in Darkness” (Airdate: 11/3/92) Synopsis: A hallucinating Batman is imprisoned in Arkham Asylum when he’s infected by the Scarecrow’s fear toxin. Guest-stars: Richard Dysart (Dr. Bartholomew), Takayo Fischer (Dr. Wu), Ron Taylor (Orderly) Writers: Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens Director: Dick Sebast Animation: Studio Junio Episode 29: “Eternal Youth” (Airdate: 9/23/92) Synopsis: Poison Ivy returns with a scheme taking revenge on polluting industrialists through her health spa. Guest-stars: Julie Brown (Lily), Paddy Edwards (Maggie Page), Lynne Marie Stewart (Violet) Writer: Beth Bornstein Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Sunrise Episode 30: “Perchance to Dream” (Airdate: 10/19/92) Synopsis: Bruce Wayne finds himself in a dream world where his parents are alive, he’s engaged to Selina Kyle—and someone else is Batman. Guest-stars: Brian Cummings (Reporter) Story: Laren Bright, Michael Reaves Teleplay: Joe R. Lansdale Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Noa Animation, Dong Yang Episode 31: “The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy” (Airdate: 10/14/92) Synopsis: Freelance criminal Josiah Wormwood is challenged to steal Batman’s cowl. Guest-stars: Bud Cort (Josiah Wormwood), John Rhys-Davies (Wacklaw Jozek), Gaille Heidemann (Matron), Mark Taylor (McWhirter) Writer: Elliot S. Maggin Based Upon: “The Cape and Cowl Deathtrap” by Elliot S. Maggin – Detective Comics #450 (Aug. 1975) Director: Frank Paur Animation: Dong Yang Episode 32: “Robin’s Reckoning” (Airdate: 2/7/93) Synopsis: Robin’s origin is revealed when he discovers that the killer of his parents is back in Gotham City. Guest-stars: Paul Eiding (Dolan), Eugene Roche (Stromwell), Joey Simmrin (Robin-Age 10), Thomas Wilson (Zucco), Ed Gilbert, Brion James, Diane Pershing, Roger Rose (Additional Voices) Writer: Randy Rogel Director: Dick Sebast Animation: Spectrum Episode 33: “Robin’s Reckoning, Part II” (Airdate: 2/14/93) Synopsis: As flashbacks continue Robin’s origin, Batman tries to stop

24 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

Robin from taking revenge on Tony Zucco. Guest-stars: Rebecca Gilchrist (Chi-Chi), Linda Gary (Berty), Charles Howerton (Lennie), Joey Simmrin (Dick Grayson-Age 9), Lionel Mark Smith (Bus Driver), Thomas Wilson (Zucco) Writer: Randy Rogel Director: Dick Sebast Animation: Spectrum, Dong Yang Episode 34: “The Laughing Fish” (Airdate: 1/10/93) Synopsis: The Joker returns with his strangest scheme yet—infecting Gotham’s fish with his trademark Joker venom to claim the copyright. Guest-stars: George Dzundza (G. Carl Francis) Writer: Paul Dini Based Upon: “The Laughing Fish!” and “Sign of the Joker!” by Steve Englehart – Detective Comics #475– 476 (Feb.–Apr. 1978), “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge” by Denny O’Neil – Batman #251 (Sept. 1973) Director: Bruce W. Timm Animation: Spectrum, Dong Yang Episode 35: “Night of the Ninja” (Airdate: 10/26/92) Synopsis: Martial arts master Kyodai Ken arrives in Gotham City seeking revenge against his former rival Bruce Wayne. Guest-stars: Chao-Li Chi (Yoru), Robert Ito (Kyodai Ken/The Ninja), Buster Jones (Night Manager) Writer: Steve Perry Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Dong Yang Episode 36: “Cat Scratch Fever” (Airdate: 11/5/92) Synopsis: Catwoman’s cat Isis is kidnapped as part of a plan by Roland Daggett to infect the cats of Gotham City with a deadly virus. Guest-stars: Virginia Capers (Judge), Denny Dillon (Jessy), Mary McDonald-Lewis (Maven), Danny Mann (Radio DJ), Frank Welker (Isis), Treat Williams (Milo) Story: Sean Catherine Derek Teleplay: Buzz Dixon Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: AKOM Episode 37: “The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne” (Airdate: 10/29/92) Synopsis: Dr. Hugo Strange discovers Batman’s secret identity and tries to auction it off to the highest bidder. Guest-stars: Ray Buktenica (Hugo Strange), Carmen Zapata (Judge Maria Vargas) Story: David Wise Teleplay: Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens Based Upon: “The Dead Yet Live” and “I am the Batman!” by Steve Englehart – Detective Comics #471–472 (July–Sept. 1977) Director: Frank Paur Animation: AKOM

Episode 38: “Heart of Steel” (Airdate: 11/16/92) Synopsis: When Wayne Enterprises is robbed by a robot, Batman follows the clues to scientist Karl Rossum and his artificial intelligence computer H.A.R.D.A.C. Guest-stars: Jeff Bennett (H.A.R.D.A.C.), Leslie Easterbrook (Randa), William Sanderson (Rossum) Writer: Brynne Stephens Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Sunrise

Synopsis: Olympic champion Anthony Romulus is transformed into a werewolf by the evil Professor Milo. Guest-stars: Harry Hamlin (Anthony Romulus), Janet May (Andrea), Peter Scolari (Hamner), Frank Welker (Werewolf FX), Treat Williams (Milo) Writer: Len Wein Based Upon: “Moon of the Wolf” by Len Wein – Batman #255 (Apr. 1974) Director: Dick Sebast Animation: AKOM

Episode 39: “Heart of Steel, Part II” (Airdate: 11/17/92) Synopsis: Barbara Gordon works with Batman to defeat H.A.R.D.A.C.’s robot doubles of Commissioner Gordon, Mayor Hill, and Harvey Bullock. Guest-stars: Jeff Bennett (H.A.R.D.A.C.), Leslie Easterbrook (Randa), William Sanderson (Rossum) Writer: Brynne Stephens Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Sunrise

Episode 44: “Day of the Samurai” (Airdate: 2/23/93) Synopsis: Bruce Wayne is summoned to Japan when Kyodai Ken kidnaps one of the Sensei’s current students. Guest-stars: Robert Ito (Kyodai Ken/ The Ninja), Julia Kato (Kairi), Goh Misawa (Sensei Yuri) Writer: Steve Perry Director: Bruce W. Timm Animation: Blue Pencil, S.I., Jade Animation

Episode 40: “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?” (Airdate: 11/18/92) Synopsis: Edward Nygma becomes the Riddler when he’s cheated out of the profits of the video game he created. Guest-stars: Gary Frank (Dan Mockridge), Hal Rayle (Henchman) Writer: David Wise Director: Eric Radomski Animation: Blue Pencil, S.I., Jade Animation Episode 41: “Joker’s Wild” (Airdate: 11/19/92) Synopsis: The Joker targets a billionaire who’s using his likeness to promote a new casino. Guest-stars: Harry Hamlin (Kaiser), Ernie Hudson (Security Guard), Brion James (Irving), Roger Rose (TV Host) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: AKOM, Mr. Big Cartoons Episode 42: “Tyger, Tyger” (Airdate: 10/30/92) Synopsis: Catwoman is transformed into a genuine cat-creature by Dr. Emile Dorian. Guest-stars: Jim Cummings (Tygrus), Joseph Maher (Dr. Emile Dorian) Story: Michael Reaves and Randy Rogel Teleplay: Cherie Wilkerson Director: Frank Paur Animation: Dong Yang, Spectrum Episode 43: “Moon of the Wolf” (Airdate: 11/12/92)

Episode 45: “Terror in the Sky” (Airdate: 11/9/92) Synopsis: Batman investigates if Kirk Langstrom is again transforming into the Man-Bat. Guest-stars: René Auberjonois (Dr. March), Meredith MacRae (Francine), Pat Musick (Flight Attendant), Peter Renaday (2nd Longshoreman) Story: Steve Perry, Mark Saraceni Teleplay: Mark Saraceni Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Dong Yang Episode 46: “Almost Got ’Im” (Airdate: 11/11/92) Synopsis: The Joker, the Penguin, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, and Killer Croc play poker and swap stories of how they almost killed Batman. Guest-stars: None Writer: Paul Dini Director: Eric Radomski Animation: Dong Yang, Spectrum Episode 47: “Birds of a Feather” (Airdate: 2/8/93) Synopsis: The Penguin runs up against high society when Veronica Vreeland uses him to add cachet to her party. Guest-stars: Sam McMurray (Pierce), Neil Ross (Jake), Danny Wells (Guard) Story: Chuck Menville Teleplay: Brynne Stephens Director: Frank Paur Animation: Dong Yang, Mr. Big Cartoons Episode 48: “What Is Reality?” (Airdate: 11/24/92) Synopsis: Batman and Robin attempt to rescue Commissioner Gordon from the Riddler’s virtual reality world.

Guest-stars: Bever-Leigh Banfield (Clerk), Hal Rayle (Broker) Writer: Marty Isenberg, Robert N. Skir Director: Dick Sebast Animation: Episode 49: “I Am The Night” (Airdate: 11/10/92) Synopsis: When Commissioner Gordon is injured in a police raid, Batman begins to doubt his effectiveness as crimefighter. Guest-stars: Brian George (Jazzman), Melissa Gilbert (Barbara Gordon), Seth Green (Wizard), Sal Viscuso (Monk), Carmen Zapata (Judge Vargas) Writer: Michael Reaves Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Sunrise Episode 50: “Off Balance” (Airdate: 11/23/92) Synopsis: Batman and Talia work together to recover a sonic weapon stolen by Count Vertigo. Guest-stars: Barry Dennen (Shadow Agent), Chuck Vennera (Twitch), Michael York (Count Vertigo) Writer: Len Wein Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Sunrise Episode 51: “The Man Who Killed Batman” (Airdate: 2/1/93) Synopsis: A low-level criminal gets more attention than he bargained for when he’s believed to have killed Batman. Guest-stars: Matt Frewer (Sidney), Maurice La Marche (Murphy), Robert Picardo (Eddie) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Bruce W. Timm Animation: Sunrise Episode 52: “Mudslide” (Airdate: 9/15/93) Synopsis: A decomposing Clayface works with a love-struck doctor to regain his human form. Guest-stars: Rob Clotworthy (Billy), Pat Musick (Stella Bates), Marcia Wallace (Fiancée) Story: Alan Burnett Teleplay: Steve Perry Director: Eric Radomski Animation: Studio Junio Episode 53: “Paging the Crime Doctor” (Airdate: 9/17/93) Synopsis: Rupert Thorne’s brother, disgraced doctor Matthew Thorne, kidnaps Leslie Thompkins for assistance with emergency surgery on the crime boss. Guest-stars: Rodger Bumpass (Hoffman), Joseph Campanella (Matthew Thorne), Linda Dangcil (Woman), George Dzundza (Chubb), Gary Kroeger (Beechum) Story: Mike W. Barr, Laren Bright

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 25

Teleplay: Randy Rogel, Martin Pasko Director: Frank Paur Animation: Dong Yang Episode 54: “Zatanna” (Airdate: 2/2/93) Synopsis: Batman reunites with his old flame Zatanna when the stage magician is framed for robbing the Gotham Mint. Guest-stars: Julie Brown (Zatanna), Zale Kessler (Fauncewater), Vincent Schiavelli (Zatara), Bruce W. Timm (Red), Michael York (Dr. Montague Kane) Writer: Paul Dini Directors: Dick Sebast, Dan Riba Animation: Dong Yang, Spectrum Episode 55: “The Mechanic” (Airdate: 1/24/93) Synopsis: The Penguin kidnaps the designer of the Batmobile. Guest-stars: John DeLancie (Eagleton), Steve Franken (Rundle), Barry Gordon (Sheldrake), Candy Brown (Marva), Walter Olkewicz (Falcone), Paul Winfield (Earl Cooper) Story: Steve Perry, Laren Bright Teleplay: Randy Rogel Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: AKOM Episode 56: “Harley and Ivy” (Airdate: 1/18/93) Synopsis: Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy team up after Harley is kicked out of the Joker’s gang. Guest-star: Neil Ross (Chairman) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Dong Yang, TMS

Episode 57: “Shadow of the Bat” (Airdate: 9/13/93) Synopsis: When Commissioner Gordon is accused of taking bribes from Boss Thorne, Barbara Gordon becomes Batgirl in order to clear his name. Guest-stars: Greg Burson (Mad Dog), Tim Matheson (Gil Mason), Lynette Mettey (Janet Van Dorn) Writer: Brynne Stevens Director: Frank Paur Animation: Dong Yang Episode 58: “Shadow of the Bat, Part II” (Airdate: 9/14/93) Synopsis: While Batman and Robin try to escape Two-Face’s deathtrap, Batgirl tracks down the criminals who framed her father. Guest-stars: Greg Burson (Mad Dog), Tim Matheson (Gil Mason) Writer: Brynne Stevens Director: Frank Paur Animation: Dong Yang

Episode 59: “Blind as a Bat” (Airdate: 2/22/93) Synopsis: Batman is blinded when the Penguin steals an experimental police helicopter. Guest-stars: Haunami Minn (Dr. Lee), Walter Olkewicz (Falcone), John DeLancie (Eagleton), Barry Gordon (Sheldrake), Jeff Bennett (Computer) Story: Mike Underwood, Len Wein Teleplay: Len Wein Director: Dan Riba Animation: Studio Juno Episode 60: “The Demon’s Quest” (Airdate: 5/3/93) Synopsis: Robin and Talia are kidnapped, forcing Batman to track them down with the help of the mysterious Ra’s al Ghul. Guest-stars: Manu Tupou (Ubu), Frank Welker (Thug) Writer: Dennis O’Neil Based Upon: “Daughter of the Demon” by Denny O’Neil – Batman #232 (June 1971) Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: TMS, Dong Yang Episode 61: “The Demon’s Quest, Part II” (Airdate: 5/4/93) Synopsis: Batman fights to stop Ra’s al Ghul’s plan to overflow Lazarus Pits around the world. Guest-stars: George DiCenzo (Ubu), Charles Howerton (Captor) Story: Dennis O’Neil, Len Wein Teleplay: Len Wein Based Upon: “The Demon Lives Again!” by Dennis O’Neil – Batman #244 (Sept. 1972) Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: TMS, Dong Yang Episode 62: “His Silicon Soul” (Airdate: 11/20/92) Synopsis: Batman’s robot double returns and tries to replace the Caped Crusader. Guest-stars: William Sanderson (Karl Rossum), Jeff Bennett (Hardac), Richard Moll (Computer) Writers: Marty Isenberg, Robert N. Skir Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Spectrum, Dong Yang Episode 63: “Fire From Olympus” (Airdate: 5/24/93) Synopsis: Batman deals with Maxie Zeus, a mobster who believes he’s a Greek god. Guest-stars: Bess Armstrong (Clio), Vernee Watson-Johnson (Doctor), Nicholas Savalas (Stavros), Steve Suskind (Maxie Zeus) Writers: Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens Director: Dan Riba Animation: Spectrum, Dong Yang

Episode 64: “Read My Lips” (Airdate: 5/10/93) Synopsis: Batman discovers that Gotham’s new criminal mastermind Scarface is actually a Ventriloquist dummy. Guest-stars: Earl Boen (Rhino), Joe Piscopo (Manager), Neil Ross (Ratso) Story: Alan Burnett, Michael Reaves Teleplay: Joe R. Lansdale Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: TMS, Dong Yang Episode 65: “The Worry Men” (Airdate: 9/16/93) Synopsis: The Mad Hatter returns with a scheme to hypnotize Gotham’s elite into stealing their own millions. Guest-stars: LeVar Burton (Hayden Sloane), Vernee Watson-Johnson (Dana Blessing), Roger Rose (Jaguar Shaman) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Frank Paur Animation: Spectrum, Dong Yang

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

(Theatrical Movie – Release Date: 12/25/93) Synopsis: Bruce Wayne’s first love Andrea Beaumont returns to Gotham just as the mysterious Phantasm is killing mobsters. Guest-stars: Dana Delany (Andrea Beaumont), Hart Bochner (Arthur Reeves), Stacy Keach, Jr. (Phantasm/Carl Beaumont), Abe Vigoda (Salvatore Valestra), Dick Miller (Chuckie Sol), John P. Ryan (Buzz Bronski), Jane Downs, Pat Musick, Vernee Watson-Johnson, Ed Gilbert, Peter Renaday, Jeff Bennett, Charles Howardton, Thom Pinto, Marilu Henner, Neil Ross (Additional Voices) Story: Alan Burnett Screenplay: Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, Martin Pasko, Michael Reaves Directors: Eric Radomski, Bruce Timm Sequence Directors: Kevin Altieri, Boyd Kirkland, Frank Paur, Dan Riba Animation: Dong Yang, Spectrum Episode 66: “Sideshow” (Airdate: 5/3/94) Synopsis: An escaping Killer Croc hides out with a group of ex-sideshow performers. Guest-stars: Brad Garrett (Goliath), Whitby Hertford (Billy), Kenneth Mars (Richard), JoBeth Williams (May and June) Story: Michael Reaves Teleplay: Michael Reaves, Brynne Stephens Based Upon: “A Vow from the Grave!” by Denny O’Neil – Detective Comics #410 (Apr. 1971) Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Spectrum, Dong Yang

Episode 67: “A Bullet for Bullock” (Airdate: 9/14/95) Synopsis: Harvey Bullock enlists Batman to find out who is trying to kill him. Guest-stars: Greg Berger (Rosie), Jeffrey Jones (Nivens), Liane Schirmer (Officer Renee Montoya) Writer: Michael Reaves Based Upon: “A Bullet for Bullock” by Chuck Dixon – Detective Comics #651 (Oct. 1992) Director: Frank Paur Animation: Studio Junio Episode 68: “Trial” (Airdate: 5/16/94) Synopsis: Gotham’s new DA Janet Van Dorn defends Batman from a kangaroo court of super-villains in Arkham Asylum. Guest-stars: Stephanie Zimbalist (Janet Van Dorn), Liane Schrimer (Officer Renee Montoya) Story: Paul Dini, Bruce W. Timm Teleplay: Paul Dini Director: Dan Riba Animation: Dong Yang Episode 69: “Avatar” (Airdate: 5/9/94) Synopsis: Batman and Talia try to prevent Ra’s al Ghul from unlocking the secrets of the ancient Egyptian sorceress Thoth Khepera. Guest-stars: George DiCenzo (Ubu), Nichelle Nichols (Thoth Khepera) Writer: Michael Reaves Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Studio Junio Episode 70: “House and Garden” (Airdate: 5/2/94) Synopsis: Poison Ivy has reformed and settled down in the suburbs… Or has she? Guest-stars: Jim Cummings (Saunders), Scott McAfee (Chris Carlyle), Megan Mullally (Cindy), Paul Nakauchi (Doctor), Christopher Pickering (Kelly Carlyle), Peter Strauss (Dr. Steven Carlyle) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Dong Yang Episode 71: “The Terrible Trio” (Airdate: 9/11/95) Synopsis: Three spoiled playboys turn to crime to relieve their boredom. Guest-stars: Hector Elizondo (Fallbrook), David Jolliffe (The Vulture), Khrystyne Haje (Rebecca Fallbrook), Lauri Johnson (Nurse), Bill Mumy (The Fox), Peter Scolari (The Shark) Story: Alan Burnett, Michael Reaves Teleplay: Michael Reaves Director: Frank Paur Animation: Jade Animation Episode 72: “Harlequinade” (Airdate: 5/23/94)

26 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

Synopsis: The Joker’s stolen an a-bomb, and Batman springs Harley Quinn from Arkham to help track him down. Guest-stars: Dick Miller (Boxy Bennett), Neil Ross (Dealer) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Dong Yang Episode 73: “Time Out of Joint” (Airdate: 10/8/94) Synopsis: The Clock King returns with a device that alters time. Guest-stars: Roscoe Lee Browne (Dr. Wataki), Tress MacNeille (Woman), Alan Oppenheimer (Auctioneer), Alan Rachins (Temple Fugate/The Clock King) Story: Alan Burnett Teleplay: Steve Perry Director: Dan Riba Animation: Dong Yang Episode 74: “Catwalk” (Airdate: 9/13/95) Synopsis: Struggling to go straight, Selina Kyle accepts a job from Scarface. Guest-stars: Earl Boen (Rhino), John Rubinow (Museum Guard) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Dong Yang Episode 75: “Bane” (Airdate: 9/10/94) Synopsis: Rubert Thorne hires the venom-addicted Bane to take down the Dark Knight. Guest-stars: Joe Lala (Dicky the Thug), Diane Michelle (Candice) Writer: Mitch Brian Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Dong Yang Episode 76: “Baby-Doll” (Airdate: 10/1/94) Synopsis: An unaging former child star tries to kill the co-stars of her old sitcom. Guest-stars: Alison LaPlaca (BabyDoll), Jason Marsden (Spunky Spencer), Robbie Rist (Brian Daily), Judy Strangis (Tammy Vance), Tasia Valenza (Mariam), Alan Young (Tod Baker) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Dan Riba Animation: Studio Junio Episode 77: “The Lion and the Unicorn” (Airdate: 9/15/95) Synopsis: Alfred is summoned to England by his old espionage partner Frederick, who’s been kidnapped by Red Claw. Guest-stars: Kate Mulgrew (Red Claw), Adam Ant (Bert), Roy Dotrice (Frederick), Richard Doyle (Ernie), Kenneth Mars (M2), Hal Rayle (Cameraman), BJ Ward (M3) Writers: Diane Duane, Philip Norwood, Steve Perry Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Dong Yang

Episode 78: “Showdown” (Airdate: 9/12/95) Synopsis: Ra’s al Ghul tells Batman and Robin the story of his battle with Jonah Hex in 1883. Guest-stars: Senator Patrick Leahy (Governor), Malcolm McDowell (Arcady Duvall), Michael Bell (Airman Captain), William Bryant (Sheriff), William McKinney (Jonah Hex), Elizabeth Montgomery (Barmaid) Story: Kevin Altieri, Paul Dini, Bruce W. Timm Teleplay: Joe R. Lansdale Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Dong Yang Episode 79: “Riddler’s Reform” (Airdate: 9/24/94) Synopsis: Batman and Robin try to figure out if the Riddler has really gone straight. Guest-stars: Patricia Alice Albrecht (Brenda), William Katt (Zowie), Robert Pastorelli (Manny), Peter Mark Richman (Charles Baxter) Story: Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, Randy Rogel Teleplay: Randy Rogel Director: Dan Riba Animation: Dong Yang Episode 80: “Second Chance” (Airdate: 9/17/94) Synopsis: When Harvey Dent is kidnapped right before his reconstructive surgery, Batman and Robin search Gotham to find the person responsible. Guest-stars: Linda Gary (Dr. Nora Crest), Nicholas Guest (Thug), Matt Landers (Frankie) Story: Paul Dini, Michael Reaves Teleplay: Gerry Conway Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Dong Yang Episode 81: “Harley’s Holiday” (Airdate: 10/15/94) Synopsis: A newly released Harley Quinn tries to stay out of trouble. Guest-stars: Frank Cover (General Vreeland), Dick Miller (Boxy Bennett), Suzanne Stone (Dr. Joan Leland) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Dong Yang Episode 82: “Lock-Up” (Airdate: 11/19/94) Synopsis: Arkham Asylum’s new head of security, Lyle Bolton, goes over the edge and begins torturing the inmates. Guest-stars: Richard Dysart (Dr. Bartholomew), Bruce Weitz (Lyle Bolton/Lock-Up) Story: Paul Dini Teleplay: Marty Isenberg, Robert N. Skir Director: Dan Riba Animation: Dong Yang

Episode 83: “Make ’Em Laugh” (Airdate: 10/5/94) Synopsis: Batman and Robin investigate why three famous comedians are suddenly committing crimes as super-villains. Guest-stars: Richard Jeni (Host), Andrea Martin (Rolling Pin), Stuart Pankin (Condiment King), Grant Shaud (Pack Rat) Writers: Paul Dini, Randy Rogel Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Dong Yang Episode 84: “Deep Freeze” (Airdate: 11/26/94) Synopsis: Mr. Freeze is kidnapped by theme park mogul Grant Walker, who wants to unlock the secret of Freeze’s extended lifespan. Guest-stars: Pat Fraley (Bat-Mite), Daniel O’Herlihy (Grant Walker), William Sanderson (Karl Rossum) Story: Paul Dini, Bruce W. Timm Teleplay: Paul Dini Director: Kevin Altieri Animation: Dong Yang Episode 85: “Batgirl Returns” (Airdate: 11/12/94) Synopsis: Batgirl teams up with Catwoman to discover who’s framing her. Guest-stars: Roger Rose (Gilbert), Scott Valentine (Chemist) Writers: Michael Reaves, Brynne Stephens Director: Dan Riba Animation: Dong Yang

Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero (Direct to Video – Release Date: 3/17/98) Synopsis: Barbara Gordon is kidnapped by Mr. Freeze to serve as an organ donor for his wife Nora. Guest-stars: George Dzundza (Dr. Gregory Belson), Mary Kay Bergman (Barbara Gordon), Dean Jones (Dean Arbagast), Rahi Azizi, Townsend Coleman, Brian George, Ed Gilbert, Carl Lumbly, Tress MacNeille, Neil Ross, Randy Thompson, Lauren Tom (Additional Voices) Writers: Boyd Kirkland, Randy Rogel Director: Boyd Kirkland Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

THE NEW BATMAN ADVENTURES

Episode 86: “Holiday Knights” (Airdate: 9/13/97) Synopsis: Three vignettes of Batman, Robin, and Batgirl dealing with Clayface, Harley and Ivy, and the Joker during the holiday season. Guest-stars: Rachel Davey (Mary McSweeney), Tress MacNeille (Little Boy), Corey Burton (Uniformed Cop) Writer: Paul Dini Based Upon: Batman Adventures Holiday Special #1 by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm (Jan. 1995) Director: Dan Riba Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Episode 87: “Sins of the Father” (Airdate: 9/20/97) Synopsis: Street kid Tim Drake becomes Batman’s new Robin. Guest-stars: Peter Jason (Manny) Writer: Rich Fogel Director: Curt Geda Animation: Koko, Dong Yang Episode 88: “Cold Comfort” (Airdate: 10/11/97) Synopsis: Mr. Freeze returns, more cold-hearted than ever, working to destroy others’ happiness. Guest-stars: Tress MacNeille (Dr. Margaret Madsen), Ian Patrick Williams (Artist/Guiseppe Bianci), Cree Summer (Ice Maiden #2), Lauren Tom (Ice Maiden #3) Writer: Hilary J. Bader Director: Dan Riba Animation: Koko, Dong Yang Episode 89: “Double Talk” (Airdate: 11/22/97) Synopsis: A reformed Arnold Wesker finds himself being haunted by Scarface. Guest-stars: Mel Winkler (Lucius Fox), Suzanne Stone (Dr. Joan Leland), Townsend Coleman (Mugsy), Earl Boen (Rhino), Patty Maloney (Mrs. Segar), Billy Barty (Hips McManus) Writer: Robert Goodman Director: Curt Geda Animation: Koko, Dong Yang Episode 90: “You Scratch My Back” (Airdate: 11/15/97) Synopsis: Nightwing begins an ill-advised partnership with Catwoman. Guest-stars: Sal Lopez (Enrique El Gancho), Joe Lala (Gun Runner #1), Steve McGowan (Gun Runner #2), Michael David Donovan (Gun Runner #3) Writer: Hilary J. Bader Director: Butch Lukic Animation: Koko, Dong Yang Episode 91: “Never Fear” (Airdate: 11/1/97) Synopsis: The Scarecrow returns, removing people’s fears and causing Gothamites to become dangerously reckless. Guest-stars: Charles Rocket (Guru), Ken Berry (Seymour Grey), Pamela Segall (Mother) Writer: Stan Berkowitz Director: Kenji Hachizaki Animation: TMS Episode 92: “Joker’s Millions” (Airdate: 2/21/98) Synopsis: A broke Joker discovers that he’s inherited a massive fortune from his old rival King Barlowe. Guest-stars: Allan Rich (King Barlowe), Sam McMurray (Ernie), Maggie Wheeler (Fake Harley), John Garry (Joker’s Lawyer) Writer: Paul Dini

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 27

Based Upon: “Joker’s Millions” by David V. Reed – Detective Comics #180 (Feb. 1952) Director: Dan Riba Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Episode 93: “Growing Pains” (Airdate: 2/25/98) Synopsis: Robin develops a friendship with Annie, a mysterious girl with a strange connection to Clayface. Guest-stars: Francesca Marie Smith (Annie), Matt Landers (Gang Leader), John Rubano (Gang Member) Story: Paul Dini, Robert Goodman Teleplay: Robert Goodman Director: Atsuko Tanaka Animation: TMS

Episode 98: “Mean Seasons” (Airdate: 4/25/98) Synopsis: Batman and Batgirl face off against new villain Calendar Girl. Guest-stars: Sela Ward (Calendar Girl/Page Monroe), Barry Bostwick (Irv Kleinman), Tippi Hedren (Donna Day), Charlie Rocket (Frederick Fournier), Robert David Hall (Reporter), Bumper Robinson (Teen Cop), Dennis Haysbert (Barkley James), Miriam Flynn (Zaftig Lady) Story: Rich Fogel Teleplay: Hilary J. Bader Director: Hiroyuki Aoyama Animation: TMS

Episode 94: “Love is a Croc” (Airdate: 7/11/98) Synopsis: Baby-Doll teams up with her kindred spirit Killer Croc. Guest-stars: Laraine Newman (Baby Doll/Mary Louise Dahl), Lauri Johnson (Mom), Jeff Glen Bennett (Dad), Richard Doyle (Harry), Buster Jones (Judge) Writer: Steve Gerber Director: Butch Lukic Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Episode 99: “Critters” (Airdate: 9/19/98) Synopsis: Microbiologist Farmer Brown unleashes his monstrously mutated animals on Gotham City. Guest-stars: Peter Breck (Farmer Brown), Dina Sherman (Emmylou), Jane Singer (Old Woman), Dorian Harewood (Judge), Phil Hayes (Sergeant) Story: Steve Gerber Teleplay: Joe R. Lansdale Director: Dan Riba Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Episode 95: “Torch Song” (Airdate: 6/13/98) Synopsis: Pyrotechnic expert Garfield Lynns becomes the Firefly when his romantic obsession with a rock star gets out of control. Guest-stars: Mark Rolston (Garfield Lynns/Firefly), Karla DeVito (Cassidy), David Paymer (Frank), Tom Wilson (Howlin’ Jake), Jane Wiedlin (Shannon), John Mariano (Vicenzo) Writer: Rich Fogel Director: Curt Geda Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Episode 100: “Cult of the Cat” (Airdate: 9/18/98) Synopsis: Batman and Catwoman are targeted by an ancient Egyptian cat cult. Guest-stars: Scott Cleverdon (Thomas Blake), Jim Piddock (Martin), Tasia Valenza (Female Cultist) Story: Paul Dini, Stan Berkowitz Teleplay: Stan Berkowitz Director: Butch Lukic Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Episode 96: “The Ultimate Thrill” (Airdate: 9/14/98) Synopsis: Batman combats Roxy Rocket, a thrill-seeking stuntwoman gone bad. Guest-stars: Charity James (Roxy Rocket/Roxanne Sutton), Mel Winkler (Lucius Fox), Rob Clotworthy (Pilot), Rebecca Gilchrist (Young Woman) Writer: Hilary J. Bader Director: Dan Riba Animation: Koko, Dong Yang Episode 97: “Over the Edge” (Airdate: 5/23/98) Synopsis: Bruce Wayne is exposed as Batman and hunted by the police when Batgirl is killed fighting the Scarecrow. Guest-stars: John Garry (Lawyer) Writer: Paul Dini Director: Yuichiro Yano Animation: TMS

Episode 101: “Animal Act” (Airdate: 9/26/98) Synopsis: Nightwing discovers that the animals from his old circus are being used to commit crimes. Guest-stars: Jane Wiedlin (Miranda Kane), Corey Burton (Strongman), Lauri Johnson (Knife-Thrower’s Wife) Writer: Hilary J. Bader Director: Curt Geda Animation: Koko, Dong Yang Episode 102: “Old Wounds” (Airdate: 10/3/98) Synopsis: Nightwing tells Robin the story of why he quit being Batman’s partner. Guest-stars: Townsend Coleman (Rocco), Neil Ross (Henshaw), Ian Buchanan (Connor), Pamela Hayden (Geena) Writer: Rich Fogel Director: Curt Geda Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Episode 103: “The Demon Within” (Airdate: 5/9/98) Synopsis: Batman and Robin team up with the Demon to defeat Klarion the Witch Boy. Guest-stars: Billy Zane (The Demon/Jason Blood), Stephen Wolfe Smith (Klarion), Peter Renaday (Auctioneer) Story: Rusti Bjornhöel Teleplay: Stan Berkowitz Director: Atsuko Tanaka Animation: TMS

Episode 107: “Chemistry” (Airdate: 10/24/98) Synopsis: Bruce Wayne gives up his Batman career when he falls in love with a woman he meets at Veronica Vreeland’s wedding. Guest-stars: Linda Hamilton (Susan Maguire), Tim Matheson (Michael Vreeland), Ed Gilbert (Photographer), Bruce Gilbert (Mr. Liu) Writer: Stan Berkowitz Director: Butch Lukic Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Episode 104: “Legends of the Dark Knight” (Airdate: 10/10/98) Synopsis: Three children swap stories of how they view Batman and Robin. Guest-stars: Gary Owens (’50s Batman), Michael Ironside (’80s Batman), Michael McKean (’50s Joker), Brianne Siddall (’50s Robin), Ryan O’Donohue (Matt), Anndi McAfee (Carrie), Jeremy Foley (Nick), Kevin M. Richardson (Mutant Leader), Mark Rolston (Firefly/Don), Charlie Rocket (Security Guard), Phillip Van Dyke (Joel) Story: Robert Goodman, Bruce Timm Teleplay: Robert Goodman With Acknowledgement to the Works of Bill Finger, Dick Sprang, Frank Miller Based Upon: “The Batman Nobody Knows!” by Frank Robbins – Batman #250 (July 1973) Director: Dan Riba Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Episode 108: “Beware the Creeper” (Airdate: 11/7/98) Synopsis: Reporter Jack Ryder is transformed into the Creeper and attempts to steal Harley Quinn away from the Joker. Guest-stars: E. G. Daily (Thrift Store Manager), Billy West (Cur, Lar, Mo) Story: Rich Fogel Teleplay: Steve Gerber Director: Dan Riba Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Episode 105: “Girls’ Night Out” (Airdate: 10/17/98) Synopsis: Batgirl teams up with Supergirl to defeat Livewire, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn. Guest-stars: Nicholle Tom (Supergirl/Kara), Lori Petty (Livewire), Hal Rayle (Driver Cop) Writer: Hilary J. Bader Director: Curt Geda Animation: Koko, Dong Yang Episode 106: “Mad Love” (Airdate: 1/16/99) Synopsis: Harley Quinn’s origin is revealed as she attempts to kill Batman to win the love of the Joker. Guest-stars: Suzanne Stone (Dr. Joan Leland) Story: Paul Dini, Bruce Timm Teleplay: Paul Dini Based Upon: “Mad Love” by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm Director: Butch Lukic Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Episode 109: “Judgment Day” (Airdate: 10/31/98) Synopsis: A mysterious new vigilante called the Judge threatens Gotham’s underworld. Guest-stars: Malachi Throne (The Judge), Jodi Baskerville (Anchorwoman), Steven Weber (J. Carroll Corcoran), Peter Jason (Manny), Loren Lester (Mo) Writers: Rich Fogel and Alan Burnett Director: Curt Geda Animation: Koko, Dong Yang

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman

(Direct to Video – Release Date: 10/21/03) Synopsis: Batman tries to uncover the secret identity of Gotham’s new female crimefighter. Guest-stars: Kimberly Brooks (Kathy Duquesne), Kelly Ripa (Rocky Ballantine), Eisa Gabrielli (Sonia Alcana), Kyra Sedgwick (Batwoman), David Ogden Stiers (Penguin), Kevin Michael Richardson (Carlton Duquesne), Hector Elizondo (Bane), Eli Marienthal (Robin/ Tim Drake), Tim Dang, Chad Einbinder, Phil Hayes, Sal Lopez, John Mariano, Andrea Romano, Shane Sweet, Sean Patrick Thomas (Additional Voices) Story: Alan Burnett Screenplay: Michael Reaves Director: Curt Geda Animation: D.R. Movie Co., Ltd.

28 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

REED CRANDALL Illustrator of the Comics

From the 1940s to the ’70s, REED CRANDALL brought a unique and masterful style to American comic art. Using an illustrator’s approach on everything he touched, Crandall gained a reputation as the “artist’s artist” through his skillful interpretations of Golden Age super-heroes DOLL MAN, THE RAY, and BLACKHAWK (his signature character); horror and sci-fi for the legendary EC COMICS line; Warren Publishing’s CREEPY, EERIE, and BLAZING COMBAT; the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS and EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS characters; and even FLASH GORDON for King Features. Comic art historian ROGER HILL has compiled a complete and extensive history of Crandall’s life and career, from his early years and major successes, through his tragic decline and passing in 1982. This FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER includes NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTOS, a wealth of RARE AND UNPUBLISHED ARTWORK, and over EIGHTY THOUSAND WORDS of insight into one of the true illustrators of the comics.

(256-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $49.95 • (Digital Edition) $13.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-077-9 • NOW SHIPPING!

It’s

GROOVY, baby!

Follow-up to Mark Voger’s smash hit MONSTER MASH!

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

From WOODSTOCK to THE BANANA SPLITS, from SGT. PEPPER to H.R. PUFNSTUF, from ALTAMONT to THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY, GROOVY is a far-out trip to the era of lava lamps and love beads. This profusely illustrated HARDCOVER BOOK, in PSYCHEDELIC COLOR, features interviews with icons of grooviness such as PETER MAX, BRIAN WILSON, PETER FONDA, MELANIE, DAVID CASSIDY, members of the JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, CREAM, THE DOORS, THE COWSILLS and VANILLA FUDGE; and cast members of groovy TV shows like THE MONKEES, LAUGH-IN and THE BRADY BUNCH. GROOVY revisits the era’s ROCK FESTIVALS, MOVIES, ART—even COMICS and CARTOONS, from the 1968 ‘mod’ WONDER WOMAN to R. CRUMB. A color-saturated pop-culture history written and designed by MARK VOGER (author of the acclaimed book MONSTER MASH), GROOVY is one trip that doesn’t require dangerous chemicals!

(192-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-080-9 • DIGITAL EDITION: $13.95

SHIPS OCTOBER 2017 • Free preview online now!

TwoMorrows. The Future of Pop History.

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA

Phone: 919-449-0344 E-mail: store@twomorrows.com Web: www.twomorrows.com

by S t e v e n © Warner Bros. Commissioner Gordon TM & © DC Comics.

Batman: The Animated Series had perhaps the most impressive voice cast list of any TV series ever. Mixed in with all the top-of-the-line cartoon character actors like Batman himself, Kevin Conroy, Scooby-Doo’s Frank Welker, and Winnie the Pooh’s Jim Cummings were familiar TV voices from the likes of Ed Asner, Nichelle Nichols, and Ron Perlman, as well as big-screen greats such as David Warner, Mark Hamill, and Malcolm McDowell. In a bit of stunt casting, even the original TV Batman, Adam West, turned up! Another actor who appeared in an episode of the 1966 Batman series would become, from the beginning, a mainstay of the animated series and, in turn, his role in it would become the highlight of his later career. Although eternally handsome and always looking younger than his years, Bob Hastings (1925–2014) rarely played the lead throughout his nearly 80-year show-business career and when he did, you usually didn’t see his face at all! Hastings’ vocal characterization of Commissioner James Gordon turns up in more than 50 episodes of the cartoon series and carries over to the movies, video games, and even episodes of related DCU programs. It was hardly Bob’s first comic-book connection in show business, though. Born in 1925, Hastings started out as a boy singer on radio shows such as the long-forgotten Doug Gray’s Singing Gang and Coast to Coast on a Bus. Except for a stint in the World War II Army Air Corps, radio is where he worked for nearly three decades—and that’s how he liked it. In later years, he repeatedly told fans that he hated the fact that dramatic radio was kicked to the curb by television, because on radio you could play absolutely anything. It didn’t matter what you looked like, only what you sounded like. The postwar Hastings settled in for a five-year run as the title comicstrip teenager of NBC’s The Adventures of Archie Andrews. In the 1950s, he memorably popped up on many episodes of the intelligent adult

Thompson

Bob Hastings in 2012. Courtesy of Steven Thompson.

science-fiction radio series X Minus One, sort of an audio precursor to TV’s Twilight Zone. With television inevitable, Bob had already gotten his video feet wet appropriately enough on more juvenile science-fiction series, Captain Video and His Video Rangers (which co-starred his brother, Don) and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. He looked good in uniform and began getting cast often as a military man, police officer, or other authority figure in anthologies, live dramas, and eventually sitcoms—including multiple uniformed appearances as different characters on episodes of The Phil Silvers Show. McHale’s Navy, beginning in 1962 and running through 1966—with two feature film spin-offs as well—gave Bob the role for which he would most be recognized. His Lieutenant Elroy Carpenter was the manic, sputtering, sycophantic stooge to Joe Flynn’s Captain Wallace Binghamton and the two made quite the comedy team. Many years later, Bob told me that if the director hadn’t gotten what he wanted out of Flynn in the morning, he was pretty much out of luck for that day as Joe tended to enjoy a “liquid lunch.” Except when standing at attention, Carpenter was always moving— he twitched, he blinked a lot, he curled his lip, moved his hands, cocked his head. For a radio actor, Hastings had quickly learned how to give a visual performance and, in fact, to often steal scenes with very little effort. Although he continued popping up in person in almost every series on the air throughout the remainder of the 1960s, Bob’s first cartoon role came right after McHale’s Navy ended. Taking advantage of his still-youthful voice, he starred as Clark Kent/Superboy for Filmation in one of the first of the deluge of new superhero cartoons. Apparently a Kryptonian accent sounds a bit like a light Brooklyn accent. Already established at Filmation when they went on to do their first Archie cartoon just a few years later, Bob was the obvious choice to voice “America’s Favorite Teenager” again, but it never happened.

30 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

DC Encounters (top left) Hastings voiced the Boy of Steel in Filmation’s Superboy series in 1966. (top right) Bob (right) as Major Beasley, with Burgess Meredith as the Penguin, in the 1967 Batman TV episode “Penguin Sets a Trend.” TM & © DC Comics.

I once asked Bob why Dal McKennon got the role. He told me that it was during the period when he and other actors were complaining about sometimes being expected to “double” as multiple characters while being only paid for one. The impasse happened just in time for Bob to lose out on a return to Archie, but he and Filmation did make up later. Arguably, Bob’s most memorable big-screen role came in 1972 as he played the emcee on the SS Poseidon who counts down to the New Year’s Eve midnight just as that ill-fated ship hits the iceberg in The Poseidon Adventure. In spite of a few small roles in other feature films of that period, Bob confided that he really preferred doing the cartoon voices. He did quite a few in the 1970s as a regular on Clue Club and Jeannie but also on, among others, Devlin, CB Bears, Yogi’s Space Race, and various Scooby-Doo projects. He even returned to superheroes with Challenge of the Super Friends. He ran into some live-action superheroes during that period as well, appearing on Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, and even The Greatest American Hero. Preceding Andrew Lloyd Webber by several years, Bob Hastings also revived the Phantom of the Opera, albeit in the TV movie The Munsters’ Revenge, as the title family’s cousin. The movie also co-starred another radio veteran, Ezra Stone. Bob spent much of the 1980s comfortably ensconced as a regular on the long-running soap opera General Hospital. It was also around this time that he started getting invited to nostalgia festivals, which is where I met him in 1990. Bob would become the mainstay guest at the Cincinnati Old Time Radio and Nostalgia Convention, appearing and performing many times over its 26-year existence. That first year, he even directed a radio script recreation I was in. Between 1990 and 2013, I was privileged to perform on stage with Bob scores of times in all types of roles, but most memorably twice as Jughead to his Archie. He taught me that even though we were recreating radio and standing around reading scripts, one should always make eye contact with the other actors. He taught me how to mark a script, although mine would never end up as heavily marked as one of his own. Bob would always remove the staples, then take a pencil and go through every line—not just his—underlining, striking out, circling cue lines, rewriting dialogue as needed, and adding arrows for various purposes. On stage before, during, and after a performance, we often sat next to each other and he would mumble funny lines under his breath (off-mike, of course) that at times nearly made me miss my own cues. In his later years, he began doing voices for video games, even though he never really had much of an understanding of how they worked. My son was playing Jak and Daxter when I recognized Bob as the voice of the Mayor. I asked him and he confirmed it, also asking if there was any way we could record the gameplay and send it to him so he could hear his performance. We did just that.

It was not long after I met Bob that he was cast in Batman: The Animated Series. In fact, I remember buying a bootleg VHS tape of the test/pilot of the series at one of the conventions before it even premiered. The series, of course, was a massive hit, arguably changing the face of cartoons as we headed toward the new millennium. One of the reasons was the wonderful voice casting. Bob once related to me that he was arriving at the studio one time to record his dialogue as Commissioner Gordon. This was quite a while after he’d been playing the role. As he walked in, a young man was leaving. Bob asked who he was and was told that it was Kevin Conroy, the actor playing Batman. They had been recording their dialogue separately to be edited together and had never actually met! Bob Hastings was old-fashioned and very conservative. He described his time as a semi-regular on the popular All in the Family as him being the show’s “token conservative.” He was big on family and he had a big family. He loved to laugh and he and his old friends shared a wonderful, lifelong camaraderie that was enjoyable to see. When it came to acting, he was a strong proponent of the “there is no small role” theory. He gave a single line walk-on the same respect as a lead role. And even though he could steal a scene with the best of them, he was a generous co-star, always working for what would be best for the scene. Commissioner Gordon is a major figure in Batman’s life and career and he ended up a major figure in Bob Hastings’ life and career as well.

Everything’s Archie Onstage in 2010, during a rehearsal: (left to right) Bob Hastings, Rosemary Rice (who was Betty to Bob’s Archie on radio), Karen Hughes, Steven Thompson, and Brittany Seeley announcing. Courtesy of Steven Thompson.

STEVEN THOMPSON is Booksteve of Booksteve’s Library (booksteveslibrary.blogspot.com) and a dozen other blogs. He has written for Fantagraphics, TwoMorrows, Yoe Books, Bear Manor Media, and Time Capsule Productions.

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 31

Every version of Batman has had its Batmobile, and the car from Batman: The Animated Series ranks among the most memorable and long-lived. It was integral to the series, appearing in nearly every episode, and featured prominently in the opening credits. The animated Batmobile largely used the same platform as the 1989 movie Batmobile. It had an elongated wheelbase, a long nose, and a small cockpit with sliding canopy set over the rear wheels. However, given the “dark deco” theme of the animated series, it also drew some styling cues from 1930s sports roadsters. Instead of having a turbine intake like the movie car, the animated Batmobile had a more conventional slatted grille that formed a raised ridge incorporating the engine cover. The six (or rarely, four; see image at right) exposed manifold pipes on each side of the hood further evoked classic roadsters. The car was fitted with concave wheels and low-profile tires. The only concessions to typical Batmobile styling were scalloped “Bat-wings” incorporated into the rear wheel arches. As BTAS existed in a fairly ambiguous time period— steam trains and autogyros coexisted with cellphones and computers—the Batmobile could have been designed anywhere from the 1930s to the 1990s. Most other vehicles in the series, including the police cars, appeared to be from the ’30s or ’40s, and many had similarities to long-gone automobile marques such as Cord, Pierce-Arrow, and Cisitalia. Like all Batmobiles, the BTAS car featured a number of defensive and offensive gadgets, including front and rear grappling lines, tire slashers, flamethrowers, and ejector seats. (If all these sound copied from James Bond’s cars, note that Green Arrow’s Arrowcar had an ejector seat in the 1940s, 20 years before the Bond films!) The Batmobile also had an autopilot function, and could be summoned or controlled by a transmitter in Batman’s belt buckle. There was a retractable shield fitted to the car, although this was much less extensive than the heavy cocoon fitted to the movie Batmobile, and only covered the wheels and windshield. In some episodes, large, rectangular metal plates extended from the underside of the parked Batmobile, in order to camouflage it as a garbage skip. In the BTAS episode “The Mechanic,” it was revealed that the Batmobile was actually constructed by Earl Cooper, a former motor company executive who had been blacklisted as a whistleblower for revealing a new car as a deathtrap. After Batman rescued him from some company bully boys, Earl was hired to build a new car for Batman when the original Batmobile developed problems. Batman supplied Earl with a hidden garage where he and his daughter Marva built and repaired Batman’s vehicles. However, by using

by M

ike Pigott

To the Batmobile! The Dynamic Duo race to their super-car in this 1992 painting by John Calmette, from the Little Brown and Company BTAS tie-in book Batman: The Joker’s Apprentice. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). TM & © DC Comics.

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Mighty Miniatures (top) Ertl’s BTAS vehicles and figures, as seen on the backside of a blister card. (inset) Kenner’s TNBA Batmobile. (bottom) Hot Wheels’ BTAS Batmobile, and its “Battle Damaged” version. Toy scans in this article are courtesy of Mike Pigott. Batman and related characters TM & © DC Comics.

stolen car parts invoices, the Penguin’s men managed to deduce that Cooper was building a Batmobile and forced him to install a remote override that the Penguin could control. While Penguin was able to manipulate and crash the car, Earl had built in an escape device that allowed Batman and Robin to eject on seats that transformed into hang-gliders. There had always been some ambiguity over the Batmobile’s power source; it was shown as having a fiery jet exhaust, but the sound effect was that of a V-8 piston engine. This was cleared up in “The Mechanic” by explaining it had a conventional motor with a jet turbine for an additional speed boost. The episode also established that Cooper was responsible for providing the Batcycles, although the designer of the Batwing and Batboat was never revealed.

A NEW BATMOBILE

After a two-year hiatus, BTAS was revived in 1997 as The New Batman Adventures. Many off-screen changes had taken place, including Dick Grayson becoming Nightwing, and Batman being partnered by Batgirl and a new Robin. The heroes were all given makeovers, and many of the villains were given new looks. Also appearing was a new Batmobile, together with new versions of the Batboat and Batplane. All three vehicles were extremely modern, and lacked the retro look of the previous designs. Batman’s new car was much more typical of Batmobiles from the comics, including a Bat-head motif on the grille. It was a fast-looking black coupe with raised ridges along the sides that flowed into large bat-wings over the back wheels. While it still had a rear-set sliding canopy, it had more realistic proportions than its unfeasibly long predecessor. There were a number of improvements, including a computer uplink from the Batcave, heads-up displays, a bulletproof windshield, self-repairing tires, and compartments that could fire rockets or oil slicks. There was no origin story for this car, although it was probably built by Earl Cooper; at the end of “The Mechanic” he commented that he had “an idea for a new Batmobile.” Although TNBA only lasted a single season, the new Batmobile was seen in the 2003 spin-off film Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, and in Justice League from 2001 to 2004.

DIECAST BATMOBILES

Not long after the debut of BTAS, a range of tie-in diecast vehicles was released by American toy company Ertl. Based in Iowa, Ertl was best known for model tractors, but had moved heavily into the character-toy market after British manufacturers Corgi and Dinky went into liquidation. Ertl produced six vehicles from Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 33

Batmobile Blueprints Blueprints for Eaglemoss’ BTAS and TNBA Batmobiles, with the BTAS version inset. Batman TM & © DC Comics.

the series, all of which were around Hot Wheels size. The vehicles were the Batmobile; the rocket-shaped Batboat; the Batwing, which was a much simplified version of Batman’s plane from the 1989 film; a Batcycle with a faired-in front wheel; a slab-sided Gotham police helicopter; and Bruce Wayne’s limousine, a beige-colored classic car loosely based on a 1930s Cord 812. The models were solidly made, although none had interiors and most had painted windows. As was Ertl’s usual practice, there was a non-prototypical bat-logo printed on the four Bat-vehicles. There were also six diecast figurines produced: Batman (in two poses), Robin, Catwoman, Joker and Penguin. All the models were packaged in colorful blister packs with a free sticker. In 1997, a new range of models was released based on TNBA, this time by Kenner Toys. There were four vehicles in this set, plus four metal figures. However, only one was a new casting; these were largely re-releases of the Ertl models. Possibly the molds were sold to Kenner when Ertl lost the franchise, or more likely the manufacturing was sub-contracted out to Ertl. The new model was the redesigned Batmobile. It was a reasonably accurate model, although fitted with low-friction mag wheels and with painted windows. The other models were re-releases of the Batwing and Batboat, which were not used in TNBA, as they had been superseded by more modern versions. The fourth model was the Batcycle, now modified with the addition of a Batgirl rider figure. The four figurines were Batman, Robin, Penguin, and Joker, all with a different paint finish. A boxed gift set was produced, including all models except for the Batcycle and the Penguin, but with an exclusive car: the Joker’s car, actually Bruce Wayne’s limo painted white and covered in Joker decals.

LATER MODELS

The franchise for DC Comics toys was later acquired by Mattel, and several Batman toys soon appeared in its Hot Wheels line. In fact, in 2010 a whole range was devoted to Batman and his various vehicles from TV, film, comics, and cartoons. These were made in a nominal 1/50 scale, which was larger than regular Hot Wheels cars. One of these was the 1992 Batmobile from BTAS. It was finished in gloss black, with separate manifold tubes and blue-tinted windows, and realistic concave wheels, but unfortunately the grille was not highlighted. Presumably to get more mileage out of the casting, a second version was produced a year later. This was a “Battle Damaged” example, which was adorned with fake bullet holes along the sides. Most recently, the BTAS Batmobile has been produced in the larger 1/43 scale by Eaglemoss, a British publisher specializing in partwork collections. This collection again features a wide range of Bat-vehicles from different media, which come presented on a base with a clear cover and an appropriate 3-D backdrop. The BTAS Batmobile is an excellent model, although it is meant as a static model as the wheels do not roll. It has chrome concave wheels, gray pipes and grille, and an opening canopy that reveals a detailed interior. Eaglemoss also produced a model of the TNBA Batmobile from 1997. Undoubtedly the best-ever model of this vehicle, it had realistic spoked wheels, and a Bat-head shield on the grille. MIKE PIGOTT is an Australian writer based in London who specializes in diecast models and pop culture. His work appears in every issue of Diecast Collector Magazine, and he has also featured in Collector’s Gazette and Diecast Model World.

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by P h i l i p

Yo u n g m a n

The early 1990s was a time of great upheaval for some of H OUR STORY BEGINS… DC Comics’ classic characters. Superman had long hair, It all started in Denny O’Neil’s office. After viewing a rough cut of the premiere episode of Wonder Woman had red hair, and Batman had a new heir, and by 1993, the only place readers could find BTAS, DC Comics VP Dick Giordano floated the idea of a the classic Bruce Wayne Batman every month miniseries based on the show to Batman group was in The Batman Adventures. editor Denny O’Neil and his assistant editor Scott Regarded as one of the finest animated Peterson. The pair agreed, except for one series of all time, it is only fitting that problem—O’Neil already had a full load on Batman: The Animated Series itself would his plate and wasn’t going to be able to take on the task. After a brief discussion, inspire one of the greatest comic-book adaptations of all time. it was clear the young assistant editor was Three days after the premiere of going to be entering the “big leagues”— Batman: The Animated Series (BTAS) as he described it in the text page of on FOX, The Batman Adventures (TBA) TBA #1 (Oct. 1992)—and one of his first arrived on comic-book-store shelves. priorities was to find a creative team. Sporting a striking cover by Ty Templeton that featured the Penguin H TEAM-BUILDING looming large over the Gotham “Kelley Puckett and Ty Templeton were scott peterson skyline, the issue gave many their absolutely my first and only choices for first look at the world of the animated TBA,” Scott Peterson recalls. “Because Dark Knight. we started working on the comic long before any of the Originally conceived as a miniseries, TBA would episodes aired, and we weren’t allowed to send scripts soon outgrow its status as a tie-in, establish its own or the story bible or model sheets or anything like that voice and identity, and, by way of subsequent spin-offs, out, I needed a writer who was already familiar with the enjoy a run which continued long after the final new look and feel of the series. That meant there were really animation episode aired. only a handful of comic-book writers who were available,

Welcoming Committee Original Ty Templeton wraparound cover painting to the 1993 trade paperback Batman: The Collected Adventures vol. 1. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). TM & © DC Comics.

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The Adventures Begin Batman is challenged by the Penguin in the first issue of DC Comics’ The Batman Adventures (Oct. 1992). (right) Cover by Ty Templeton. (left) Original art from #1. Script by Puckett, pencils by Templeton, inks by Burchett. Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

and pretty much all of the other ones had day jobs Inker Rick Burchett would also soon be added to the working on the animated show.” roster. He recalls one of the major changes that occurred However, Peterson had an ace up his sleeve. “Kelley early in the assignment: “I was contacted the summer Puckett, as my predecessor as the assistant editor on the before the show went on the air. There was to be a Batman books, had already read all of the scripts—he had three-issue miniseries based on the new show. A different even flown out to Burbank at one point with Dennis O’Neil penciler would draw each issue and I would ink all three to advise on the show, so he was more than familiar with and make sure everything stayed on model. Then, about the series. What’s more, I already knew he was a really two weeks later, I received another call. Plans had changed. good writer, thanks to an issue of Detective Comics [#634] It would now be a six-issue miniseries with a new penciler he had recently written, and which had just blown me every two issues. Two weeks after that, another call, with away. Of course, at that point I had no way of knowing another change of plans. The book would now be a just how great a writer he’d soon prove to be.” monthly ongoing title with a new penciler every three Of Templeton, Peterson says, “I was already issues. My job would be the same.” “I don’t actually remember whether it a big fan of Ty the Guy due to his work on Justice League. And he just so happened to was supposed to be a three- or six-issue be visiting the offices when I first started miniseries,” responds Peterson. “I thought looking for an artist. So, I stapled his feet it was supposed to be six, but Rick has a much better memory than I, so if he to the floor and wouldn’t let him leave until he agreed to do the first three says it was three, it must’ve been three! issues. Fortunately, despite having a Or maybe I lied to him and said it was supposed to be three to get him to sign superhumanly high tolerance for pain, on… Anyway, the reason it was quickly he agreed. It’s kind of unbelievable to think about the fact that he drew those switched to an ongoing was pretty simple: issues without the benefit of any official Paul Levitz happened to see some of materials other than what had been Ty’s pages for the first issue on my desk released in press materials and such.” and was so impressed by how great rick burchett they looked, even by Ty’s standards, © Rich Burchett. that he pretty much immediately decided it should be an ongoing.” Completing the team were letterer Tim Harkins and colorist Rick Taylor. “I jumped!” says Taylor in regard to being offered the assignment. “I got the most up-front source material for a gig that I have ever gotten,” Taylor recalls. “We benefited mightily because the first three episodes of the cartoon were in the can as we were doing the books and we watched them first. Plus, we had style guides from the studio and Joe Orlando’s department made an expanded print one of licensing.”

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THE INFLUENCE OF TELEVISION

Given its roots, it is not surprising the influence television exerts on both the content and structure of the new title, with each issue presented like an episode of the show. “I’m pretty sure the three-act structure was my idea,” says Scott Peterson, “one of my attempts to make the book different from other books on the shelves, and because the show, obviously, had the three-act structure due to its commercial breaks. I really liked it, and Kelley was so good when it came to form and structure that his stories naturally fell into a three-act structure anyway. I think he got sick pretty quickly of having to think up titles for each of the three acts, though!” Content-wise, the influence of television is also apparent from the very beginning. TBA #1 (Oct. 1992) starts like most good Batman stories—with the Dark Knight in pursuit of a villain across a Gotham City rooftop. Or does it? All is not as it seems when it is quickly revealed to readers they are in fact watching one of the Penguin’s goons, who is in turn watching Batman: The Animated Series— for a “kiddie book” it had dipped into the metaphysical remarkably quickly. Retaining the structure of the miniseries, the first three issues detail the Joker’s latest scheme—and appropriately, he chooses the medium of television to deliver the chaos. Co-opting the Penguin and Catwoman into service, the Joker’s plans culminate in the kidnapping of Commissioner Gordon, whom he savagely beats on live TV. Given the book’s intended audience, the sight of the Joker, baseball bat in hand, is particularly chilling despite not seeing a single blow land. Set firmly during the early days of the animated series’ continuity, a preTwo-Face Harvey Dent is used as bait to lure the Joker out of hiding and into a trap. However, in a classic double-cross, Dent and Batman have switched places, and when both are kidnapped (disguised as each other) Batman successfully turns the tables on the Clown Prince of Crime. It is clear all the hallmarks of the animated series are present and the three issues perfectly set the tone of what was to come. With Martin Pasko now writing and Brad Rader on penciling duties, “Riot Act” takes place across issues #4 and 5 and brings the Scarecrow into the mix. Installed inside TV sets across Gotham, the villain’s “Dyslexus Device” robs people of their ability to read. Not only does the story provide a timely social commentary, it also delivers a clever thematic twist, again using television as an integral part of the story, while deftly adding a connection to the printed word. Rounding out the initial phase of the title is a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, written by the returning Kelley Puckett. A classic, locked-

It Was on a Dark Night… …when this spooky scene took place. Original Brad Rader/Rich Burchett artwork from TBA #6 (Mar. 1993), courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

door murder mystery, #6’s (Mar. 1993) “The Third Door” sees Bruce Wayne arrested and unable to explain his presence over the victim’s body without giving away his dual identity, and it is up to Dick Grayson to investigate and prove his mentor’s innocence. Suitably “noir-ish,” a shadowy moodiness in the art permeates this issue. While both the story structure and artistic direction had both quickly established the identity of the book, the importance of color in these early days should not be overlooked. Rick Taylor explains, “About the color palette, this book was originally printed on newsprint, which tended to ‘gray’ things down. So, I tended to color things bright so they wouldn’t muddy up. Also, the books were produced very ‘oldschool.’ I did not do those books direct to computer. I did color guides (handcolored Xeroxes that were coded to a limited palette). The situation was way more structured than it is now. By the time we did Mask of the Phantasm, it was on ‘good paper.’ “We also revived an old lithographer’s trick called ‘red-lining.’ Rick Burchett would use a red marker to show me where he wanted the shadow areas. It would make the exact shape visible. I could see it on the copy but it would be removed when we did the color separations. It gave the book that modeled look on the cheap.” H

A PERFECT FIT

In some ways, the polybagged TBA #7 (Apr. 1993) could be considered the second first issue. Stepping beyond the originally planned miniseries, the issue featured the debut of Mike Parobeck, thereby completing the trio of creators most associated with the title. “I think I’d thought Mike would just do three issues, the same way Ty did three and then Brad Rader did the next three,” says Scott Peterson. “But I knew Mike was available to be the regular penciler, since his Justice Society of America monthly was ending, and the second I saw his first batch of pages, I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s no way I’m ever letting this guy go’. For one thing, he was great—for another, he was a joy to work with: so upbeat and pleasant and easy, not to mention

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reliable. And he was fast, fast, fast, so having him as the regular penciler meant I’d never have scheduling problems, at least not from his corner. If anything, I had trouble keeping him busy enough!” This was not the first time Parobeck was paired with colorist Rick Taylor. “When Scott Peterson offered me the gig,” he says, “I had been coloring Mike for about a year on the Elongated Man and Impact’s Fly for Brian Augustyn. The Impact line was on its last year and they weren’t going to renew the contracts, so Mike slid into the Batman Adventures slot. “I always loved Mike’s work,” Taylor continues. “He made Batman Adventures fun and smart while not compromising the dark stuff. His storytelling was straightforward and energetic and spot-on. He got the Dibneys [Ralph and Sue, a.k.a. the Elongated Man and his wife], Fly was a throwback to Captain Marvel Adventures—and now this. Part of me wishes he could have done the Golden Age Captain Marvel.” Rick Burchett, likewise, is full of praise for his colleague: “When you ink someone you get to know them a little through their work. Mike and I actually spent time together twice at a couple of conventions and had a few phone conversations. He was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met and I felt we were in sync on the art. It was a good mix. I had so much fun inking his work, it didn’t feel like work. I could have and would have inked his stuff as long as they would’ve let me.” H

SIMPLE, BUT NEVER SIMPLISTIC

It was only his second issue, but Mike Parobeck was already giving a level of depth to his characters many artists would spend a career trying to achieve. It was all part of his deceptively simple style which blended so well with the animated aesthetic. Already established as one of the animated series’ tragic villains, Clayface’s debut is particularly heartfelt.

In the guise of a tall, blond, and handsome man, Matt Hagen comes to the aid of journalist Summer Gleason when she is accosted by a group of thugs, dropping his lapel rose in his haste to depart. The reporter is clearly smitten. Meanwhile, Batman is investigating a series of bank robberies while Hagen makes contact with Summer in an attempt to establish a normal life. But Hagen cannot deny his true nature and is unmasked as the bank robber by Batman just as Summer arrives on the scene. The look of horror on her face and the look of shame on Clayface’s captures the moment brilliantly, and the issue’s final panel featuring a rose crumbling into dust remains a haunting image. H

I KNOW THAT FACE…

AND THE WINNER IS…

While it contains arguably one of the best Riddler tales of all time, TBA #10 (July 1993) is also noteworthy for the first appearance of Mastermind, Mr. Nice, and the Perfessor. “Ah, the Threatening Three…” says Scott Peterson. “Kelley mentioned that he was going to make up a couple of throwaway bad guys to use in his upcoming Riddler issue, and I said, ‘Hey, we should make ’em [group editors] Mike [Carlin], Denny [O’Neil], and Archie [Goodwin].’ And we laughed… and then there was a pause and Kelley said, ‘…You know….’ “When I got the lettered inks done, I passed copies to Mike, Denny, and Archie. The next day, Mike dropped it off on my desk with a few suggestions in red—move this balloon there, make sure that’s clear in coloring—stuff like that. I said, ‘So, no other thoughts?’ He said no. I asked if he was sure. He paused, then said, ‘What am I missing?’ He started flipping through it again and said, ‘Hey… is that… and is that…?’ and started laughing. “They all loved their alter-egos. The characters never caught on with the general audience quite as much as might have been ideal, alas—what I wouldn’t have given for a set of Threatening Three action figures— but they were pretty beloved by industry pros, and rick taylor those of us working on the books absolutely loved working on them, hence their semi-frequent returns. Every ten issues, like clockwork… for the first three times, at least.” Something really special in the history of comic books quietly began in TBA #6 (Mar. 1993)—every issue for the remainder of the run, two lucky readers would win original Batman Adventures illustrations by Mike Parobeck and Rick Burchett, a gesture that spoke volumes as to the commitment the creators had to both the title and their fans. “The free art giveaway was absolutely 100% Mike Parobeck’s idea,” says Scott Peterson. “For one thing, he was so fast that drawing 22 pages per month plus a cover just wasn’t nearly enough to keep him busy—that was maybe three weeks out of the month. And rather than work fewer hours or take a week off every month, he started doing drawings for free, both because he had the time and because he thought it might help boost sales. “Of course, doing two of those per month still only took up at most one of his extra days. I’m not sure how many he ended up doing—and Rick Burchett insisted upon inking them for free, once he found out what Mike was doing—but at least two per issues from the time we announced it until the end of then; people could request certain characters, but when he’d done all the requests, Mike would just start drawing whatever and whomever.” Rick Burchett continues, “I’m not sure how many pieces were given away. I know that after a while they began to pile up, and I spent many a late night finishing them. I don’t know if editorial considered it a success, but I’m pretty sure the readers did.”

Driven Batty Harvey Bullock’s encounter with Man-Bat, from Batman Adventures #7 (Aug. 1993). By Puckett/ Parobeck/Burchett/Taylor. TM & © DC Comics.

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Harley’s Coming Out Party (left) Harley Quinn’s first comic-book appearance, in TBA #12 (Sept. 1993). Cover by Parobeck and Burchett. (right) In 2015, DC published this convention variant of that issue with a new cover by Burchett (who signed this copy). TM & © DC Comics.

IT’S ALL IN THE TONE

By now it was clear the tone of the book was firmly established. The regular team was in place and had found its groove, delivering a well-balanced mix of stories—from the comedy of the Killer Croc story in #7 (Apr. 1993) to the heartbreak of #8’s Clayface story, it was all part of the plan, according to Scott Peterson: “The tone of the book was kind of my contribution to the entire thing. Once Kelley, Mike, and Rick were really firing on all cylinders, I’d be the one telling Kelley what I wanted the next issue to be. Current issue a bit on the heavy side? Let’s make the next one funny. Now let’s go sad with the one after that. I’d tell him which villain I wanted him to write, or if I wanted him to create someone new, or whatever. And being Kelley, he not only didn’t mind—he’d just as soon be handed an assignment with some parameters, rather than entirely open-ended, so he’d already know where to start and what to push against—he’d do it brilliantly, whether it was one of his hysterically funny issues, or heartbreaking, or whatever.” Rick Burchett adds, saying of Peterson’s contribution, “He doesn’t get near the credit he deserves for that book. Scott set the tone for the whole project. He never treated it like anything less than one of the monthly Batman titles. To him, it wasn’t just a ‘kid’s book’ or a ‘TV tie-in,’ it was a Batman comic, just as important as Batman and Detective Comics. He was our biggest advocate and cheerleader. To this day, he’s still the best editor I ever worked for.” H

HISTORY IN THE MAKING

While readers may not have realized it at the time, TBA #12 (Sept. 1993) would prove to be a landmark issue and remains a much-sought-after back issue to this day. Sporting a reworked “Batgirl Adventures” logo, the issue marks not only the first appearance of the animated Batgirl (the issue shipped around a month before her debut episode aired) but also the first comic-book appearance of Harley Quinn, predating her DCU debut (Batman: Harley Quinn) by some six years. “I had to force Kelley to write Batgirl,” recalls Scott Peterson. “He was always somewhat resistant to writing her, which was funny, because he was extraordinarily good at it, and probably ended up writing more Batgirl stories than any other character other than Batman.” The issue is full of great touches—including terrific interplay between Harley and Ivy, who were still in the very early days of their partnership—

as well a sneaky cameo thanks to Mike Parobeck. “Mike is the one who inserted the Los Bros characters [from Love and Rockets] into the costume party scene,” explains Scott Peterson, “and then Kelley, delighted by Mike’s addition, added the dialog later.” While Puckett may have been resistant to Batgirl, not all the creative team shared his feelings. Colorist Rick Taylor cites this as his favorite issue: “Issue #12,” he recalls fondly. “I was all about Babs Gordon— but who’d of thought the issue would become ‘historic’ for the first funnybook appearance of Harley Quinn?!? “Here’s where I go off on how great a guy Mike was,” Taylor adds. “I only met him once and talked to him about six times, usually about the book. When I called him to gush about how great issue #12 was, he seemed genuinely touched. A few months later, Scott brought me some art from that issue—Mike had given me a couple of pages. Man….” H

LESS IS MORE

In addition to setting the overall tone of the book, Scott Peterson was also responsible for another of the book’s defining aspects. In an effort to set it apart from the other Bat-titles on the shelves, his directive to the team was to keep the number of panels to four per page. This had the added bonus of giving the art a faster, cartoon-like feel. An excellent early example can be found in #13’s (Oct. 1993) “Last Tango in Paris,” in which Batman and Talia pursue a thief who has stolen a “statue of great value” from her father. The fight sequences in this issue are especially dynamic, benefitting immensely from the panel layout, but likewise so too do the more intimate character moments, such as Bruce and Talia’s day spent sightseeing. Somewhat ironically, the most powerful use of the layout is probably on the least actionoriented page of the entire issue. As Talia walks away on the final page, having used and discarded both Batman and the statue respectively, the Dark Knight stands alone in front of a burning building. As the flames die out and it begins to rain, Batman drops his gaze ever so slightly. There is more emotion contained in those three wordless panels than in an entire issue of some other titles. Clearly, others agreed. “A few days after The Batman Adventures #13 came out,” recalls Scott Peterson, “Matt Wagner called me up to say, ‘That’s the best comic book that’s going to be published this year.’ Needless to say, I was blown away—even though I pretty much agreed with him!”

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Toon Titans Courtesy of Charles Kochman, a sampler of Superman & Batman Magazine ads and artwork. TM & © DC Comics.

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From Hero to Zero Superman & Batman Adventures Magazine editor Charles Kochman, now the editor of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, in his office. Magazines TM & © DC Comics.

BUILDING A UNIVERSE, EIGHT PAGES AT A TIME

In what could well be a unique turn of events, a spin-off comic itself inspired a spin-off magazine. The Eisner-nominated Superman & Batman Magazine (S&BM) was launched in 1993 by the Welch Publishing Group. Aimed at kids and featuring a selection of articles, puzzles, and jokes, the true gems of each issue (as far as older fans were concerned) were the all-new pinups, Who’s Who-style Hero Files, and stories set in the DC Animated Universe (DCAU). Written by Kelley Puckett, who was joined by TBA regulars Mike Parobeck, Rick Burchett, and Rick Taylor, the eight-page Batman stories were essentially bonus installments of the monthly title. Highlights include the first issue’s origin tale—which Scott Peterson described in TBA #15 as “possibly the best Batman origin story I’ve ever read,” and #6’s “A Penguin Scorned,” featuring the Penguin’s latest attempts to join—and subsequently take his revenge upon—Gotham’s elite. “That was another project that came out of that time and one of the things I’m proudest of,” says Rick Burchett. “Remember, this was before the Justice League shows were produced, so we got to imagine what these new characters would look like designed in that style. I think Mike did some of his best work on those little stories.” “I am very proud of the magazine. It was an important first step for me at DC, and 25 or so years later I remember it fondly,” says S&BM editor Charles Kochman, who is now the editor of the bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney, which has over 180 million copies in print around the world. “At its height, it was selling hundreds of thousands of copies through the Publishers Clearing House, making it one of DC’s bestselling titles. The first issue alone sold a quarter of a million copies, I believe.” Kochman, who started work with DC Comics in 1993, was the first editor of licensed publishing. “Before that, the great Joe Orlando oversaw all of licensing (merchandise and apparel as well as publishing), and a decision was made to hire an editor with a background in licensing to oversee the book publishing that DC was licensing,” he explains. “Our department was small, but our VP of business affairs and licensed publishing was Chantal d’Aulnis, and our manager of business affairs and licensed publishing was Sandy Resnick. The three of us would meet regularly about business opportunities. It was either Chantal or Sandy who had the idea to license the DC characters to Welch Publishing and create a magazine for kids with all-new material. Once the deal was in place, the hard part was making it happen editorially, working with my editorial counterparts at Welch—Adam Philips and Scott Sonneborn. Eventually they both came to work at DC. Adam is still there, in fact. “When I started to roll up my sleeves and conceptualize the magazine, it became clear that we needed a unifying vision for the characters, especially because the magazine was for kids, not collectors. Batman: The Animated Series was very popular, and I thought it would be great to extrapolate that style onto the rest of the DC Universe. It seems like the obvious choice now, but at that time it was really radical.

“In licensed publishing, my goal was to work with the editors in the DCU to get the best stories possible,” Kochman continues. “I didn’t really get to establish canon for the DCU so much as follow it— certainly not contradict it. Which is why Neal Pozner, who oversaw creative services at DC, encouraged me to liaise with the various assistant editors and group editors. I would have regular meetings with Scott Peterson and Jordan B. Gorfinkel on the Batman stories, Mike Carlin and Mike McAvennie on Superman, Kevin Dooley on Green Lantern, Brian Augustyn on the Flash—a lot of those editors offered to write the stories for the magazine, or offered up their talent from the monthly books.” Consequently, the stories were penned by a wide roster of DC writers, while art on most of the stories remained in the hands of Mike Parobeck and Rick Burchett. These adventures offered readers their first glimpse into an expanding DCAU, debuting many characters including Hawkman, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, and (undoubtedly to the joy of Rick Taylor), Captain Marvel (Shazam!). While it was aimed at a younger crowd, Kochman does remember one light-hearted attempt to broaden their audience: “As an April Fools’ joke, Adam Philips created a ‘Vertigo for Kids’ sample. Sandy kept up the joke by sending back a contract saying we’d love to do it. There was a Little Johnny Constantine Heckblazer and Womb Boy: The First Trimester (a Peter Milligan joke).”

BATMAN BEYOND THE COMICS In addition to the Superman & Batman Magazine, members of the TBA creative team worked on a number of other side-projects including How to Draw Batman (Walter Foster Publishing, Inc., 1998), written and illustrated by Ty Templeton; Batman: The Joker’s Apprentice (Little, Brown and Company, 1996), written by Chuck Dixon and drawn by Warner Bros. Animation artist John Calmette; Batman: The Animated Series Pop-up Playbook (Little, Brown and Company, 1994), with art by Mike Parobeck and Rick Burchett; and the children’s book Batman and the Missing Penguins (Golden Books, 1995), written by Suzan Colón and illustrated by Parobeck and Burchett, who were joined this time by Dave Tanguay. “One of the nice things about working on the animated books was that you were also offered opportunities to do work on children’s books that featured the look of the TV series,” says Rick Burchett. “I did a ton of those things! They were fun to do and DC had some great editors in their licensing office, Charlie Kochman and Steve Korté.”

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 41

TM & © DC Comics.

Superman & Batman Magazine remained popular throughout its run, and things were going along well— until Marvel Comics purchased Welch Publishing. “It wasn’t feasible to have our content branded by them, so we had to pull our magazine out of their subscription services,” says Kochman. “We decided to make our last issue as deluxe as possible and go out with a bang. They also peeled away our editorial resources at Welch to help create the non-comics pages, so we decided to do an all-comics issue to fill out the magazine.” The result was issue #8, featuring a full-length Justice League tale written by Roger Stern, with pencils by Ty Templeton and inks by Rick Burchett. However, that was not quite the end. The magazine’s premature cancellation would produce one final surprise in the form of “Cruise to Nightmare,” an unpublished Poison Ivy story by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, with colors by painter Mark Chiarello. “I had a relationship with Bruce and Paul going back to my first days at DC, when I was working on a number of tie-ins to the Animated Series,” Kochman explains. “I think I asked them to contribute for the first issue and kept asking them until they were able to fit it into their schedules. By the time they did, our last issue had

wrapped up, so we had that leftover inventory story. Years later, editor KC Carlson saw a copy of it somewhere and asked if he could include it in the upcoming Adventures in the DC Universe #3 (June 1997).” H

STANDING APART FROM THE CROWD

HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST ONE-SHOT

Despite laying the groundwork for a wider DC Animated Universe, for the most part TBA existed in its own world, and except for a couple of obvious exceptions, there weren’t even a lot of guest-stars. However, this was not mandated from above, but rather a conscious decision on the part of Scott Peterson, who had already taken steps to ensure the title stood out on its own. “I think I had pretty free reign as far as using other characters, but I didn’t actually really want to,” Peterson says. “I was hesitant to use big-name characters, such as the Flash or Green Lantern or whomever, before the show did—I didn’t want to contradict anything they’d later do, and I didn’t want to usurp their—authority isn’t quite the right word—I just didn’t want to step on their toes. So, we could have used Wonder Woman, say— assuming the Wonder Woman editor was okay with it— but I just didn’t think it would have been a cool move. So, no, I didn’t really have much interest in using established DC characters—if anything, I was just the opposite. I felt like the show had already given us so much to play with, why try to use other characters which might end up confusing things down the road somewhere?” As the book neared the mid-point of its second year and Batman set off in pursuit of Ra’s al Ghul in #17 (Feb. 1994), the first TBA one-shot hit the shelves. It was a little project called Batman Adventures: Mad Love. While Harley Quinn had made her debut on the small screen, it was this Eisner Award-winning one-shot that would finally reveal her origin, filling in many of the more explicit details the animated series had not—or could not have—addressed. “Even though The Batman Adventures was specifically aimed at a younger audience, I think we were able to do some things in the comics that would not have gotten past the TV censors,” says Bruce Timm. “We got a tiny bit of pushback from the editors at DC over ‘adult content,’ but the actual Comics Code people had no problem with our stuff, that I can recall—whereas every single episode of the animated series involved many, many, many notes from the broadcast standards and practices folks.” According to Timm, the story behind the one-shot was particularly straightforward: “Paul Dini and I were having lunch with Denny O’Neil at the San Diego Comic-Con—my memory is that he casually suggested that if Paul and I would like to do a Batman comic someday, we should give him a call—or maybe we floated the idea ourselves and he said, ‘Sure, anytime.’ Anyhow, a few months later, we came up

When Editors Go Bad TBA’s Threatening Three were based upon DC Comics group editors (top panel, left to right) Denny O’Neil, Archie Goodwin, and Mike Carlin. Original art page by Parobeck and Burchett from issue #20 (May 1994), courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

42 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

Love Psychotic Style Uh-oh. Mistah J’s not happy with Harley on this page from Batman Adventures: Mad Love. TM & © DC Comics.

with the idea for Mad Love, contacted Denny, who put us in touch with Scott Peterson, and we were off to the races—literally as simple as that!” While it may have been “as simple as that,” the finished work is anything but. Highly deserving of its praise and awards, the story explores the complex relationships between Harley and the Joker, and Batman and the Joker, far more deeply than had been possible on the animated series. In a book full of standout moments, the scene where Batman admits to the Joker mid-fight that Harley came closer to killing him than he ever did—and the look of fury on the Joker’s face after Batman derisively calls him Puddin’—is worth the price of admission alone. While this was the first time either Dini or Timm had worked on the spin-off, it would certainly not be their last—in fact, they would return multiple times over the next decade, working on projects both together and separately. Outside of these official assignments however, they did not exert any influence over the books. “We didn’t have any direct input on the comics,” Timm says. “DC never solicited our opinions on what they were doing, nor would we have had time to give them notes if they had—I learned very early on not to get my nose bent out of joint if they did something in the comics that we would never have done—my own personal way of dealing with it was to consider only the animated episodes themselves as true ‘canon’— which means that even Mad Love wasn’t purely canonical until we adapted it for the animated series.

“MY NAME… IS TWO-FACE.” H

SUPER FRIENDS

The Batman Adventures #25 (early Nov. 1994) played host to the biggest guest-star of the entire run—the Man The Batman Adventures continued of Steel himself. With Superman: The Animated Series still two years away, the portrayal of Superman and Lex to build upon its strengths Luthor would be in keeping with their appearances during its second year featuring bruce timm a return of Batgirl—teaming up as established in the Superman & Batman Magazine— with Robin for the first time—and Courtesy of Comic Vine. that is, an animated take on the then-current mainreturns of the Scarecrow, the Threatening Three, and stream DC Universe continuity, hence Superman’s long hair and the Man-Bat, among others. Among all of these returns presence of Lex Luthor II. though, is a first appearance. Bruce Timm offers his thoughts on the appearance: “We tried really While in early issues—as was the case in early episodes hard in the early days to keep BTAS grounded in as ‘real’ a world as of BTAS—Harvey Dent had played a minor role, Two-Face possible. Sure, there were man-bats and mad scientists and killer robots, had yet to make an appearance. That would all change in but no space aliens—thus, no Superman—also, the only DC heroes we #22’s (July 1994) excellent “Good Face, Bad Face.” With used as guest-stars were characters we could rationalize somewhat. the team delivering a truly threatening portrayal—Dent even For example, Zatanna was more of a stage magician than an actual manages to intimidate the Joker—the story fits in early in his sorceress—we had zero interest in having Superman guest-star in BTAS. transformation as Bruce Wayne struggles to save his friend’s “When we did eventually do the Superman series (and later, crossed fractured psyche after he escapes from Arkham Asylum. over with the BTAS continuity) we fought really hard to keep Superman Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story, though, is a in his ‘classic’ look—DC at the time was insisting that Superman’s new detail offered about Two-Face’s use of the coin. Literally long-haired look was permanent, not just a passing phase—but (A) I putting his life on the line, Batman takes a chance that Harvey is didn’t believe it and figured he’d be back to his old hairstyle sooner still somewhere inside Two-Face, which is why he needs the coin— than later, and (B) I disliked the long-haired look intensely. “Did I know they were going to have Superman show up in The he won’t let Two-Face’s actions define him. While Two-Face argues that it is just a theory, Batman’s hunch pays off and Two-Face Batman Adventures? I guess so, but whether I heard about it from collapses, unable to choose whether or not to shoot Batman the folks at DC or just through the grapevine, I don’t recall. Did they without a flip of his coin. While it does not redeem him, the consult me on what he should like in the ‘animated style’? Nope, story offers the character a glimmer of hope. I don’t think they did. Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 43

Same Timm, Next Year (top left) Bruce Timm’s cover to 1994’s TBA Annual #1, and (bottom) an unused cover preliminary for that issue (courtesy of Heritage). (top right) Annual #2 (1995), guest-starring the Demon, with Mike Royer inks giving Bruce’s cover pencils an extra Kirby boost. TM & © DC Comics.

A CHRISTMAS CRACKER

THE SANDS ARE RUNNING OUT

Fans must have been on Santa’s “nice” list as they received a special present in their Christmas stocking in 1994—one wrapped in a striking Bruce Timm cover. The 64-page one-shot Batman Adventures Holiday Special #1 (Jan. 1995) is truly deserving of the title “special.” Drawn by members of the BTAS animation staff including Kevin Altieri, Butch Lukic, and Dan Riba, the collection of short stories was tied together by a holiday theme. It also followed in the footsteps of the previous year’s Mad Love, winning the Eisner Award for Best Single Issue/Single Story… and likewise, being turned into an episode of The New Batman Adventures (TNBA), in this case under the title “Holiday Knights.” That is, with one notable omission. Written by Paul Dini with art and color by Glen Murakami, “White Christmas” manages in just 13 pages to, if possible, be more heart-wrenching than Dini’s Mr. Freeze episode, “Heart of Ice,” as Mr. Freeze visits his wife’s Nora’s grave on what would have been their tenth wedding anniversary. With no snow forecast until January, Freeze breaks out of Arkham determined to make it snow—but it is his motive that tugs at the heartstrings. It had snowed on their wedding night and Freeze’s beloved wife loved the snow—his final words, “I thought it… sad that there should be none this year. And I wouldn’t want my Nora to be sad tonight” hang in the air as Batman leads the broken man back to Arkham. Visually stunning, Murakami maintains his own style while at the same time evoking that of Mike Mignola, who designed the animated Mr. Freeze. While the other sequences—which included Batgirl teaming up with a comically undercover Bullock and Montoya to take down Clayface, the Joker’s attempts to ring in the New Year with a little mass murder, and two old friends sharing a coffee—are all extremely solid, it is this standout sequence which would not be animated due to a continuity conflict created by the Warner Home Video animated film, Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero. “We tried to follow the show’s continuity and tried not to contradict or establish anything,” says Scott Peterson. “We were following their lead. And while we’d occasionally try to do an issue that specifically came before or after a certain episode, in general, we just concentrated on not contradicting anything.” It is therefore somewhat ironic that an issue created by the show’s animators would in turn be contradicted by an animated movie. Bruce Timm explains further, “As far as I was concerned, Nora Fries was already dead in ‘Heart of Ice’—100% dead, dead as a doornail—her lifeless corpse preserved in the cryo-chamber, not still-clinging-to-life in suspended animation. “We wanted to adapt the Mr. Freeze story that Glen Murakami had drawn for the holiday special—but unfortunately, in between BTAS and TNBA Boyd Kirkland and Randy Rogel had brought the ‘late’ Mrs. Fries back to life in their movie SubZero, so we couldn’t.” As Timm previously stated, once a story was on the screen, only then was it considered canon. “Yes. SubZero was absolutely canon, even though I had no involvement in the project (and I personally would never have brought Nora Fries back to life),” he remarks. The movie would be subsequently adapted as Batman & Robin Adventures: Sub-Zero by Kelley Puckett, with art by Joe Staton and Terry Beatty. The one-shot would not only introduce the revived Nora Fries to the DCAU, setting her up for future appearances, but it would present the final in-print appearances of the characters in their original BTAS style. It would also be one of the last times original series colorist Rick Taylor would work on a DCAU title. “Comic adaptations of animated series were always relegated to the bottom of the barrel, getting the least attention in the line,” opines Taylor. “But Batman Adventures made fun comics cool again and started the all-ages wing of comics. The team participated wherever possible for the stuff from Joe Orlando’s special project group so we could maintain the look of everything. For me, Batman Adventures was a step toward comics being fun again.” Although TBA was heading towards its conclusion, there were still some great stories left to tell. During the book’s final year Batgirl and Robin would team up yet again (#26), Batman would teach a grieving widower the futility of vengeance (#27), the Threatening Three’s origin would be revealed (#30), and Anarky would make an appearance

44 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

Not So Cold-Hearted After All This poignant scene concluded The Batman Adventures: Holiday Special #1. TM & © DC Comics.

in a special issue by Anarky co-creator Alan Grant, with guest pencils by Dev Madan (#31). There would also be just enough time to sneak in another Annual. After the success of the Holiday Special, Glen Murakami, Paul Dini, and Bruce Timm teamed up once again to create a tribute to Jack Kirby in TBA Annual #2 (1995), which introduced Etrigan the Demon to the DCAU. What had begun as a seemingly casual pitch became a looming deadline, and as a result it would be a truly collaborative effort with all three co-plotting and Murakami and Timm sharing art duties—Murakami would also color the issue— with the whole piece taking a mere three weeks from start to finish. Although the collaborative approach was particularly intense due to time constraints, it does highlight the difference between the processes of creating comics and animation. “The biggest difference is that in comics, it’s a much more direct collaboration,” explains Bruce Timm. “In animation, you’re collaborating with dozens and dozens of people: the writer, the story editor, the director, the character and background designers, the storyboard artists, the film editor, the music composer, the sound designer, plus an entire overseas animation studio with its own animation directors and supervisors, animators, background painters, etc.—in comics, it’s just me, the writer, the editor, the letterer, and the colorist. In animation, whatever art I do gets filtered through other hands—even in a ‘best case’ scenario, where I’m doing the majority of the character designs and storyboards (as happened with the ‘Laughing Fish’ episode of BTAS), the actual animation drawings are being drawn by someone on the other side of the planet— in comics, the drawings you see are actually my drawings (so, if they suck, I can’t blame anybody but myself!)” H

GOING OUT ON A HIGH

The Batman Adventures would finish as it began— with a three-part storyline. Absent for issues #29–31, Mike Parobeck returned in fine form sharing art duties with Rick Burchett in a tale that pitted an amnesiac Batman against Hugo Strange. In what had been a hallmark of the book, writers Puckett and Templeton took an established villain and added even more layers to their character, this time building a backstory for Strange involving the tragic death of his son and a father who couldn’t cope with such a loss. Having built its reputation primarily with “done in one” stories, this multi-part arc allows the story and characters to really breathe and it is a fitting end to an acclaimed series. And with that, TBA was over—but the adventures were far from it. The reasons for a series relaunch were explained by editor Scott Peterson in text page of The Batman and Robin Adventures #1 (Nov. 1995): “TBA was the most critically acclaimed superhero book in years. It had a, well, a feel utterly unlike any other book being published today… the real origin of that tone was simply the creative sparks borne out of the working relationships of Kelley Puckett, Mike Parobeck, and Rick Burchett… When two of those three decided that, although they had loved working on TBA, after three years they wanted to move on, I thought it was the time to end the book. It would be absolutely impossible to just replace any of those three, much less two-thirds of the team. I thought it better to go out on a high note.” And leave on a high note they did.

THE ALL-NEW, ALL-DIFFERENT…

It would have been immediately apparent to regular readers of TBA that The Batman and Robin Adventures (B&RAdv) was not merely a simple rebranding. The new book would quickly establish its own look and tone, carving out its own place in the wider DCAU. Noticeable in their absence were Kelley Puckett and Mike Parobeck, but also gone was colorist Rick Taylor, and with them went the three-act structure. “I don’t really recall exactly why we dropped the three-act structure when it switched to The Batman and Robin Adventures,” says Scott Peterson, “but I assume it was in an effort to differentiate the new book from its predecessor.” Also gone for the most part was a hallmark of the Parobeck style—pages featuring four to five panels. While Ty Templeton and Rick Burchett had both penciled issues of The Batman Adventures, they adopted a new approach which often featured characters breaking out of panels or panels inset or laid over the top of others. In addition, Paul Dini and Ty Templeton’s scripts were “talkier” than Puckett’s—and when combined with Linda Medley’s coloring, the pages looked noticeably different to those of its predecessor.

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 45

“NOT THE ONLY TWO-FACE IN GOTHAM”

MAINTAINING THE BALANCE

THE BEST-LAID PLANS

WELCOME TO METROPOLIS

The new title debuted with a two-part Two-Face tale that pits the villain against both Bruce Wayne and Batman thanks to a truly mean-spirited scheme hatched by the Joker. The relationship between Bruce and the former Harvey Dent had not been revisited since TBA #22, and this story arc presented a renewed focus on the former friends. It also allowed for a return of Harvey Dent’s former fiancée Grace, who had played such an integral part of the BTAS’ “Two-Face” episodes. Driven to a jealous rage by the Joker (perhaps in payback for their confrontation in TBA #22, or maybe, as he states, just “because it was Tuesday!”), Two-Face escapes Arkham convinced Wayne has been covering up a romantic relationship with Grace. The final panel of #1 reminds readers just how truly threatening and unpredictable a foe he is. The stakes are raised in part two as Two-Face kidnaps not only Grace, but also Dick Grayson in an attempt to lure Bruce Wayne into a trap. It is these actions which finally end Two-Face’s relationship with Grace, Bruce—and Batman, who, having escaped the villain’s trap, confronts him and calls him “Two-Face” rather than Harvey. When questioned on this, Batman realizes “There’s nothing left to save.” However, it is Grace who delivers the deepest cut of all, calling Two-Face “a monster.” As the story ends, it is apparent from the tears rolling down Grace’s cheeks that their relationship is finally over. The title wastes no time in presenting more of Batman’s classic foes, with the Riddler on hand for a Christmas tale (#3) and the Penguin taking the spotlight of the first Templetonwritten/Burchett-penciled issue (#4). While he doesn’t have a particular favorite issue, B&RAdv #6 stands out for Rick Burchett. “If I was forced to choose a favorite issue,” he says, “it would probably be the story ‘Round Robin.’ I got to pencil and ink that one. Robin had been kidnapped, but Bruce pretended he had quit and went about finding a replacement. During the interview process there was room for quite a bit of humor with the applicants without sacrificing the dramatic nature of the story. A well-balanced yarn.” Balance, it must be said, had been such an important feature of TBA, and thanks to Scott Peterson’s leadership it continued during B&RAdv. A fine example of the creators’ abilities to shift gears is seen in the very next issue, which expands upon the Ventriloquist’s past, revealing his connection to a large crime family. Adding “mommy issues” to the list of villain Arnold ty templeton Wesker’s psychological problems, the tale manages to tread the already well-worn road of his love/hate relationship with Scarface, while adding a Photo by 5of7. whole dimension of pathos to the character. The Batman and Robin Adventures #8 (July 1996) would see the return of Paul Dini, this time in the role of plotter, while Ty Templeton picked up scripting duties. The new Dynamic Duo of Poison Ivy and Robin were featured on the cover by Rick Burchett in a spin on the classic Carmine Infantino/Murphy Anderson Silver Age Batman and Robin pose. It’s a tale of jealousy, betrayal, and hurt feelings—and that’s just on Harley Quinn’s part—and full of fun and hijinks as the Boy Wonder falls under the spell of Poison Ivy, becoming her unwitting heist strategist, much to the chagrin of an unappreciated Harley Quinn. Rick Burchett is in top form, shifting from action to comedy with ease. While Dini would write the upcoming B&RAdv Annual #1, this would be the last issue until #17—which in turn would be his final—in which he would also again be credited as plotter. Scott Peterson explains the change in plans: “The plan was for Paul to write about half the issues, and then Ty to write the other half. Ty would pencil the Paul issues and Rick would pencil the Ty issues. But Paul’s day job kept him so busy that he wasn’t able to do quite as many as might have been ideal. On the other hand, when your other creative team is Ty Templeton and Rick Burchett, well, that’s also one hell of a starting lineup, so I couldn’t exactly be upset. Either way, I won big time.”

Dynamic Duo (top) The terrific trio of Dini, Templeton, and Burchett launched DC’s new Batman and Robin Adventures book with #1 (Nov. 1995). Cover by Templeton. (bottom) A Burchett fave: B&RAdv issue #6. TM & © DC Comics.

With the end of the first year of B&RAdv in sight, Rick Burchett would soon find himself considerably busier. Not only would he continue to ink the title through issue #17, he would also start as the regular penciler on the newly launched Superman Adventures based on Superman: The Animated Series, a position he would maintain until #15. “Batman Adventures had been a success, so Superman Adventures was an obvious step,” says Burchett. “Since my presence on the Batman book wasn’t as crucial as some of the others, I was approached by Mike McAvennie in the Superman office to see if I’d like to help launch the Superman title. It was to be written by Scott McCloud and inks by Terry Austin. I figured those two were bound to make me look good, so I moved over to that book for its first year.” But his plate was clearly not completely full, as he also would ink—along with Terry Beatty— the first B&RAdv Annual.

46 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

A RETURN—AND A FAREWELL

Batman and Robin Adventures Annual #1 would tie into the canon universe with a story written by Paul Dini with art by a host of talent including Ty Templeton, Dev Madan, Rick Burchett, and Mike Parobeck. The Annual would feature not only the return of Phantasm, but the final work of Mike Parobeck, who had passed away shortly before the book’s release. A tribute to the young artist by Scott Peterson would conclude the issue. “A critic recently said that Mike’s work would finally be truly appreciated in 20 years, long after the flash-in-the-pans were forgotten. As it happens, we won’t have to wait quite that long.” And, as it also happens, it is now 20-plus years later and new fans are still discovering Mike Parobeck thanks to much of his work on the title remaining in print, while old fans still mourn for a talent lost far too soon. [Editor’s note: A remembrance of artist Mike Parobeck appears later in this issue.] While stories had been—and would continue to be—borne out of episodes, the Annual would tie directly into Batman’s on-screen adventures. Beginning with a recap of the final minutes of the movie Mask of the Phantasm, “The Shadow of the Phantasm” featured the return of both Andrea Beaumont and Arthur Reeves, the latter still wearing the grin he received as a result of the Joker’s toxin during the film. It is a highly satisfying tale which manages to tie up some loose ends, introduce a new female villain (Kitsune), and reinforce the fact that it is unlikely Andrea Beaumont will ever get a happy ending. H

NEW KID ON THE BLOCK

With B&RAdv #12 (Nov. 1996) came another issue tying into an episode as well as a new regular penciler. Having penciled #9’s solo Batgirl outing, and a chapter of the recently released Annual, Brandon Kruse would remain on the title for most of the rest of the run. Kruse delivered a particularly fluid take on the characters under the inks of Rick Burchett, who by this time had worked with a variety of pencilers: “We were so lucky to have the people we had working on those books,” Burchett says. “Everyone tried to make the book the best thing on the stands. No one ever gave less than the best they were capable of. It was lightning in a bottle. I was maybe the luckiest one in the bunch. I got to ink great pencilers, occasionally pencil an issue, do a cover now and then. The changes I made from one penciler to another were minor—the job was the same as it was when I started. Keep everything on model.” H

WELCOME ADDITIONS

RICK BURCHETT’S BIG ADVENTURE

“After the ceremonies were over I hung around hoping to get a chance to talk to Mr. Eisner. He was up on the stage talking to some other people and when there was an opening I stumbled up there and said something inane about how much his work meant to me. We talked for a few minutes and I walked away with my award autographed on the back, in gold pen, by Will Eisner. Quite an evening.” H

OUT OF THIS WORLD

The book would draw to a close with #25 (Dec. 1997), but not before a strong Two-Face story in #22 which brought back Grace one final time. Unlike the closing moments of #2, “Fifty Fifty” offers a glimmer of hope for Two-Face, who shows genuine concern for Grace and even takes a bullet for Batman. Under a Ty Templeton cover drawn as part of “The Faces of the DC Universe” line-wide event which saw every title feature a closeup portrait of the book’s star, the final issue’s double-length “Demon in the Sky” pits Batman against Ra’s al Ghul, who has commandeered a UFO, having been abducted by “little green men”—or more specifically, little gray ones. Flying in the face of Timm’s “no space aliens” rule, it is Batman-meets-The X Files in a literally out-of-this-world tale which as a result feels much more a product of its time than almost any other issue.

Dick and Deadman Brandon Kruse, inked by Rick Burchett, from B&RAdv #15 (Feb. 1998), courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

Up until this point, B&RAdv had limited its scope to characters established in the show, but as the DCAU expanded with the launch of STAS and Adventures in the DC Universe, the second year of the title would see the introduction of Deadman (#15) and Huntress (#19). While all the previous incarnations of the Huntress had shared a link with Batman, Deadman was also cleverly tied into the mythos as a member of Haley’s Circus, Dick Grayson’s old stomping grounds. While Boston Brand would make it through the issue in one piece, the possibility of a more-familiar Deadman making an appearance was now a very real possibility, although readers would have to wait until Batman: Gotham Adventures #6 (Nov. 1998) for this to happen. Another highlight of the run is the long-awaited appearance of the Mad Hatter in #17 (Apr. 1997). Penciler Joe Staton brings his own style to a story which finally sees the Mad Hatter marry his beloved Alice and live happily ever after—at least in his own mind—as well as Robin save the day. A hit with readers, the veteran artist would soon return, penciling Batgirl’s second solo appearance in #21, the 1997 B&RAdv Annual/SupAdv Annual crossover, and The World’s Finest adaptation of the three-episode TNBA storyline, among others. Although it would see the end of B&RAdv, 1997 was a big year for the DCAU and Rick Burchett in particular. Nominated for multiple Eisner Awards for his work on SupAdv, B&RAdv, and the Batgirl Adventures one-shot, Rick’s win the following year at the San Diego Comic-Con would prove extra special. “I won three Eisner Awards for work done on those books, but for me the most memorable one was the second, in 1998 for the Batman and Robin Adventures,” recalls Burchett. “I was in San Diego that year and was handed my Eisner Award by Will Eisner! Talk about a surreal experience. Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 47

Go with a Smile! A Joker-ish Arthur Reeves and the return of Phantasm made Batman and Robin Adventures Annual #1 (Nov. 1996) a stand-out. TM & © DC Comics.

NEW BOOK, NEW LOOK

A TRIUMPHANT RETURN

BACK TO WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

On board for Batman: Gotham Adventures (BGA) were Ty Templeton, Rick Burchett, and Terry Beatty—however, for the first time since the launch of Batman Adventures, Scott Peterson was not editor. In his place was the familiar face of Darren Vincenzo, who had been Peterson’s assistant editor since TBA #12. The series began strongly and featured a succession of key rogues’ gallery members such as Two-Face, Mr. Freeze, and Catwoman, as well as some welcome guest-appearances including the Gray Ghost and Deadman—who this time would become a ghost. An early standout is #13 (June 1999), in which Kelley Puckett returned to write a farewell to the Threatening Three’s Mr. Nice. Dedicated to Archie Goodwin, the issue perfectly blends humor and sentimentality without becoming overly saccharine in its tribute to the editor, who died in 1998 [and whose life and career will be covered in BI #103—ed.]. As Mr. Nice is escorted into the light, the Perfessor reminds a tearful Mastermind that everything ends—“Even stories.”

FILLING IN THE BLANKS

Writing in B&RAdv #25, Scott Peterson explained the book’s cancelation, citing the recent “radical changes” in the animated series that was now known as The New Batman Adventures. However, unlike the animated series, they would not be launching straight into the new look, but rather—by way of their first miniseries—take the opportunity to fill in some missing details. Working with Paul Dini, a timeline of events that occurred during this three-year period was created—none of which, according to Bruce Timm, were ever planned for inclusion in TNBA. Written by Hilary Bader with art by Bo Hampton and Terry Beatty, the fiveissue Batman Adventures: The Lost Years expanded upon such turning points as Dick Grayson’s departure and transition into Nightwing and Batgirl’s move into a fulltime member of the team, while deftly weaving in and out the episodes “Old Wounds” and “Sins of the Father.” H “I WONDER IF HER PARENTS KNOW HOW SHE SPENDS HER NIGHTS?”

Released alongside Batman Adventures: The Lost Years, the Eisnernominated Batgirl Adventures is a particular highlight. “Oy to the World,” by Paul Dini and Rick Burchett, sees Barbara Gordon’s Christmas shopping plans once again interrupted by one of Gotham’s rogues— this time leading to the unlikely pairing of Batgirl and Harley Quinn as they unite to save Poison Ivy from the clutches of the evil Kitsune returning after her debut in the Paul Dini-penned The Batman and Robin Adventures Annual #1. The one-shot is particularly fun; it addresses a few juicy pieces of gossip and reminds readers that Harley Quinn should never be underestimated.

Scott Peterson would not be absent for long, however. With the departure of Ty Templeton, the former editor would return to the DCAU with #15 (Aug. 1999), this time as regular writer—a position he would hold for the remainder of the run. Usually paired with penciler Tim Levins, Peterson brought with him a return to the dynamic, minimal panel approach which was a hallmark of the Parobeck era. Writing in his final issue, #14, Ty Templeton summed up his feelings on his long association with the titles. “Writing (and occasionally drawing) Batman’s animated adventures has been a personal and professional highlight, not just for the chance to work with a character that’s meant the world to me since childhood, but because of the chance to work with so many of the most talented folks in comics.” Highlights of the 60-issue run included guest appearances by the Flash (#25), a touching Clayface story (#30), an appearance by the Phantom Stranger (from the guest team of Ed Brubaker and Brad Rader in #33), and a tribute to Dick Sprang (#37). The series was also fortunate to receive two covers by Darwyn Cooke (#45 and 50). “I wasn’t really privy as to why they canceled Batman: The Gotham Adventures,” explains Scott Peterson. “My editor just called me up one day and said we only had three more issues left—but I assume it’s because the sales weren’t what they’d have hoped, so they rebooted it in an effort to get the sales up.” Fittingly, the DCAU would come to an end with a book simply titled Batman Adventures. Hitting shelves a month after the final issue of Batman: Gotham Adventures, Batman Adventures (BA) #1 (June 2003) sported a Bruce Timm cover and a new, more “cartoony” style logo. The premiere issue also heralded the return of writer/penciler Ty Templeton and penciler/inker Rick Burchett, this time joined by writer Dan Slott (who would share the duties with Ty Templeton) and inker Terry Beatty. It stood apart from its immediate predecessor in many ways: Batman’s suit was redesigned in keeping with its Justice League Unlimited appearance; most issues featured a lead story and backup; and ongoing continuity and story arcs would play a greater role than ever before. The book would also—at least in early issues—downplay the roles of Robin and Batgirl, returning the spotlight to Batman. Conversely, the book also introduced multiple characters to the DCAU including Julie Madison (#2), Eel O’Brian,

48 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

Final Adventures (top) From Heritage’s archives, an undated, absolutely dynamite Poison Ivy vs. Batgirl illo by Rick Burchett. (middle) Some of DC’s later Batman animated comics: Batgirl Adventures #1 and Batman: Gotham Adventures #1, and (bottom) BGA #13 and the final series, Batman Adventures, issue #16. Characters TM & © DC Comics.

Bronze Tiger, and Deadshot (#5), and Black Mask and the False Face Society, and Black Spider (#6). Although only a month passed between the end of BGA and the beginning of BA, it was clear some time had elapsed in Gotham City, with many characters finding themselves in a change of circumstances, including Harvey Bullock’s new role away from the GCPD and an aging Alfred now walking with a cane. None, however, were as big a change as the newly elected Mayor Cobblepot (a.k.a. the Penguin). His win and subsequent time in office would provide a narrative through line for the first 13 issues of the new series. An ongoing storyline involving the Red Hood would also begin to play out, but sadly it would not be resolved before the book’s cancellation. H

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS WHEN YOU LEAVE

Despite all of these changes, they were not enough to save the book, and BA #17 would be its last. As Commissioner Gordon switches off the Bat-Signal and says to Batman to “Go get the bad guy,” the DCAU fades to black. “Presumably the reboot was then canceled again because the desired sales boost didn’t materialize,” offers Scott Peterson. “Obviously, the reboot was wonderful from a creative point of view, but that speaks to something which was always frustrating, from the very beginning. Because the Adventures line of books were always seen as ‘kiddie’ books, their sales always lagged well behind the rest of the comics, despite being at least as good from a creative standpoint. “I mean, we used to get more praise from more big-name creators on the Adventures books than the rest of the comics put together—but, of course, there are more non-pros reading books than there are pros (and at that point, most of the pros were getting the books free in their monthly comps). We were popular with small kids and older readers—meaning collegeaged and up—but at least back then, teenagers still seemed to make up the bulk of the buyers, and they wouldn’t touch a book that looked like it was aimed at little kids no matter how sophisticated the storytelling inside actually was. To quote the Bard, and so it goes.” And indeed, so it went. As to the reason for the books’ continued popularity 25 years on? Perhaps the final word on the subject should go to Ty Templeton, who, in writing his farewell in BGA #14, talked about how he is often asked if he ever wished he worked on the “real” Batman. His reply was always the same— “I do.” The author would like to thank Scott Peterson, Rick Burchett, Bruce Timm, Rick Taylor, and Charlie Kochman for their time and assistance. PHILIP YOUNGMAN has been a DC Comics fan for as long as he can remember. He cannot believe it has been 25 years since he picked up The Batman Adventures #1 and is thrilled to have played a small part in celebrating this milestone.

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 49

Comics legend Jim Steranko showcases his distinct take on the Dark Knight Detective on the cover of

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When Bruce Timm and company created Batman: The Animated Series, a new version of the DC Universe was born. Superman and the Justice League later got their own shows that spun off from the Dark Knight’s outing. With BACK ISSUE celebrating the 25th anniversary of the cartoon that gave birth to what has been called the “Timmverse,” it seems only fitting that the companion comic books featuring the animated versions of the Caped Crusader’s compatriots are covered.

ADVENTURES OF STEEL

by J a m e s

Heath Lantz

The Animated Universe Issues #1–19 of Adventures in the DC Universe and its Annual #1, featuring many of DC’s major and minor superstars in “animated” form. TM & © DC Comics.

The next logical step after the success of Batman: The Animated Series for Bruce Timm and company would be to work on Superman: The Animated Series. It flew onto television screens on September 6, 1996. The first issue of Superman Adventures debuted just a day earlier, with a November 1996 cover date. This wasn’t the first time readers saw an animated series version of the Last Son of Krypton. Batman Adventures #25 saw Superman team up with the Dark Knight in 1994. Written by Paul Dini with cover art by Bruce Timm and drawn by Batman Adventures artist Rick Burchett, Superman Adventures #1 takes place about one week after “The Last Son of Krypton: Part Three.” After his plans for the LEX SKEL 5000 battle suit were foiled, Lex Luthor created a robot duplicate of Superman to destroy the Man of Steel and his reputation. Other scribes from Superman: The Animated Series had migrated to the comic-book version of the show after Paul Dini. Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer, Hilary J. Bader, and Mark Evanier penned tales for both the cartoons and the comics. Superman Adventures also had a slew of famous creative talent in the comics field. Legendary Marie Severin served as colorist, while Scott McCloud, Mark Millar, and Jordan B. Gorfinkel were among the writers on the title. Aluir Amancio, Neil Vokes, and Mike Manley were some of the names that drew the book alongside Rick Burchett, who provided visuals for most of Scott McCloud’s post-Dini run. Scott McCloud told World’s Finest Online how he got the Superman Adventures assignment. “I’d been a fan of the Batman cartoons that Paul Dini and Bruce Timm had overseen, and I had heard that there was a Superman cartoon coming up at about the time that I got a call from Mike McAvennie at DC Comics asking me if I’d be interested in writing a comic based on the Superman cartoon. Usually, I don’t work on work-for-hire characters. I normally write and draw my own stuff, but it was as if I’d been given an invitation to write a brand-new character because, I think, Paul and Bruce had done such a great job in rebooting the character. It’s so hard to write a character that’s mired in decades of continuity. With one that’s just newly minted and newly re-conceived—and so well conceived, as I thought was the case with their ideas— it was pretty hard to resist, so I signed on and did 12 issues of the series. I had a lot of fun writing it.” Scott McCloud’s series of Superman Adventures issues began with issue #2. A woman claiming to be Superman’s girlfriend becomes bait for a trap set by Metallo, the cyborg with the kryptonite heart. McCloud’s run also included Brainiac, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Kryptonian villains Jax-Ur and Mala, and an alien sports competition among its pages. After Scott McCloud’s run ended, Mark Evanier (#14 and 15), Chris Duffy (#17), Devin K. Grayson (#18), and Jordan B. Gorfinkel (#20) took on the writing duties, while art chores alternated between Neil Vokes and Aluir Amancio, with Rick Burchett drawing issue #15.

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 51

Supermanimation (left) Bruce Timm’s dynamic cover to Superman Adventures #1 (Nov. 1996). (right) Not unlike Harley Quinn, Livewire—created for Superman: The Animated Series—has enjoyed appearances outside of her cartoon roots. TM & © DC Comics.

“Well,” stated Millar, “the plan was always just to do around 18 Jordan B. Gorfinkel reminisces with BACK ISSUE about writing four issues of Superman Adventures (the aforementioned #20, along with #43, 60, and issues of Superman Adventures. We Brits tend to have finite runs on 64): “A reasonable guess is that the title was one of the few that accepted books, I’d rather go while I’m still having fun.” one-off, self-contained stories starring DC Comics’ flagship character. While there were constraints regarding the continuity and style of At the time, the [main] continuity Superman titles featured tightly inter- Superman: The Animated Series, creators on Superman Adventures had twined plots that left little room for guest writers, understandably.” a little more freedom with storytelling unlike the people working on Overall, two things stand out in Superman Adventures after Scott McCloud the core titles featuring the Man of Steel. When asked by World’s left the title. First is Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer’s follow-up to the Superman: Finest Online if he felt limited when following the Timmverse style, The Animated Series two-part episode “Little Girl Lost” in Superman artist Neil Vokes replied, “Yes, but I also learned some things from drawing in that style which helped me in subsequent projects. Adventures presents Supergirl Adventures #21 (July 1998). According to what Dorkin and Dyer told World’s Finest I have always found that every book I do expands my Online, the original plot for “Little Girl Lost” was changed knowledge. The Bruce Timm model of Superman Adventures at the last minute. There had a lot of unused backstory became a part of me—nearly every con sketch I was for the cartoon debut of Supergirl which never made doing during that time was in the animated style. it to television. DC Comics had contacted Dorkin and It showed in every subsequent book, but in subtle Dyer with the intention to produce a one-shot. Yet ways—a simpler, more direct way of getting an image scheduling delays for the television broadcast of “Little across. And make no mistake: simplicity of style is Girl Lost” changed those plans into the giant-sized harder than the more detailed approach.” Superman Adventures #21, comprising 52 story pages. “Some pencilers who work in the animated style “Last Daughter of Argo” has Kara/Supergirl facing have the obligation to follow the style of Bruce Timm her fears, her past, and villains like Jax-Ur, Mala, and and are paid to do this,” Aluir Amancio stated in the Granny Goodness, while helping Superman, who is interview on his blog, “My style was already very away in space, protect Metropolis and Earth. Dorkin similar to his. Bruce agrees. I would say that currently jordan b. gorfinkel and Dyer wrote a sequel to this issue in Superman this is not a serious problem in my case. Some time Adventures #39 which had Superman and Supergirl ago, my editor granted me more freedom in respect unwittingly bring back a female version of Brainiac after a memorial to the style. Thus, I started to develop the style in a direction that made service in Argo City. me feel more comfortable in the routine. I was certain that fans of the The second thing that made Superman Adventures shine among the show would hate me for doing this, but it was a risk that I decided to Timmverse comics was the 20-issue run (#16, 19, 22–31, 33–38, 41, take. The first feedback I got was from Alex Ross, who mentioned the changes as something positive. and 52) written by Mark Millar. “My main aim,” Amancio continued, “is to make the script more “That was perhaps the best phase of the title so far,” Aluir Amancio, who also provided some storyboards for Superman episodes as well as attractive and exciting for the reader, but I have also had the chance artwork for Superman Adventures, said of working with Mark Millar on to disclose new colors in the relationship between Lois and Superman the Man of Steel in an interview posted on his blog. “Mainly because (Clark Kent) that really no other artists have done. In Superman Adventures, Mark based his scripts in the continuity of the show, only, from time they are not married, and Lois does not know the secret identity of to time, the characters acquired a certain Scottish accent.” Superman. Thus, I insinuate a definitive platonic love that is suggested Millar himself had spoken of ending his Superman Adventures run by the corporal expression of both. It has been interesting to see that with Superman Homepage back in 1999. some readers are catching these details.” 52 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

Rogues’ Gallery The Action Ace’s arch-foes, including (top left) Brainiac and (top right) the Parasite, got makeovers in the animated DCU. (bottom) Unused pencil page by Rick Burchett from Superman Adventures #6 (Apr. 1997). Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). TM & © DC Comics.

On an interesting side note, Aluir Amancio had drawn a character named Senninha in Superman Adventures #29. He is based on the late Formula One racing pilot Ayrton Senna. Gorfinkel also informs BACK ISSUE about constraints and freedom on Superman Adventures: “The mandate for the animated titles was the same as for any other comic book: be entertaining and don’t break anything! So, plenty of freedom, and perhaps more than on the mainstream titles, because stories were meant to be self-contained, and continuity, aside from the major stuff such as how Superman’s powers worked, wasn’t constricting. For example, if Metropolis had been destroyed in the prior issue, it was magically whole in the next. Superman’s cast of supporting characters is so rich and well developed that I naturally gravitate towards writing Lois, Jimmy, et. al. If you look at my stories, the through line is my love of Superman’s supporting cast—they’re the mirror that reflects Superman’s best nature.” “I went story by story,” Gorfinkel says of his overall experience on Superman Adventures. “I certainly would have continued if the opportunity existed. Maybe with my last one, I had a sense that the series was winding down? I don’t know. I certainly went for broke on that last one. I was the first one to bring the worlds of Superman Adventures and Batman Beyond together. I even worked in Superman referring to him as Batman Beyond in dialogue, another first. Why they greenlit me doing such a big moment in this series, I don’t know. I’m very grateful. What an honor to play in the animated sandbox.” Hilary J. Bader had been an established writer for television, comics, and animation when her story for Superman Adventures, the only Annual in the series, was released. It tied in with Adventures in the DC Universe Annual #1, also written by Bader. The cover designs for both comics and Batman and Robin Adventures Annual #2, according to John Delaney’s reflections on World’s Finest Online were even similar as per the artist’s requests. While Superman Adventures Annual #1 saw Superman fighting demons and training with Zatara, the heroes Dr. Fate, Rose and Thorn, Superboy, Mister Miracle, and Impulse must fight the same creatures in Adventures in the DC Universe Annual #1. The final pages of both comics have Fate and Superman finishing their conflict with the monsters. (For more on Adventures in the DC Universe, look elsewhere in this article.) One of the most popular guest-stars on Superman: The Animated Series was Lobo. His appearance in the two-part episode “The Main Man” spawned several Superman Adventures comic books starring the Last Czarnian, including the Superman Adventures Special #1 (1997). Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 53

Short Fuse (left) Original Rick Burchett/Terry Austin artwork to the cover of SA #15 (Jan. 1998), courtesy of Heritage. (inset) The published version, featuring Marie Severin colors. (right) Lobo co-starred in Superman Adventures Special #1 (Feb. 1998). Cover art by John Delaney and Mike Manley. TM & © DC Comics.

The Man of Steel crosses paths with Lobo while in space searching to rid himself of a virus on his person that could exterminate humanity. John Delaney spoke of his work on the comic with World’s Finest Online. “This, of all the Adventures books I’d done, is was my favorite,” stated Delaney. “I felt I did my best work on that one and I loved the end result. I thought it was a great example of everyone’s style meshing together and working. I love the design of Lobo from the Superman show, so it was really easy to draw and act that character. David Michelinie writes in what’s known as the Marvel style in that instead of a full script he outlines what action and emotional beats are need for a page and then leaves it up to the artist to create the pacing and acting. He then he comes in and writes in the dialogue to match the page. I felt this was a great way to work and really freed me up as an artist. Hence, the reason it felt like my best work to date at the time. Since then I’ve done a couple of Justice League Adventures where I felt my work was stronger, but this story had all the people involved bringing it to the party and moments like that are truly amazing.” Perhaps one of the most experienced in both the fields of comic books and animation who also had a hand in both Superman: The Animated Series and Superman Adventures is Jack Kirby biographer Mark Evanier. Evanier’s unaired script for Superman, which was co-authored with the late Steve Gerber, became Superman Adventures #42. “Steve Gerber and I did a plot together which was mostly mine for the animated series,” Evanier told World’s

Finest Online. “It didn’t get used there, but when I was doing the comic book, I got Steve’s okay to use it there. I believe he asked not to be credited since the portions he contributed were not going to be used.” Introducing Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle and Big Barda into the Timmverse, Superman Adventures #42 saw Granny Goodness trying to recapture Scott Free, the only person to escape her orphanage on Apokolips. A sequel with Granny Goodness coming to Earth while Intergang tries to kill an informant was also penned by Evanier for #53. Superman Adventures ceased publication with issue #66 (Apr. 2002). Yet, it wasn’t the end for the Timmverse Man of Steel.

A UNIVERSE OF ADVENTURES

With the success of Batman Adventures and Superman Adventures came Adventures in the DC Universe #1 (Apr. 1997). Getting it released was a challenge. In his overview of Adventures in the DC Universe posted on World’s Finest Online, artist John Delaney stated, “One behind-the-scenes thing that you might find interesting is that when the book got the green light, there still wasn’t a writer attached so I couldn’t begin right away even though we had a deadline for the first issue looming. When the talented Steve Vance got signed and sent in his first script I had only 11 days to draw the full 22 pages so we wouldn’t miss our first shipping date. Unfortunately, by hitting the first deadline on time, we were now trapped into that cycle leaving me literally only 11 days

54 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

The Gang’s All Here for penciling each issue up until #5, by which time we had finally caught up. It’s very hard for me to look at those first year of issues because all Cover to Adventures in the DC Universe #1 (Apr. 1997). I see are what I would change and how I could make it better.” Art by John Delaney and Ron Boyd. The debut issue of ADCU, with a story by Vance and art by Delaney, featured the Justice League, about four years before their cartoon had TM & © DC Comics. premiered, battling their greatest foes and the mysterious Cypher. Public opinion, according to Steve Vance, was mixed. “One thing that here and there, including an Impulse caught me by surprise was the fan Annual for DC. I think that book reaction, both positive and negative,” was what led [editor] KC [Carlson] to think of me for ADCU. When I Vance stated on World’s Finest Online. “When we started this book, came aboard, the idea of ADCU was I was a huge fan of Bruce Timm’s to provide a Batman Adventuresstyle, but what I liked best was how style intro for a wide range of other when he did a comic book (Mad characters in the DC Universe Love, Batman Adventures Annual), without being too tied to current he would allow his more cartoony continuity. However, before we sensibilities to come to the surface actually launched, the higher powers with really fun pushed expressions at DC decided that the book did and a strong Kirby and Toth influence need to reflect that current continuity. in the staging and strong use of That complicated the task of writing. blacks and speed lines. Being a One downside I discovered when I started doing comics professionally huge fan of both Kirby and Toth, was that I had a lot less free time I glommed on to this and pushed to read comics just for enjoyment. those influences further to give the book its own personality. Many At that point there were a lot of DC fans were very in sync with what I characters I wasn’t really following was trying to do, but others felt I month to month. This meant that was moving too far away from the before I could start, say, an Aquaman Timm style, and they didn’t like it. story, I needed to read years’ worth This is why when I worked on of Aquaman books just to familiarize Justice League Adventures I stuck myself with the latest undersea so close to the Timm style. Many doings. This process repeated every people didn’t understand that my month. You’d think it would be fun, more ‘pushed’ style on Adventures but scrounging for story ideas while was deliberate, and as an animator the deadline clock is ticking actually takes a lot of the fun out of it.” who has had to work on every different kind of style of show, The editing chores went to I was determined to show the unKC Carlson, who tells BACK ISSUE, happy fans that I could give them “Besides Legion of Super-Heroes, what they wanted if I chose to.” Adventures in the DCU was also a Delaney discussed his art style high point in my career of which I am very fond and proud.” for Adventures in the DC Universe Carlson reminisces on how he with World’s Finest Online: “Another factor of the difference between got the job of ADCU’s editor: my style of drawing the DC Animated “That’s a weird story, actually. I had style on Adventures and what was recently stepped down from editing happening on the Batman Adventures all of DC’s Superman comics and I and Superman Adventures was that was looking to pick up other titles our book started as Bruce Timm was redesigning his style for the New to replace them. At the same moment, DC was trying to ramp up a Batman and Robin Adventures. The model sheets I was getting were a new title set in their Animated Universe. Both the Batman Adventures lot more angled and sharp edged than what was being done and the Superman Adventures comics were big successes, and if I had to guess (because I was never actually told), DC was in the other books. Seeing the way the new show was searching to get a third book rolling that would potentially going to look, I moved in that direction. Unfortunately, be able to star virtually the entire DC Universe. So they our first eight books came out before anyone else saw asked me to help put it together. This book, soon to anything of the new shows and I think some people didn’t get what I was doing. As the first two books be titled Adventures in the DC Universe, would be had set out a blueprint for what they should look like, developed by me, although I didn’t come up with I was fighting a pretty tough battle to try something the concept or title. “I was partially assigned to develop/edit AdvDCU new. After the Batman and Robin Adventures came out, I think people were more receptive to the idea of as a punishment for something else I did. At the time, changing Bruce Timm’s style around a bit more, and I editorial considered a lot of the young readers’ titles think we could have gone in some different directions not as important as the mainline titles. Those were had the book continued.” usually assigned to assistant editors or mainline editors who had irritated either Mr. [Mike] Carlin Writer Steve Vance tells BACK ISSUE how he became kc carlson or Mr. [Paul] Levitz (or both, like I did). I, instead, ADCU’s writer: “In ’93–’94, Matt Groening, Bill Morrison, my wife Cindy, and I started up Bongo Comics, rose to the challenge of making it one of DC’s publisher of The Simpsons comics. I oversaw the first year’s output, quirkiest books, starting with the crazy covers and horrible puns writing and drawing a lot of it. Anyway, once I left Bongo I got offers and reviving some of DC’s most obscure characters ever (like Ultra, from other publishers. I was pretty burned out from too many 100-hour the Multi-Alien). They responded by throwing more rules at me. weeks and didn’t want to jump right back in, but I did a few books So I doubled-down on the quirk. Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 55

The Ultra-Wet Look (top) Ultra, the Multi-alien, from AdvDCU #5. (bottom) Aquaman, as seen on the cover of ADCU #6 (Sept. 1997), courtesy of Heritage. The published version can be seen in the inset. Ultra, the Multi-Alien TM & © DC Comics. TM & © DC Comics.

“Before the book was publicly announced, my two future AdvDCU artists—penciler John Delaney and inker Ron Boyd— physically showed up in my office to ‘interview’ (i.e., beg) for the job. What was unusual about that was that John was West Coast and Ron was Canadian, and guys from those places didn’t always just drop by the then-NYC DC offices. “Initially,” Carlson continues, “there weren’t a lot of parameters placed on the book. It was decided fairly early that every third or fourth issue would be a book-length Justice League story. All the other issues would feature two or sometimes three stories. The longer lead story starred one of the JLA members. Those shortly became, for sales purposes, tales starring the Flash, Green Lantern, or Wonder Woman, since they were DC’s strongest secondary characters. The short backup stories could feature virtually anybody in the DCU, something I think that DC’s powers-that-be ended up regretting, because I took that to the limit by occasionally showcasing goofy and obscure characters. Like the team of Blue Beetle and Booster Gold which, back then, wasn’t the full-on fanfavorite bromance that pairing became later. More often, writer Steve Vance chose the backup characters, or maybe the artists had suggested characters to Steve that I was unaware of. The entire creative team on AdvDCU was amazingly tight and really committed to the book. “I noted that a lot of editors balked at the idea of editing any kid-friendly titles because they weren’t the ‘real’ in-continuity storylines that the longtime comics fans loved. I think a lot of fans (and some editors) forget about where they came from originally and look back at kids comics as just some phase you had to grow out of to graduate to ‘real’ comics. I loved kids comics, and I thought it was wonderful that all the DC Batman and Superman Adventures comics were so creative and popular and successful, and I was very proud to carry on the tradition, even if it was only for a very short time.” Steve Vance tells BI, “The initial plan for the book was always to start with the JLA, and while I was delighted to do work on DC’s headliners, part of what excited me, and KC and John Delaney as well, was the opportunity to dust off some characters who were out of the spotlight. Fans we heard from were really enthusiastic about this idea, too. “As for the actual issue-by-issue making of the book,” Vance continues, “well… we all had our wish lists, but KC generally took the lead on suggesting characters for the next issue since he was the one who had to coordinate with the characters’ own editorial teams. At that point, I had always done layouts with my scripts, so I continued that to begin with. John Delaney, understandably, felt kinda constrained by that approach, so we gradually shifted to me just doing scripts and leaving John to do his thing with the art. I think in the end it worked out better for both of us, though I found the transition difficult at first. Both John and KC wanted to try working Marvel style, with me giving John a plot and then writing dialogue to fit his art, but I never managed to wrap 56 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

my head around that process. KC and I would discuss the very basics of a story—like, ‘Next issue let’s have Wonder Woman face Cheetah’—I’d then write a brief outline, just a paragraph or two that set the scene, and once KC had approved that I’d go stare at my computer and try to come up with the actual story. The process changed when [editor] Kevin Dooley came aboard, as he liked to be much more involved in the plotting. We’d spend a lot of time on the phone hashing things out before I sat down to write. John Delaney and Ron Boyd always seemed amazingly fast at turning out top-notch pages from anything I threw at them, and I recall John saved my bacon once when I accidentally wrote a script for #14 that was a page too long and he made it fit in a way that improved on my original. Also consider that, unlike on Batman Adventures, John had to revamp the look of every character to fit the Adventure style on the fly, without the benefit of the copious style guides that exist for the characters that had already been animated. He really went all out on this book, and his love for the characters always showed. He also slipped in cameos of a few DC staffers here and there—I recall KC and Mike Carlin, and you may spot more if you look closely!” Wally West has his time in the spotlight in Adventures in the DC Universe #2 (May 1997) as the Flash takes on the Bomb Squad while Catwoman attempts a diamond heist in that issue’s backup story. Cheetah uses ancient artifacts to try to kill Wonder Woman and Helena Sandsmark in #3’s main tale. Not all backup stories were done by the team of Vance and Delaney. “Cruise to Nightmare” by Paul Dini

and Bruce Timm was a Batman tale that pitted the Dark Knight against Poison Ivy and a plant dragon creature during a cruise for charity. “One of the most exciting incidents was the happy ‘accident’ of getting to publish a Paul Dini/Bruce Timm Batman Adventures story in AdvDCU #3,” KC Carlson tells BI. “That came about totally by chance, as Dini and Timm had produced a series of Batman Adventures short stories for the Welch-published Superman & Batman Magazine, but the magazine was canceled before the last episode was published. “ ‘Want it for AdvDCU?’ asked the magazine’s comics editor, Charles Kochman. “ ‘Yes, please!’ was the easiest answer to any question, especially since this story also featured Poison Ivy! So many people both out there and in the office were glad to finally see it, and I think it also gave AdvDCU a little boost in both sales and becoming better known.” The All-Alien issue contained in Adventures in the DC Universe #5 (Aug. 1997) featured a main tale with Martian Manhunter saving the Colorado Mountains from an extraterrestrial invasion while making a trip to video store. Yet, it’s that comic book’s backup story that is remembered the most by Steve Vance and KC Carlson. “I think KC wanted to show how far out we could go when he suggested Ultra, the Multi-Alien for the backup in #5,” Vance tells BACK ISSUE. “Steve Vance pretty much came up with all the AdvDCU stories himself,” Carlson says, “But on rare occasions, he’d—most likely, regretfully—ask me, ‘Who should I use for the next backup story?’

Big Red, Blue and Gold (left) The original Captain Marvel, from AdvDCU #7. (right) Page 7 of issue #8’s Beetle/ Booster tale. By Vance, Delancey, and Boyd. TM & © DC Comics.

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Future Shock (left) The Legion of Super-Heroes, as seen in ADCU #10 (Jan. 1998). (right) The swell-headed Flash cover, issue #9. TM & © DC Comics.

“Since my nickname was ‘Mister Obscure,’ I’d say something like, ‘Hey, have you ever heard of Ultra, the Multi-Alien?’ especially because I wanted to bill issue #5 as the ‘All-Alien Issue!’ with Martian Manhunter as the lead story, and I already knew that wasn’t going to happen again. I was credited as ‘Martian’ in that issue by Steve, with all of the creative participants’ names converted to way-cool authentic Martian spellings by him. Anyway, Ultra appeared, oh, maybe three times in the classic Mystery in Space title in 1965, effectively pushing previous MiS stars Adam Strange and Space Ranger completely out of the book. This story actually prompted a rare visit to my office from Mr. Paul Levitz. Here’s how I remember that conversation going: “Paul: ‘So, Ultra, the Multi-Alien, eh?’ “Me: ‘Yeah! Pretty cool, huh?’ “Paul: ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ (Leaves immediately.)” Both Steve Vance and KC Carlson fondly recall Adventures in the DC Universe #8, featuring Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, and the Question.

“I particularly enjoyed doing the Blue Beetle/Booster Gold team-up with the Question as backup,” Vance tells BI. “I came up with the intentionally terrible cover blurbs for that issue (something the editors usually did), in arrows pointing at the lead and supporting characters: ‘TWO B’s, OR NOT TWO B’s… THAT is THE QUESTION!’ There was much groaning all around, but we decided it was a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity to make a pun that bad.” “I struck again with the bizarre cover copy for AdvDCU #8,” Carlson reminisces, “Inspired by seeing the awesome Delaney/Boyd cover for that issue featuring a Blue Beetle and Booster Gold team-up, and a backup starring the Question. In the office, we frequently shortened talking about Booster and Beetle to ‘B&B,’ and riffing off that, I wrote ‘Two B or NOT Two B’ in one arrow-caption, following it up with the groan-inducing ‘That is the Question!’ Paul didn’t stop by my office that time, but I heard through others that he was either confused or not pleased. Incidentally, Steve Vance credited me as ‘Toxic Waste Disposal’ on the splash page of that issue, long before he ever saw that cover. So, he not just a great writer, but psychic to boot!” Perhaps one of the strangest and most talked about issues of Adventures in the DC Universe was issue #9, featuring the Flash. “People still ask me what was up with the cover of AdvDCU #9, which featured a close-up of the Flash with a giant-sized cranium,” Carlson says. “Longtime fans knew that it was a callback to another crazy Flash story from The Flash #177 from 1968. It also featured a big-head Flash that imprinted on my then-12-year-old brain. What people today might not realize that it was also part of a deliberate attempt to unify most of the DC covers that month with a Faces of the DC Universe campaign, with every cover featuring an extreme closeup of that book’s lead character. I realized that I was in a wonderful position to somewhat circumvent the stunt a bit with this cover and the covers for my two Legion

58 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

of Super-Heroes titles which featured an alien (Chameleon Boy) and a woman (actually, three women, in depicting LSH member Triad). Later, DC’s then-art director Mark Chiarello, who conceived the campaign, thanked me for deliberately using characters who weren’t the usual white guy heroes to provide a bit of diversity.” Adventures in the DC Universe #10 (Jan. 1998) was a booklength story of the Legion of Super-Heroes fighting and trying to understand the motives of “the Blobs.” “It wasn’t my idea to have AdvDCU #10 be an all-Legion of Super-Heroes issue,” KC Carlson reveals to BACK ISSUE. “It was pretty much the rest of the creative team’s choice, and I kinda was talked into it. I did surprise the guys by procuring the talents of regular LSH colorist Tom McCraw for the issue, which made artist John Delaney very happy. I didn’t really know it yet, but it was kind of a going-away present since I would leave the title (and DC Comics, and New York City) just three issues later. Kevin Dooley, Dana Kurtin, and Chuck Kim edited the last five or six issues. And while I’m saying thanks, huge ones go out to Frank Berrios for keeping me sane enough to function during trying times away from my actual editing work. If you loved this series, you loved his work as well, even if you didn’t know it.” Adventures in the DC Universe ended with issue #19 (Oct. 1998). While KC Carlson was no longer editor when the book ceased publication, both he and Steve Vance discussed its cancellation with BACK ISSUE. “By that point, we were on track with the big names,” Vance says, “Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, the Shazam family, and the JLA. It was a sensible sales strategy, but it didn’t work well enough. Unfortunately, it really was our only chance. KC was tired of living in New York, and he left DC a few months later. When Kevin Dooley came in as editor, he brought with him the bad news that the Beetle/Booster/Question issue had been a sales disaster, and the title hadn’t fully bounced back since. Because of that, he also brought a directive from the higher powers: no more second-tier characters, it would be stars only from then on, with the full JLA in regular rotation, in hopes of boosting sales. We got the news of the cancellation before much work had been done on issue #20. I think Flash would have been next up, but I don’t remember the specifics.” “I was no longer at DC Comics at the time AdvDCU was canceled, so I was not privy to any intentions regarding or discussions about its cancellation,” Carlson tells BI, “If I had to guess, it was probably the usual thing that causes cancellations: poor sales. I think—and it’s unfortunate I didn’t think more about this at the time—that the book probably would have done better had they had come up with more of a Justice League title/concept for it at that earlier time. In fact, the kid-friendly Justice League Adventures/Unlimited, which launched several years later, ran from 2002 to 2008, a huge stretch of time compared to AdvDCU. “I really enjoyed working with some of DC’s most kid-friendly characters and situations, and I am very proud of the hard work all the creator-guys did while making it look easy! It was truly a job I hated to leave behind.” While Carlson never left any unpublished material behind before he stopped editing Adventures in the DC Universe, in addition to the Flash story Steve Vance mentioned, John Delaney mentioned on World’s Finest Online that issue #20 was in the works with a Superman and Phantom Stranger team-up. However, that never went beyond the cover designs. The finale for Adventures in the DC Universe came to readers on August 19, 1998. Yet, there was more to be seen from the Timmverse. In addition to Batman: Gotham Adventures and Superman Adventures, big plans were in store for Earth’s Greatest Heroes.

Amazo and an Amazon (top and inset) The android Amazo raised a ruckus in AdvDCU #18 (Sept. 1998). (bottom) An unlikely duo, in issue #19. TM & © DC Comics.

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UNLIMITED JUSTICE

preting Adam Strange and the whole setting of Rann into the Justice On November 17, 2001, Justice League premiered on Cartoon Network League animation style. However, the most memorable thing from with the 90-minute episode “Secret Origins.” The debut issue of Justice working on the issue was discussing some of the sci-fi pseudo-science of League Adventures came to comic-book shops just three days the story with the writer over a long-distance phone call that had prior to the airing of the cartoon’s pilot. The January 2002 been set up by our editor. Specifically, I was debating the cover-dated issue #1 was not a direct tie-in to “Secret effect on Superman in an orange sun environment that had Origins” (readers get the idea that the League has had him at reduced power of submerging him underwater— a few bouts with evil between the first serial’s initial and having the realization that this was my job!” Jones also spoke of Justice League Adventures #31 (July TV broadcast and JL Adventures #1), but like other comics based in the Timmverse, it and subsequent 2004), which featured the Phantom Stranger. “The Phantom issues of Justice League Adventures followed the formula Stranger has long been a favorite character of mine,” Jones of single issue or two-part story arcs. On television, says, “and I had told our editor repeatedly that if he got a Earth’s Greatest Superheroes were in two- or threescript for a Phantom Stranger story I was calling dibs on it. chapter episodes in their first two seasons. Eventually he hooked me up with a writer named Josh Artist Christopher Jones, who is erroneously Siegal, who had contributed stories to the book, and told credited in JLA as Chris Jones, took time out of his us to cook up a pitch for a Phantom Stranger story and busy schedule to discuss his time on Justice League if it was approved, Josh could write it and I could draw christopher jones Adventures with BACK ISSUE. it. I ended up on the phone with Josh, who asked me “The first work I had gotten from DC Comics was what it was I loved about this character. I talked to him as a result of samples I had done based on the Bruce Timm animation style,” about that for a bit, specifically mentioning my favorite Phantom Stranger Jones says. “I had been sending samples of my art to editors at DC and story, ‘To Kill a Legend’ from Detective Comics #500, which sees the Phantom Marvel Comics for years trying to get work. I’d been drawing comics for Stranger facilitating a story where Batman has a chance to save the lives smaller publishers for a few years, but I’d not cracked the big leagues yet. of Thomas and Martha Wayne on a parallel Earth. Josh listened and soon I did some samples to try and get delivered a story that was completely work with Warner Bros. Animation, different but pushed all the same and while nothing came of that, buttons. The Phantom Stranger reveals I included those samples with the to the Justice League that a boy who was orphaned during a battle benext batch of submissions to DC and tween a villain and the League will Marvel editors. Those were seen by soon manifest metahuman abilities. an editor at DC who was looking for Depending on the form of guidance an artist to do a fill-in issue of a book the League offers him, the boy faces called Young Heroes in Love, which different possible futures including was drawn in a more cartoony style. tragic death or becoming a villain I got that gig, which lead to more himself. It was a great story and I got work doing fill-ins or five- and tento design alternate-future versions of page stories for anthology titles. When the Justice League Adventures the Justice League. I had a great time.” title came along based on the aniOn July 31, 2004, Justice League mated TV show, I was well positioned underwent a name change for its third season on Cartoon Network. to get some of those assignments.” The two-part story featuring Justice League Unlimited, as it was Adam Strange in Justice League called, changed the format from Adventures #25 and 26 particularly two- or three-chapter stories to stands out in Jones’ memory. single-episode tales. The word “I had already drawn a few issues ‘Unlimited’ meant Bruce Timm of the Justice League Adventures and the rest of the crew and cast comic,” Jones tells BI, “when I was had unlimited potential as the series given the opportunity to draw a focused on other DC Comics supertwo-part story that had Superman, heroes in addition to the seven used Batman, Wonder Woman, and the in the series’ previous sagas. Martian Manhunter transported to Naturally, a companion comic Rann to have an adventure with would be published. The November Adam Strange. The story was by a 2004 cover-dated first issue was in new writer not that experienced comic shops. The creative team of with writing for comics, so I was writer Adam Beechen, penciller Carlo given the story in the form of a plot, Barberi, and inker Walden Wong launched the book. Beechen and from which I was to draw the story Marvel style before the finished Barbieri had a solid run in the first dialog was written. It’s the only two-dozen issues, with other scribes comic I’ve ever done for DC that and artists filling in periodically. was done that way, and it was a fun Walden Wong, who, according change of pace. It gave me a lot of to what he tells BACK ISSUE, was contacted by JLU editor Tom Palmer, freedom to stage the action the way Jr. because of his previous work with I wanted. It was a ton of fun interCarlo Barbieri, inked 12 entries. Wong is no stranger to the Justice League. His inks have graced the various titles TV’s Greatest Superheroes featuring the World’s Greatest Superheroes. Yet, Justice League Unlimited was Cover to DC’s Justice League Adventures #1 (Jan. 2002), different from most mainstream books. “At the time,” Wong recalls, “comics were 22 pages of art. If memory serves correctly, JLU was the first comic illo’ed by Bruce Timm and painted by Alex Ross. I’ve worked on that was only 20 pages of art. Also, it was separate from the DC Universe even though there were the same characters from it.” TM & © DC Comics. 60 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

Strange Days Adam Strange and company, featured on this original art page from JLAdv #26 (Feb. 2004), courtesy of Heritage. Signed by penciler Christopher Jones. TM & © DC Comics.

Justice League Unlimited had a big impact on Walden Wong after he had left the series. “Working on JLU was so much fun,” he tells BI. “Because the art was based on the animated show, everything was drawn simpler, making the art relatively quicker to complete. It’s still a part of me, just like how some people remember me for my work on Superman: Red Son. Even now, when I see the words Justice League anywhere, I think back to the time Carlo Barberi and I worked on JLU together. It was a fun time, and I wouldn’t change anything.” One particular event made Wong feel particularly proud. “My favorite part about working on the series was when there were JLU toys being released,” Wong reminisces. “The first line of toys had a special-edition print of the same JLU #1 we worked on. It was nice to see that at big-box stores, other than comic-book stores.” One issue of Justice League Unlimited drawn by Christopher Jones, #43 (May 2008), had originally been intended for Justice League Adventures, as Jones discusses with BI. “Every issue of that series was fun and memorable for me,” Jones says. “My two favorites had to be the Phantom Stranger story and the Blue Beetle/Booster Gold issue. I had been a huge fan of the Justice League run by Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis, and one of the things that defined that run was the buddy-comedy duo of Blue Beetle and Booster Gold. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I got the script by Keith Giffen for a story that had Beetle and Booster meeting the Justice League. All the trademark humor and banter were there, with the League playing straight-man to this pair of over-eager wannabe heroes. “I had a great time drawing the story,” Jones recalls, “and was almost finished with it when we got word that Booster Gold was going to be used in an episode of the show, which at this point had been re-branded into Justice League Unlimited. In spite of the fact that it would be the better part of a year before the Booster episode would be seen by the public, there was concern

GIVE IT AWAY, GIVE IT AWAY, GIVE IT AWAY NOW The popularity of Superman and Justice League animated series led to premiums/ giveaways during their time on television. The Nintendo 64 Superman: The New Adventures game came with a prequel mini-comic titled “Dimension of the Dark Shadows.” Brainiac and Lex Luthor captured Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen and placed them in a computerized dimension where Metallo, Darkseid, and other foes prevented Superman from saving his friends. In 2003, Burger King gave away eight Justice League Adventures comics. Seven of the these focused on one member of the team each with a toy of that superhero in the Kid’s Club meal. The last of the series showed the Justice League working together to battle the threat of alien invasion within the Watchtower. There were also instructions for putting together the spotlighted weekly toy—seven Leaguers and their headquarters. The accompanying comics that came with the video game and the kids meals are rare finds, but completists of Superman Adventures and Justice League Adventures can most likely locate them at various online comic shops or on eBay. TM & © DC Comics.

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 61

Unlimited Iterations (top) Yet another stylistic take on DC’s pantheon, as seen on Ben Caldwell’s cover to Justice League Unlimited #1 (Nov. 2004). (bottom) The Atom took center stage in issue #3. Art by Carlo Barbieri and Walden Wong. TM & © DC Comics.

that our comic-book introduction of Booster might be in conflict with what the show was going to do. It was decided that the comic story would be shelved. “When the TV episode finally aired,” Jones continues, “it turned out that their version of Booster was completely compatible with ours and there was no problem with publishing the comic, except that by this point the comic had not only been re-branded from Justice League Adventures to Justice League Unlimited, the stories had been reduced from 22 pages in length to 20. Our completed Beetle/Booster story wouldn’t fit in the current version of the book! It wasn’t until the Justice League Unlimited TV show was coming to an end, and the tie-in comic with it, that DC was motivated to make use of inventory stories that they’d already paid to produce. They solved the length problem by cutting two pages from the story. I wasn’t happy about the cuts, but I was happy that at least the bulk of the story finally was to be seen by an audience! “It was great getting to work on characters I love so dearly,” Jones says, “and the Justice League animated versions are such classic depictions of those characters. The stories were pretty great overall, too. It was just a real pleasure to work on. The only thing that frustrated me during that time is that I didn’t get to draw more of them. I’d gotten to draw some of the DC Comics big-gun characters previously, but a lot of that was in the context of fiveand ten-page short stories for the anthologies like 80-page Giants and Secret Files that DC Comics was doing a lot of at the time. In that format you’re trying to pack so much into so few pages that all your creative energy just goes into squeezing everything onto the page. This was the first chance I had to draw these characters in stories where they really got to breathe, and even though I was having to follow the animated series style sheets rather than do my own interpretations of the characters, the Bruce Timm designs were so go good it really wasn’t a hardship. Though I have to say, the proportions of the characters are really extreme, with most women being wasp-waisted and the men looking like they have football pads on their shoulders. What’s scary is when you’ve drawn enough of that style that it starts to look normal!” May 13, 2006 was the original broadcast date for “Destroyer,” the final episode of Justice League Unlimited. The comic version of JLU finished in the August 2008 cover-dated issue #46 with a story centering around the Green Lantern Corps. While this was the official finale to the DC Timmverse adaptations, Bruce Timm and those involved with the Batman, Superman, and Justice League cartoons went on to continue working with the World’s Greatest Superheroes in comics, video games, and animation. However, it’s Timm and Dini’s work on the DC animated series that is remembered most fondly by fans. Their comic-book counterparts expand on that corner of the DC Universe and is as equally cherished by people of all ages whether they are diehard comic-book and animation nerds walden wong or casual readers and viewers. Whichever of those you may be, you can find Superman and the Justice League’s cartoon exploits on DVD and/or Blu-Ray and iTunes. Superman Adventures, Adventures in the DC Universe, and Justice League Adventures/Unlimited can be found in back-issue bins in your local comics shop or digitally on Comixology. Share them with friends and family. You’ll be glad you did. JAMES HEATH LANTZ is a freelance writer who was heavily influenced by television, film, old time radio shows, and books—especially comic books—growing up in Ohio. The co-author of Roy Thomas presents Captain Video, he has written introductions to PS Artbooks titles, self-published his Trilogy of Tales e-book (Smashwords.com), and reviews various media for Superman Homepage. James lives in Italy with his wife Laura and their family of cats, dogs, and humans from Italy, Japan, and the US.

62 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

Eury

All covers TM & © DC Comics, except The Fly TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Photo courtesy of the Mike Parobeck Appreciation Society.

by M i c h a e l

He drew in the “animated” style before that term was coined. His figures According to writer and educator Len Strazewski, “Mike was the were deceptively simple, resembling coloring-book art, yet they bristled artist that Brian Augustyn chose for Quest for Dreams Lost, a fundraiser with emotional impact. His storytelling was crisp and accessible, comic for the Literacy Volunteers for Chicago. He drew a storyluring the eye from panel to panel. His art wasn’t flashy at a time framing sequence into which other independent comic when over-rendering and exaggerations were becoming creators contributed pages. Contributors included [creators the norm. He was Mike Parobeck, perhaps best known from] Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, among other for his work on DC Comics’ The Batman Adventures independents of the mid-1980s.” Once Brian Augustyn landed in New York at DC, comic book. Mike’s art brought out the inner child in many an adult comics reader… making his untimely “one of my goals was to find Mike work. He was a death in 1996, just days shy of his 31st birthday, all the junior art director in a Chicago ad agency and I knew more tragic. This issue’s theme and its coverage of he wasn’t happy there. Shortly after I arrived, I managed DC’s “animated” universe allows us this opportunity to convince Mark Waid to use Mike for a Secret Origins to look back at the career of this phenomenal artist. feature,” that assignment being the Dr. Light story in Former DC Comics editor Brian Augustyn was Secret Origins #37 (Feb. 1989), written by Craig Boldman and inked by Ken Branch. “That guy was a fundamental in bringing Parobeck to the company, genius,” remarked editor Waid of the young artist in telling BACK ISSUE, “I first met Mike in Chicago before brian augustyn BI’s Secret Origins article in our last issue. I moved to DC. We were introduced by a mutual While Parobeck would soon pencil additional Secret friend. [Mike] was maybe 21, very shy, but very genuine and sweet. It quickly developed that he was also a very talented Origins stories, he was quickly tapped to illustrate a brand-new monthly series: El Diablo. Appropriating the name of a Bronze Age Western cartoonist with a serious love for comics.” Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 63

Early Parobeck Page from an unpublished indie comic, Target, written by Brian Augustyn and illustrated by Mike Parobeck in 1986. (We’ll explore Target in a future issue’s “Greatest Stories Never Told” installment.) Scan courtesy of Paul Mullins. © Brian Augustyn and Mike Parobeck.

eight issues, commencing with a first issue cover-dated April 1991. While Tom Lyle drew all eight covers, Mike Parobeck penciled the interior art for JSA #3 (starring the Golden Age Green Lantern) and #6 (starring the Golden Age Flash and Hawkman). “It was fun and got good reviews,” Len says of the Justice Society mini. “Afterwards, [group editor] Mike Gold asked me if I was interested in a regular JSA series, edited by Brian. Absolutely!” But first came the launch of Impact, with Strazewski and Parobeck’s Fly. “Mike really came into his own on The Fly,” contends Brian Augustyn. “To me, Mike’s art was perfect for Impact’s outreach to new, young readers; fresh, fun, animated, and incredibly accessible. I loved what Mike and Len Strazewski crafted in The Fly—it really evoked the excitement I remembered from my own earliest comics reading. Mike’s vibrant, original art was perfect for comics.” Strazewski tells BACK ISSUE that during production of The Fly, he and Parobeck communicated “constantly. Mike lived about two miles away from me in Chicago and we met for lunch and discussed ideas and even better, he let me see his pencils before he sent them in. They were amazing, and in Mike’s humility, he always said that he just drew my script. Not true. He conceived my script in whole new levels.” Parobeck’s editor also heaps praise upon the artist. “As far as his work ethic [is concerned], Mike was fast, exceptionally reliable, hard working, and endlessly inventive,” Augustyn says. “He was a natural-born storyteller, and improved any story he worked on.” While deadlines did not deter the artist, his own insecurities proved a throbbing Achilles’ heel. “On the downside, perhaps, Mike was also a bit of a perfectionist,” according to Augustyn. “He often drew a page multiple times before he was satisfied. His studio was often littered with discarded pages, most as good or better than work many artists would turn in. Maybe Mike was also less than confident, generally. I know he was never completely convinced of his qualities, and remained ever character, editor Augustyn and writer Gerard Jones envisioned for the DC self-effacing.” Those artistic anxieties were never evident to anyone Universe a new El Diablo, actually Rafael Sandoval, a young city alderman reading The Fly, however. The book was a delight, a lighthearted fly in in a rough-and-tumble Texas town who used his fists and wits to thwart the ointment of an increasingly dark and somber superhero marketplace. street-level crimes such as arson, the narcotics trade, and murders. Once Parobeck was spelled by Al Bigley and Barry Horne on a few issues of “Gerry Jones and I developed the new El Diablo character, Mike was the The Fly as Mike reteamed with his former El Diablo collaborator Gerard first and only artist I had in mind from the start,” Augustyn tells Jones for a four-issue miniseries, Elongated Man (subtitled Europe BI. “At that point, Mike’s art was a bit more ‘serious,’ not yet ’92), launching with a January 1992 cover-dated first issue. as loose and fresh as he would become later, and he was Brian Augustyn reveals, “Elongated Man came about simply very influenced by Alex Toth, Norm Breyfogle, and Jaime because Gerry and Mike wanted to work together again and have fun doing a classical comic-book series. A little Hernandez, working in a black-and-white, illustrative style—and that meshed very well with our real-world Thin Man, a little Dick Van Dyke, a little Plastic Man. Fun.” vision for El Diablo. I pitched the book to the powersParobeck returned to conclude The Fly, drawing its final that-be with Mike attached and we were approved three issues (#15–17), as well as its 1992 Annual. fairly quickly, so I guess he was well received at DC Mike’s next new project starred old heroes: the initially.” Jones and Parobeck’s El Diablo ran 16 issues, ongoing Justice Society of America series mentioned ending with a January 1991 cover-dated final issue. earlier by its writer, Len Strazewski; the series’ premiere Mike Parobeck’s next ongoing assignment was issue was cover-dated August 1992. “Reteaming Len part of a new imprint at DC: Impact Comics (its and Mike on the ongoing Justice Society comic was a bouncy logo screeching “!mpact” across the top natural choice, and we had a blast,” remembers len strazewski of each cover), DC’s 1991 licensing of twice-failed Brian Augustyn. Archie Comics superheroes in a line skewed toward a From the writer’s perspective, Parobeck was the readership younger than the company’s aging target audience. (The Impact ideal JSA artist, bringing to the book “real characters with expression series will eventually be explored in BACK ISSUE.) The initial Impact titles that reflected humanity,” says Strazewski. “Mike could draw action but were The Comet, The Legend of the Shield, The Jaguar, The Web, The Black unlike many others, he could put emotion into a simple conversation.” Hood, and the title assigned to Parobeck, The Fly, with up-and-coming Glenn Whitmore colored Parobeck’s work on the JSA book, and illustrators tapped for the books including Tom Lyle, Grant Miehm, reflects upon the artist for BACK ISSUE: “In 1992, I was blessed to have Rick Burchett, David A. Williams, and Parobeck. colored Mike Parobeck’s work, mainly on Justice Society. Mike’s drawings “As Impact was developing, I wrote a Justice Society of America of my favorite DC characters ever were a beacon of light and fun at a miniseries primarily to provide work for the Impact artists as they were time when the comics universe was submerged in ‘grit’ and ‘grim.’ It is waiting for the launch,” says Len Strazewski. This JSA miniseries ran probably the biggest regret in my career that I never got to meet him. 64 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

Swat’s Up? Mike knocked it out of the park with his art on DC/ Impact’s The Fly. Cover art to issue #15 (Oct. 1992), with inks by Paul Fricke, courtesy of Paul Mullins. (below) The creative team of The Fly, from a 1992 signing: writer Strazewski, penciler Parobeck, and inker Fricke. Photo from Facebook’s Mike Parobeck Appreciation Society. The Fly © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.

DC Breakthrough (bottom left) Mike’s (inked here by John Nyberg) first regular series was the short-lived El Diablo. Cover to issue #11 (July 1990). Scan courtesy of Paul Mullins. (bottom right) Cover to the first issue of the JSA monthly (Aug. 1992). TM & © DC Comics.

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But I am ever so thankful that I got to work with him, Society book. “JSA sold reasonably well, but I think it was and that his style is an inspiration whenever I draw.” canceled after its 10th issue because the theme and style Legacy has been a continuing theme in DC’s titles since was perceived by some inside as too old-fashioned, and the Silver Age, and during the ’80s and ’90s many maybe not as grim and gritty as was popular in the long-standing DC identities, including the early ’90s,” Augustyn says. “Also, that Mike Flash and Green Lantern, were replaced by was ‘too cartoony’ was in the air at the time. younger characters. Justice Society of Obviously I didn’t agree. I was happily America stood in defiance of that working with not only Mike, but with youth-oriented trend, the team’s core [similarly ‘cartoony’] Mike Wieringo and Humberto Ramos as well.” members being of retirement age and, Len Strazewski elaborates: “[Group some would say, past their prime. But editor] Mike Carlin and others thought to editor Augustyn, that was part of the series’ appeal. “I think the book’s theme a series featuring older characters and of continuing to value heroes even when their lives was inappropriate. He killed the they grow older resonated with fans and series after issue #1, though we were given until #10 to finish the story. added dimension to superhero comics,” By the way, word was that the series Brian says. “It resonates even more with glenn whitmore me 30 years later, in fact.” didn’t sell. Absolutely untrue. The series Crow’s feet and receding hairlines launched at more than 100,000 copies were not considered superheroic by some parties at DC, and every issue of the ten earned royalties, which at the however, generating some internal friction over the Justice time meant it sold more than 70,000 copies.” Justice Society of America closed shop with issue #10 (May 1993), but amid the charges of Mike Parobeck’s art being too “cartoony,” a funny thing happened: superhero comics began to catch up with him. The subject of this edition of BACK ISSUE, Batman: The Animated Series (BTAS), had premiered the previous fall, spawning a tie-in comic book from DC, The Batman Adventures (TBA). Mike Parobeck became TBA’s artist beginning with issue #7 (Apr. 1993). Parobeck’s “cartooniness,” according to Brian Augustyn, “fortunately turned out to be his greatest strength once Batman Adventures came up for him.” Parobeck was the perfect artist to interpret Warner Bros.’ “Timmverse” to the pages of DC’s four-color comics. His virtues—believable characters and rock-solid storytelling—were also hallmarks of Timm’s BTAS. While he was now working for editor Scott Peterson, Parobeck’s new gig didn’t escape the paternal eye of the man who welcomed him to DC Comics. “Mike was extremely happy on Batman Adventures and the fans and DC were happy to have him,” says Brian Augustyn. Also happy was Rick Taylor, colorist of BTAS (as well as The Fly and Elongated Man). “The thought of Mike Parobeck never fails to bring a smile to my face,” says Taylor. “He was one of the best young storytellers of his time. And Lord, did he make fun comics cool. I would read each issue on the train ride home and plan my color strategy. His Batman was dark with a sense of humor… imagine that! The part of our lives where we intersected was pure gold for me, and I miss his positive influence.” The intensity Parobeck invested into his work apparently trumped his interest in maintaining his personal wellbeing. “Mike’s health began to decline at the time of his greatest success on Batman Adventures,” Augustyn says. “Mike was a Type 1 diabetic who struggled with balance in his diet and meds.” When Parobeck died on July 2, 1996, due to complications from diabetes, other artists followed him in the pages of TBA… but he permanently imprinted those with whom he worked. “Mike was a spectacular artist and a great friend,” Len Strazewski says, a sentiment echoed by Brian Augustyn, who adds, “I think that for all of Mike’s vast talent, the kind of person he was is equally important. Mike was generous, warm, thoughtful, and living. A great friend and a true and dedicated professional in every way. I miss him every day.” Special thanks to Brian Augustyn, Len Strazewski, Rick Taylor, and Glenn Whitmore, with nods to Mark Waid, Steven Thompson, Paul Mullins, and the Mike Parobeck Appreciation Society.

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by J

o h n Tr u m b u l l

addi tiona l tran scrip tion by Stev

en Thom pson

Sometimes being sick pays off. One day in the late 1980s, animation writer Paul Dini was home ill. Flipping through television channels, he caught his college friend Arleen Sorkin on Days of Our Lives, in her regular role as Calliope Jones. Inspired by the film The Princess Bride, Sorkin suggested a fantasy sequence where the regular Days actors played fairy-tale characters. Sorkin’s Calliope appeared as a court jester, mooning the king in an ornate harlequin outfit. As omens go, it was certainly more whimsical than a bat flying through a study window. Explaining the origin of his longtime friendship with Sorkin, Paul Dini tells BACK ISSUE, “We were both at Emerson College in the late ’70s, though I think Arleen was graduating the year I was coming in. We didn’t overlap a lot, though I certainly knew she was one of the bright lights in the theater department. After college all the ex-Emerson kids seemed to drift either to New York or Los Angeles and eventually reconnect. I kept running into Arleen at mutual friends’ parties and we became friends through them.” By the early ’90s, Dini was a writer on Batman: The Animated Series, and needed a villainous gal Friday to the Joker in the episode “Joker’s Favor.” Remembering the image of Arleen as a harlequin on Days, a new character began to click into place. As BTAS producer Bruce Timm recalls, “We had a bunch of Joker episodes where he had different kinds of henchmen, and they’re usually just guys in suits. Sometimes they were named after famous comedians or comedy sketches. Like ‘Rocco and Henshaw’ [Sgt. Bilko’s sidekicks on The Phil Silvers Show] or whatever. So [Paul] pitches me, ‘As a change of pace, what about a hench-woman? And we could call her ‘Harley Quinn’ like a harlequin.’ I thought it sounded like a great idea. I said, ‘Sure. Let’s do that.’ So it was pretty straightforward.” Dini was so enthusiastic he even sketched out a proposed costume. Bruce Timm explains, “It was an Adam West-show kind of version, where she has the ’60s miniskirt. Kind of a curly bob and stuff. I was just like, ‘Naaah.’ It didn’t seem to me like it worked in the world that we’d created, so I took it upon myself to design her.” Simplifying the look of traditional medieval harlequins, Timm devised a sleek red-and-black costume partially inspired by the Golden Age Daredevil. Harley Quinn was born.

FINDING HARLEY

But Harley still needed a voice. And who better to play the part than her inspiration, Arleen Sorkin? Since Harley was a one-time guest role, no other actresses auditioned. As Dini remembers, “I think [voice director] Andrea Romano had a short list of actresses in her pocket to call if Arleen didn’t work out, but I never knew who they were. Arleen nailed it, so that was that.” Timm concurs. “Arleen came in doing that voice and I was, like, ‘Okay, great! That fits. That’s good.’ It’s cute, it’s charming, it’s funny, and it fit the dialogue. The dialogue was all written in ’40s comedic gun-moll slang, so it was all kind of perfect.” Arleen Sorkin tells BACK ISSUE, “All I knew was I had a job, you know? That’s an actor. ‘Oh my god, I got a job!’ And I went in, and Mark Hamill was there. I think I had met Mark at Carrie Fisher’s house years ago. You know, he’s a lovely, lovely guy. So I didn’t feel nervous around him. When we would go in to record it, I would lose track of what I was doing. When Mark would perform, I would just watch him. It was like watching a master! I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. He’s such an unbelievable actor. And then when

Love Psychotic Style Detail from the cover of DC’s Batman Adventures: Mad Love, its Timm cover signed by Harley’s co-creators, Paul Dini and Bruce Timm. TM & © DC Comics.

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She Coulda Been a Contenda (top) Paul Dini’s original character design for Harley Quinn, and a DC Collectibles’ statuette of same. (middle) A cartoon given by Timm to Sorkin. (bottom left) Dini and Timm cameo on BTAS. (bottom right) Gal pals Poison Ivy and Harley. © Warner Bros. TM & © DC Comics.

Diane Pershing came in and did Poison Ivy, I was so impressed with her! So I loved it. It was a great job.” But despite this successful debut, BTAS producers Bruce Timm and Alan Burnett were hesitant to have Harley immediately return. As Paul Dini relates, “Bruce and Alan agreed, and rightly so, that we should use her sparingly at first. It was important to keep the Joker as a solo threat in Mask of the Phantasm and episodes like ‘Joker’s Wild’ and ‘The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne.’ But when Joker needed to have his gang, Harley was usually a welcome addition.” Timm wanted to keep the BTAS Joker as frightening as possible, as previous animated shows always emphasized his wacky side. “When Paul talked about bringing Harley back, I was a little bit reluctant just because I thought, ‘Okay, that kind of undercuts him a little bit,’” Timm says today. “It plays more towards his comedic side and it gives him a recurring girlfriend, which also humanizes him to a degree which I was not really comfortable with. But having seen that first episode once it came back from overseas, it was hard to deny that she had immense appeal. The combination of the design, the personality in the script, and what Arleen definitely brought to the table, we were all kind of like, ‘Wow!’ I mean, immediately. The minute we saw the raw footage, it was like, ‘Okay, there’s something here!’ So [Paul] didn’t have to twist my arm very hard to bring her back. And then, of course, once we opened that door, then arleen sorkin suddenly Paul was constantly bringing her back! We couldn’t have the Joker without Harley at that point.”

HARLEY AND IVY

Further appearances in “The Laughing Fish,” “Almost Got ’Im,” and “The Man Who Killed Batman” solidified Harley’s part on the show, but a new side was revealed when she teamed up with fellow bat-villain Poison Ivy in the episode “Harley and Ivy.” “That was a fun one,” Timm recalls. “That one was just one of Paul’s weird ideas. You could see the appeal of it. They were interesting characters together. I tend to think Poison Ivy is a much more serious character than Harley usually, but when they’re together, she kind of becomes Bud Abbott. And Harley’s like Lou Costello. So she’s funnier, but she’s still the straight man, you know? They definitely make a good team, weirdly enough. They shouldn’t really go together, but they do.” Ivy was in some ways a positive influence, forcing her friend to realize just how abusive the Joker really was. “Poison Ivy is definitely the catalyst for Harley’s quote-unquote ‘awakening,’ in terms of kind of opening her eyes to how the Joker is actually treating her,” Timm explains. “Poison Ivy takes no sh*t from anybody,

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especially not from men! Most of that episode was a romp, but there’s definitely a strong character core to it: Poison Ivy looking at Harley and seeing how she’s treated by the Joker. [Ivy] can’t stand to see it and [is] doing her best to break her out of that.”

MAD LOVE

The abusive elements of Harley’s relationship with the Joker were laid bare in the Batman Adventures one-shot Mad Love (Feb. 1994), the first comic-book teaming of Paul Dini and Bruce Timm. Timm recalls, “Once we got the go-ahead to do a comic, and Paul and I sat around, I think immediately the first idea that both of us had was, ‘Hey, let’s do Harley’s origin story.’ Paul goes, ‘I know exactly who she was. Before she was Harley Quinn, she was the Joker’s psychiatrist.’ And I went, ‘Ohhh! Now, there’s an idea!’ And so from that point on, once we started plotting the story out, the idea [was] exploring their really messed-up relationship.” Mad Love revealed that Harley Quinn was once Harleen Quinzel, winner of a gymnastics scholarship to Gotham State University. Pursuing a degree by romancing her way through her professors, Quinzel planned to become a pop psychologist until an internship at Arkham Asylum introduced her to the Joker. Manipulated by her patient’s mind games, Quinzel ends up falling in love with him. When Batman brings an escaped Joker back to Arkham battered and bruised, Quinzel finally snaps, transforming herself into her idea of the Joker’s perfect woman: Harley Quinn. Mad Love was a harrowing look into the psyche of what had once been a simple comic-relief character. It won both the Eisner and Harvey Awards for Best Single Story in 1994. This was an honor Timm describes as “kind of surreal, having only been officially in the comic-book world for such a short period of time and my first big comic debut to actually win the top honor

of the industry was… [laughs] kind of weird! But it was great. It was awesome.” The Harley/Joker relationship in Mad Love definitely struck a chord with readers. “I think everybody is very familiar with that condition of the one-sided abusive relationship,” Timm continues. “So in a weird kind of way, it does humanize [the Joker], but at the same time, it also just goes to show you that yeah, he doesn’t really have feelings for her. She’s just an interesting plaything when she serves his purposes. And when she doesn’t... Throw her out the window.” Having worked out Harley’s origin, Dini and Timm began teasing it on the Batman cartoon, eventually adapting Mad Love into an episode in 1999. Harley appeared as Harleen Quinzel in “The Man Who Killed Batman,” and talked about being the Joker’s psychiatrist in “Harlequinade.” Arleen Sorkin’s main concern with the introduction of a civilian Harley was a practical one: “How could I take that character and then make her sound sane? I hope I did a good job. I was nervous, but nobody said, ‘You stink,’ so I kept going.”

She’s No Angel (left) Original Bruce Timm cover art to DC’s Batman: Harley & Ivy #1 (June 2014), a threeissue miniseries. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions. (right) Courtesy of Heritage, original art to page 10 of Paul and Bruce’s award-winning comic, Mad Love. TM & © DC Comics.

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HARLEY QUINN, SHOWSTOPPER

Romantic Bat-Roast (top) Cover to The Batman Adventures #28 (Jan. 1995), by Mike Parobeck and Rick Burchett. (bottom) An undated Harley illo by Bruce Timm, courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

Sorkin’s friendship with Paul Dini continued to inspire her animated counterpart. The episode “Harlequinaide” featured Harley distracting a group of mobsters by belting out the humorous show tune “Say We’re Sweethearts Again” from the 1944 MGM musical comedy Meet the People. The song was an old audition piece of Sorkin’s, and Dini arranged to buy the rights after first hearing it on a harrowing ride home. “Paul was driving me back from a recording session during the [L.A.] riots, so I was trying to keep him distracted,” Sorkin recalls. “And I’m not a great singer, but I just thought, ‘I’ll sing songs for him.’ So I knew that song from my cabaret days and sang it to him and next time I saw him, he said, ‘It’s in the show.’ He really knew how to make me feel like he valued me and I certainly was so impressed and valued him. We had a great working relationship.” The episode also provided another one of Harley’s trademarks. Bruce Timm reveals, “Harley’s pigtails? [Director] Kevin Altieri came up with those for ‘Harlequinade.’ He suggested it. He said, ‘Yeah, when she’s in her civilian look, she should have these pigtails that stick out like the jester hat.’ So that was Kevin’s big contribution.”

HARLEY’S LAST HURRAH?

As Batman: The Animated Series neared the end of its initial run, Harley got a solo story as a grand sendoff. The 1994 episode “Harley’s Holiday” finds a newly released Harleen Quinzel struggling to stay straight, only to be falsely accused of shoplifting in an ever-escalating comedy of errors. The episode ends on a touching note, as a sympathetic Dark Knight tells a contrite Harley, “I know what it’s like to try and rebuild a life. I had a bad day too, once.” The viewer is left hopeful that someday soon, a reformed Harley can be released from Arkham permanently. Much like her musical number, Harley’s shoplifting mishap was inspired by an episode from Arleen Sorkin’s life. “I was on a sitcom called Duet, one of the first shows on the Fox network,” Sorkin explains. “When Married with Children premiered, so did Duet. I had an idea for my character, Geneva, and I said to my executive producer—at the time I didn’t know how completely irritating it was to have the actor pitch a story—‘What if Geneva got arrested because she didn’t know they forgot to take the theft tag off of her clothes?’ I told that to my executive producer, she humored me, [rejected the idea,] and I felt like a complete fool! Then I had breakfast with Paul Dini and I told him the story. He thought it was a good idea, and he put it in ‘Harley’s Holiday.’ He made something out of it, probably because I felt bad! I felt bad and he made something wonderful out of it.” As Bruce Timm explains, the hopeful ending was no accident. “We thought at that time that that was going to be our last Harley story, because it was pretty late in the series. We thought, ‘Okay, we’re probably done. This is probably our last Harley episode.’ So we kind of gave her a happy ending.” But ultimately, the character proved too popular to stay reformed for long. When BTAS returned as The New Adventures of Batman, Harley was up to her old tricks and back together with the Joker.

INTO THE DCU

Although she made her first comic-book appearance in the BTAS tie-in comic Batman Adventures #12 (Sept. 1993), Harley was officially incorporated into the regular DC Universe with the October 1999 special Batman: Harley Quinn. As Bruce Timm points out, “It’s not the first time a character from other media has been subsumed into the official DC canon. Normally they don’t make a big deal out of it. Like, Jimmy Olsen originated in the [Superman] radio show. It was just, ‘Oh, that’s a cool character. Let’s put him in the comics.’ But they were smart to publicize and make a big deal out of it because, obviously, it helped with sales and her profile and everything.” 70 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

One person opposed to adding Harley to the DCU was Batman group editor Dennis O’Neil. “I was not consulted on Harley Quinn at all,” O’Neil tells BACK ISSUE. “I didn’t know about her until I saw it in print, and I would not have approved.” Oddly enough, O’Neil’s reasoning was similar to Timm and Burnett’s initial concerns over how Harley affected the Joker. O’Neil explains, “My version of the Joker is that he is so crazy that his mind works in such a way that’s alien to the rest of humanity. That something like having a girlfriend, having a sex life, would be way too normal for him. But, I would’ve been wrong. Harley is a very good character. It’s a slightly different interpretation of the Joker, but it’s like Hamlet. If you see Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, and Richard Burton’s, they’re not too much alike, but they’re both valid on their own terms. This stuff is not graven in stone and it has to be allowed to evolve. Nobody involved would be doing their jobs if I had to approve of everything.” Considering O’Neil’s feelings, it is perhaps not surprising that the Harley Quinn one-shot was edited by former O’Neil assistants Darren Vincenzo and Jordan Gorfinkel. The Harley Quinn one-shot was written by the natural choice: Paul Dini. The new DCU version of Harley had a few differences from her classic BTAS incarnation, though: Her relationship with the Joker was shorter-lived and much more contentious. The Clown Prince of Crime views his hench-wench as more of an unwanted groupie than anything, and tries to kill her at the first opportunity. When asked why he made these changes, Dini replies, “I was writing to the needs of the DC line at the time. Joker in the comics was a much darker character, so Harley’s relationship with him reflected that.” In addition, the special had Harley injected with a special formula from her friend Poison Ivy, giving her greater acrobatic skill as well as immunity to poisons. Again, Dini implemented this change to better suit the needs of the DCU. “I figured if she’d be going head-to-head with Batman and the other DC heroes, Harley would need some kind of physical edge. So the immunity that Poison Ivy gave her in ‘Harley and Ivy’ got amped up here to include some degree of enhanced strength and agility. Just enough that if she got in a fight with say, Talia or Black Canary, she’d be able to hold her own. Wonder Woman, however, would clean her clock.”

ONGOING GOINGS-ON

Harley got her own monthly comic the next year, lasting 38 issues (Dec. 2000–Jan. 2004). The regular Harley Quinn series pushed Harley into the greater DCU, as the Insane Ingénue clashed with Big Barda, became the Daily Planet’s advice columnist, romanced Jimmy Olsen, and

escaped from Hell itself. Although he credits the series with putting Harley on the map in comics, Paul Dini confesses, “I thought I might have liked a crack at it first, but in reality, I was too busy with animation to do it justice.” Regular Harley Quinn writer Karl Kesel recalls how he got the assignment: “I was in New York City visiting the DC offices, and [editor] Matt Idelson approached me to pitch for the book. I had absolutely loved Dini and Timm’s Mad Love—probably the best comic of that year, if you ask me—and was instantly attracted to the character. Interesting side note: I have not to this day seen any episode of any animated show featuring Harley! Not saying that’s good or bad, just that it’s a fact.” Putting together his proposal for the series, Kesel says, “I eventually decided Harley should be a love comic—‘about love gone horribly, terribly wrong,’ as it said on the pitch’s cover page.” Harley Quinn the series made a big change to Harley’s status quo, as she finally broke away from the Joker and pursued her own crime career. As Kesel explains, “That was essential, and it was clear why in Harley #1. Joker originally played a much larger role in that issue, but Matt asked me to dial him down, and he was absolutely right. Joker is such a strong presence that he dominated every scene he was in. If Harley wasn’t removed from his orbit she would have been the sidekick in her own book!” Kesel provided Quinn her own sidekicks to bounce off of with the Quinntets, a group of five henchmen whose fifth members were killed off like Spinal Tap drummers. Also introduced were Surley, Donner, and Chispazo, a group of Three Stoogesinspired bounty hunters who Harley tried to play matchmaker for. As Kesel explains, “Of course, trying to set up some of the people who are trying to take you down is crazy, right? Which was kind of the point: Harley is crazy! But she also has an overwhelming, almost uncontrollable belief and faith in love. She has to, or else she wouldn’t love Joker.” Cleverly, the Harley Quinn ongoing occasionally showed the world from Harley’s POV, as her various delusions appeared in the BTAS style. Looking though

How Do Ya Do, DCU? The Joker’s main squeeze entered the DC Universe in the one-shot Batman: Harley Quinn. Its Alex Ross-painted cover was turned into this lithograph, titled Tango with Evil. Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

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“Love Gone Horribly, Terribly Wrong” (left) First issue of the original Harley Quinn monthly. (right) Jeepers! Witness young Jimmy Olsen’s popping peepers on the splash to HQ #18 (May 2002). By Kesel/Dodson/ Dodson. TM & © DC Comics.

Harley’s rose-colored glasses, nothing, not even the death of a loyal Quinntet, was ever as bad as it seemed. As Kesel says, “It seemed like a nice way to acknowledge Harley’s roots, and I liked the idea that Harley saw the world in, literally, a cartoon fashion. It just seemed to fit. Luckily, we had an artist talented enough to pull it off.” That talented artist was Terry Dodson, inked by his wife, Rachel Dodson. Together, their Good Girl-style art gave Harley the appropriate zing for her new solo adventures. As Kesel recalls, “I dragged Terry (and he dragged Rachel!) into Harley. It just seemed he would be perfect for the book. As it turned out, Terry had already been drawing Harley in his sketch book and was at a point where he was looking for something new, so pieces just fell in place. I filled my proposal with Terry’s sketches of Harley in a not-too-subliminal attempt to influence DC’s choice of the artist. Obviously, Terry and Rachel are outstanding artists, and they bring that to whatever they work on, but there’s also a real joy and liveliness to their style, which is essential for Harley.” One of the more intriguing “What If?”s in Harley’s history happened after the Dodsons’ departure. Karl Kesel tells BACK ISSUE, “When Terry stepped away from the book, Matt Idelson suggested a new artist as a possible replacement—some guy who had just started drawing Catwoman named… Darwyn Cooke. I can’t remember why that was never followed up on—possibly Darwyn wasn’t interested. He came into his own very quickly, after all.”

NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME

Harley Quinn made the leap to live-action in 2002 as a recurring villain in the short-lived WB television series Birds of Prey. Loosely adapted from the DC comic, the show featured Batman and Catwoman’s daughter Helena Kyle (the Huntress) teaming up with ex-Batgirl Barbara Gordon (Oracle) as they mentored a psychic teenage runaway named Dinah Redmond (daughter of the ex-Black Canary). Harley was featured as Dr. Harleen Quinzel, Helena’s psychiatrist, who, unbeknownst to our heroines, was secretly plotting revenge for the death of her beloved Joker. Twin Peaks’ Sherilyn Fenn starred as Dr. Quinzel in the unaired pilot, but was replaced by Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’s Mia Sara in the series due to scheduling conflicts. Fenn remarked in a 2014 interview with the A/V Club, “I don’t remember what happened. … I thought it was fun. It was easy to play. It seems like I had to go somewhere after I filmed it, but… I don’t remember! … Something happened, though, because I know we had a good time filming it. It was probably money or something.” Although Birds of Prey debuted to strong ratings, viewership fell quickly and it was canceled after 13 episodes. The series finale featured Dr. Quinzel gaining artificial hypnotic powers and holding Helena under her sway. Mia Sara’s made-for-TV costume was also a far cry from Harley Quinn’s classic look. While it was certainly less than most HQ fans were hoping for, Paul Dini remains sanguine about Harley’s first live-action portrayal. “I think Mia did the best she

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Ever-evolvin’ Three distinct looks for the DCU Harley. Art by (left) Jim Lee and Scott Williams and (center and right) Amanda Conner. TM & © DC Comics.

Thankfully, Strong had the enthusiastic approval of Harley’s original voice actor. “I was a huuuge fan of Tara Strong ’cause I watched her record on Batman. I thought she was so great!” raves Arleen Sorkin. “In fact, I remember going home and saying to my husband [television producer Christopher Lloyd], ‘This girl is so great! If she does on-camera work, FROM SORKIN TO STRONG 2009 brought Harley to the world of video games, as Rocksteady Studios you’ve got to see her for Frasier.’ So when I heard that she was replacing released Batman: Arkham Asylum. Much like the comic book of the same me, I felt the character was in very expert hands.” name, it involved the Dark Knight fighting his way through an Arkham Strong confirms that Sorkin’s blessing made a big controlled by its inmates. BTAS’ Arleen Sorkin redifference with Harley’s fanbase: “She was very gracious turned as Harley, who received a radical makeover about it and then the fans were very welcoming,” Strong halfway between a riot grrrl and a sexy nurse. says. “I was very grateful that the transition went Game writer Paul Dini approved of the change, smoothly. The most resistance was in a very sweet way. stating, “I did work with the game crew on coming Like, ‘We love your version but Arleen’s always the first,’ up with a new look for Harley. As the Arkham world or, ‘We love your version and we still love Arleen,’ which is one that is visually harsher and more ‘realistic’ I thought was fair, you know? Because my version is than the animated series, the game version of Hardifferent from hers, and she does live in different worlds ley had to be a reflection of that. Given that Joker had than Arleen did and it doesn’t discount her performance taken over the Asylum, it fit that Harley would have with my performance, if that makes sense. So even though adopted a parody of a nurse’s uniform.” the fans were like, ‘We love you so much. We still love her,’ I thought that was very fair. There was no, ‘Die, Further changes came in 2011’s sequel Arkham City, Tara Strong!’ ” as voice actor Tara Strong assumed the role. Strong had tara strong Paul Dini has praise for all Harley’s various voice massive respect for her predecessor, having played Batgirl opposite her on Batman: The Animated Series. actors, saying, “Although Arleen will always be Harley “I bow to the genius of Arleen Sorkin, and because it was group records, to me, I think Tara Strong, Hynden Walch, and Jenny Slate have all done I did sit beside her while she was doing her Harley [on BTAS], and I was outstanding work with the character.” always so impressed by her as an actress,” Strong says. “She just by nature had the most adorable-sounding voice I think I’ve ever heard. And her sheer NEW 52 AND REBIRTH actual ability to make these tones and different inflections was masterful.” These days, Harley Quinn is again headlining her own book at DC, helmed Explaining the difficulties in inheriting the part, Strong says, by another husband-and -wife team, writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda “Whenever you’re taking over for a role in voiceover, you always ask Conner. The past few years have seen her do everything from partnering the actor, ‘Is this a financial discussion?’ Because sometimes a show’s with Power Girl to running a roller-derby team. And, after years of making millions in toys and they still don’t want to pay their voice innuendo and speculation, Palmiotti and Conner have confirmed that actors more than scale, which is like $800. And so there’s always a sort Harley and Ivy enjoy a same-sex (but non-monogamous) relationship. While the Amanda Conner redesign is different from her original of fair increase in salary once the show’s doing well, so you always have to check first and make sure it’s not a deal thing. Or is it a creative costume, it gets a thumbs-up from Harley co-creator Bruce Timm: thing? Like, this person really doesn’t want to do this role, or doesn’t “I really like Amanda’s design a lot because it’s modern and a little bit want to do a video game, or whatever it is. So, first you do your home- punk rock, but it’s really fun without being trashy. I think the whole work to find out why this role is being recast. In the case of the video roller-derby girl look is really fun because it’s tough but it’s still playful. game, they wanted way more levels of screaming and highs and lows It’s not… it’s not skanky. [laughs] If I can use that word.” and insanity to this character, and my version of her can be much bigger than what Arleen did. When I first went in, they said, ‘We don’t SUICIDE SQUAD GOALS want you to copy Arleen,’ which I was really relieved [to hear] because Harley made the leap to yet another medium in 2016, as Australian there’s only one Arleen! I didn’t want to copy her and they didn’t want actress Margot Robbie snagged the part for the live-action Suicide that. They wanted sort of the essence of her character, but then taken Squad movie. Critical reaction to the film was mixed, but Robbie’s to all kinds of crazy, large levels in this video-game world. And to be performance was consistently cited as a standout. Although her honest with you, I was very nervous to step into her shoes. You know, classic costume was briefly glimpsed, the majority of the movie put the thing that sometimes networks don’t understand is that fans fall Harley in a Debbie Harry-flavored punk-rock ensemble. The film also in love with the voices of these characters and they’re very loyal to included flashbacks to Harley’s origin, as Jared Leto’s Joker seduced these characters, as was I. So I wanted to do her justice.” Robbie’s Harleen Quinzel. could with what the show provided,” he says today. “I met two of the writers who worked on Birds and the first thing they said was: ‘We wrecked your character.’ What could I say? I complimented them on their candor.”

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While Sorkin and Timm have not yet seen Robbie’s portrayal of Harley, Dini “loved it. Margot really got into the role and brought great things to it, particularly when it came to Harley’s twisted sense of humor. I got a big kick seeing a recent photo of her reading a Harley comic book in an airport. The lady does her homework!” Robbie’s casting also gets high marks from her fellow Harley Tara Strong. “I actually love her so much and think she’s luminescent onscreen and I think she’s such a gorgeous girl,” Strong says. “Fans were so pissed off that I didn’t get to play her on camera and I was like, ‘Let’s be real, y’all. I’m 40, she’s 20.’ [laughs] I know I’m keeping it together, but she does look good. And she doesn’t just look good, she’s a phenomenal actress. So I actually quite approve of that casting.”

WHO IS HARLEY QUINN?

So with all her different incarnations through the years, the question remains: Who is Harley Quinn? What about her still speaks to her audience? And what traits carry through from one version to the next? In the opinion of Tara Strong, “She’s certainly a hopeless romantic. She is vulnerable and smart and funny and crazy. She’s everybody’s hidden emotions wrapped up into one hilarious, gorgeous, crazy girl. Often when you get asked to do a video game as a seasoned voice performer you don’t really want to, because it’s four hours of just you, often vocally very taxing and screaming and you blow your voice for the week, but whenever I get asked to do a Harley video game, I’m still just as excited. It’s like therapy, you know? I get to get out all my frustrations! She’s such a nice mix of crazy/ strong and then vulnerable/loving. I think that’s why people identify with her. Any area you might want to go when you’re in a challenging relationship, she goes there. She’ll kill for her love and she would probably die for him. And at the same time, she’s not afraid to look crazy, look silly, act crazy. It’s just complete love at its core. There’s no fear with her. She has no fear, which is so fun!” According to Karl Kesel, the secret to Harley’s longevity and versatility is the solid character at her core. “The thing about Harley—and you’ve seen this a lot recently—is that she’s so confident and selfpossessed that she can walk into any situation and instantly fit in. Outer space? No problem. Suicide Squad? Sure. Horror and magic? No big deal.”

CONVENTIONS AND COSPLAY

Harley’s attitude and variety of looks have made her extremely popular with cosplayers. Tara Strong is a proud member of the cosplay community, making a surprise appearance in full Harley regalia at Comic-Con International to promote the 2015 game Arkham Knight. Strong says, “When I cosplay, it’s strictly for the fans. They get such a kick out of it, and it’s so much fun! When you go to these cons, they’re a tremendous amount of work. You are on all day and giving of yourself, and it’s important because the fans are so supportive, so that’s my time to give back. You’re meeting people who start crying or faint or say, you know, ‘You’re the reason I survived my parents’ divorce,’ or depression, I had a mom come talk to me and say, ‘My daughter is autistic and hasn’t spoken in a year, and when I told her we were coming to see you, she started talking again.’ So you really do give yourself graciously to the fans. In addition to that, cosplaying these characters has been so much fun and the fans go absolutely nuts! I mean, when I did Harley, it was a total surprise. I always surprise them.

A Whole Lotta Harleys (top inset) Mia Sara, from the final episode of TV’s Birds of Prey. (middle inset) Tara Strong took over voicing Harley from Arleen Sorkin… and even cosplayed as HQ at Comic-Con! (Find her on Twitter @TaraStrong.) (bottom inset) Did Debbie Harry’s fashions inspire (main) Suicide Squad’s Harley, as played by Margot Robbie? © Warner Bros. Harley Quinn TM & © DC Comics.

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Generally I come just as myself. They had no idea I was coming as Harley. I did it for the release of the video game and not even the people running that booth knew I was doing that.” Surprisingly, dressing as Harley gives Strong more anonymity at cons. “Normally when Tara Strong walks from her hotel to Comic-Con, I can’t go two feet without people saying, ‘Can I have a picture?’ or ‘Can you sign this?,’ but as Harley, I pretty much had the freedom to walk,” Strong says. “There were people that wanted to take my picture, but because of the costume, they didn’t know it was me! “I had some really funny things happen. This one guy was like, ‘Can I get your picture, please? Harley’s my favorite, and you’ll be the 12th Harley today!’ And I posed, and I said [in Harley voice], ‘But am I your favorite, Puddin’?’ and he looked at me kind of funny and he’s like, ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of good ones.’ [laughs] I wish I could have been there when he [saw] what he had actually captured on his iPhone!” A convention also provided Karl Kesel’s favorite memory of Harley. Kesel says, “A woman dressed in a great Harley costume came up to me, said how much she enjoyed my work on the character, and then said that she could see clearly from the beginning that Harley’s relationship with the Joker wasn’t a healthy one—and then realized that she, too, was in an abusive relationship—and got out of it. I have no idea how abusive that relationship was—in the comics I wrote Joker abuses Harley mentally much more than physically— but the fact remains that because of what we did, someone’s life actually got better. It’s pretty damn hard to top that as a high point.” But as meaningful as Harley is to her many fans, there is perhaps no one she’s affected more than her original portrayer, Arleen Sorkin. “There would be no Harley Quinn if I didn’t meet Paul Dini in college,”

she says today. “Life is an adventure and certainly a grand part of my adventure is that I met Paul. And now I’ve become friendly with Diane Pershing. I never was friendly before with Poison Ivy, but now I am. And that’s kind of fun!”

EPILOGUE

As of this writing, Harley has come full circle, returning to animation in the classic BTAS style in the new directto-video feature Batman and Harley Quinn, executiveproduced by Harley co-creator Bruce Timm. Making her debut as Harley is a new voice actor—The Big Bang Theory star Melissa Rauch. Paul Dini is also still in the Harley business, featuring her on the Cartoon Network’s Justice League Action series and co-writing backup stories with Jimmy Palmiotti for DC’s monthly Harley Quinn comic. Still on the horizon is a David Ayer-directed Gotham City Sirens feature film, with Margot Robbie reprising Harley opposite a yet-to-be-cast Poison Ivy and Catwoman. As Karl Kesel observes, “It’s difficult to avoid Harley these days! Personally, I couldn’t be happier for the character—she deserves all the attention she’s getting. At one point I asked Paul Dini how it felt to have co-created the biggest breakout star in comics since Wolverine? He said: ‘It’s a start.’”

Big thanks to Paul Dini, Karl Kesel, Dennis O’Neil, Arleen Sorkin, Tara Strong, and Bruce Timm for sharing their Harley Quinn memories with BACK ISSUE, and to Steven Thompson for transcribing the O’Neil, Sorkin, Strong, and Timm interviews. And a tip of the jester’s hat to Nino Santiago and Tifiney McCullough for providing digital copies of Harley’s comics adventures on short notice. Consider yourselves Honorary Quinntets! JOHN TRUMBULL has been writing for BACK ISSUE since 2012. His weekly column about comics and pop culture, Crisis on Earth-T, appears Mondays at AtomicJunkShop.com.

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A weird little coincidence, I know, but up here north of the border this kind of strange stuff seems to happen more than you know. (Hey, maybe one day I’ll tell how Doctor Who may actually have started out as a puppet on the Canadian version of the Howdy Doody show starring Robert Goulet and William Shatner!) – Jeff Taylor Send your comments to: Email: euryman@gmail.com (subject: BACK ISSUE) Postal mail: Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief • BACK ISSUE 118 Edgewood Ave. NE * Concord, NC 28025

Find BACK ISSUE on

CONDORMAN’S CANADIAN CONNECTION

Thoroughly enjoyed BI #92, especially the stuff on Swamp Thing. I must admit that I am rather a fan of the Return of Swamp Thing movie (I can play those opening credits over and over and over again…), but then I have always had a major weakness for camp superheroes. The real reason I’m writing though is that I see that BACK ISSUE #97 is going to feature an article on the 1981 Disney comedy Condorman, about a comic-book artist named Woody Wilkins who dresses up as the superhero he draws in order to fight evil. While I know that the article will probably mention the fact that the movie had been adapted out of all recognition from Robert Sheckley’s satirical spy novel The Game of X, there is a bizarre Canadian connection that might have escaped your notice. In what can only be one of the most incredible coincidences of all times, there was also another cartoonist named Woody Wilkins who dressed up as the superhero he drew in order to fight crime, and he appeared in the B&W Canadian version of Wow Comics, published by Bell Features during World War II. Drawn by a wonderfully named young artist named Tedd Steele (his real name… and he was born on April Fool’s Day, to boot!), the decidedly silly strip was called “Woody and the Wolf,” and in it the title character would put on long underwear, black trunks, and a cartoon wolf mask to © the respective copyright holder. go out to battle various wacky crooks, spies, and mad scientists. (In a more serious vein, Steele also drew the equally wonderfully named Speed Savage, who fought crime across Canada as the White Mask in a Shadow-style cloak and hat before switching to a more traditional skintight superhero suit.)

THE “NEW LOOK” SHAZAM!

I really enjoyed the “All-Captains Issue” of the latest BACK ISSUE magazine [#93], in particular, both Captain Marvel articles. Huge kudos to Karen Walker for her piece on Marvel’s Mar-Vell and having some nice bits on both the Englehart/Milgrom run and the Moench/Broderick run. Really liked John Pierce’s article on Shazam! in the Bronze Age, though there’s one part of that article that kind of “sticks in my craw,” so to speak, and that’s when we get to Alan Weiss’ take on the character in Shazam! #34. I quote the article: “But was this ‘New Look’ Harris’ or Bridwell’s idea? Although comments in the fan press blamed Harris, Kurt Schaffenberger commented that ‘It had to be higher than that, perhaps Joe Orlando or even [publisher] Jenette Kahn.’ ” Was Jack C. Harris even talked to about this? I’m sure he’d share whatever he remembers on it. Alan Weiss has talked about it very briefly and on the record in the pages of the Comic Book Artist Collected Edition vol. 1. Weiss’ interview in that was an “extra” for the collected edition and not one of the articles from the magazine. Weiss mentioned in that interview that the main reason why he went after that gig was to be able to sort of pay homage to Mac Raboy’s work with Captain Marvel, Jr. Weiss further mentioned that the previous open line work on the character didn’t really have a lot of appeal to him, but it certainly had its charm, so he added what he called “Woody” type of shadowing (in reference to Wallace Wood’s ink work) and went for the Fred MacMurray face. Other than that, he gave no reason why he was chosen for it or why he didn’t continue with it. I expect he didn’t continue with it because he was bouncing around on assignments (I would’ve loved to have seen him either continue with that or Super-Team Family after his work on its 11th issue) and just didn’t want to have a deadline hanging over his head, but that’s purely conjecture on my part. The part that “sticks in my craw” was the use of the word “blamed” about the decision in the fan press. Now, I can’t admit to knowing what exactly was said in the fan press at the time as I just wasn’t reading any of that (hard to get that stuff in the small town of Louisiana, Missouri, when I was just a kid in high school), but I certainly know my own reaction at the time. I was a huge fan of both C. C. Beck’s and Kurt Schaffenberger’s work on the character and even had a subscription to the book back in the day. I had no clue about the work on Captain Marvel in the ’40s and ’50s prior to DC’s revival of the character, but, man, I was sure happy to see DC reprint it whenever they did.

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I agree with your comment about the selection of Alan Weiss as the Shazam! artist, Darren. This should have given me pause when I read the manuscript, but the article was behind schedule due to an illness and didn’t get as much of my time as it should have. So I reached out to the always-helpful Jack C. Harris, who replied: Okay, let’s clear it up right now. If you recall, Shazam! #34 was the next-to-the-last issue before this initial run was discontinued. It was canceled because it wasn’t selling well. It was my belief that low sales were because the cartoony approach to Captain Marvel was out of step with the rest of the DC line at the time. I went to managing editor Joe Orlando and expressed this view and asked for permission to change the approach. He gave his blessing and I put the word out that I was looking for a more “realistic” artist for Shazam! Alan Weiss was available, but he had two conditions: First, he wanted to do the cover, and second, that it would be a one-time thing. When he turned in the job, I loved it. There was a bit of a backlash from old-time Captain Marvel fans, but for the most part, the new look was applauded. By the time we were doing the next issue, we knew it would be the last. However, everyone agreed about the importance of keeping the character in print, so I made

certain Cap would have a future home in the pages of World’s Finest Comics. As the artist, I selected Don Newton, as sort of a compromise— a middle ground between Alan’s art and C. C. Beck’s. I thought Don’s art maintained some of the whimsy of the original, although Kurt Schaffenberger let me know he didn’t agree. “I don’t see it,” he told me. So if you want to blame anyone for the look, blame me. – JCH No blame from me, Jack! Alan Weiss’ Captain Marvel was mind-blowing, and I wish his run on Shazam! had lasted longer— and had been given a chance to cultivate an audience. Plus, Don Newton’s work on the strip was superb. Back to Darren’s letter: I also agree about the background images in BI; yours is the second such letter received about this recently. I’ve had a discussion with the designer about this and have asked that backgrounds be used judiciously and limited to larger images that are visible yet do not interfere with readability. Thanks for that constructive criticism!

OH, MIGHTY ISIS!

A few notes on the “Shazam in the Bronze Age” article: “The Silencing of the Shazam Sayer” was eventually published in the 2011 hardcover “The Someday Funnies.” The Isis story in Shazam! #25 did guest star Captain Marvel, but that story and the cover got left out of the Showcase Presents: Shazam! reprint book because DC no longer had the Isis license. – Mark Drummond

HE LIKES THE LOSERS!

I enjoyed the [Captain Storm and the] Losers article, especially since most of their publication history was a bit before I had reliable access to new comics; but I did wonder why the article skipped over the team’s last two Bronze Age appearances. They appeared in Crisis on Infinite Earths (I don’t have the issue number or numbers handy), where they died fighting shadow-demons, and The Losers Special #1, the Special being a Crisis tie-in and one of the earliest books set on the post-Multiverse Earth (where they died again). I realize that my categorizing those stories as Bronze Age is debatable, but I personally use Crisis #12 as the end of DC’s Bronze Age (with everything between Crisis #12 and Legends #1 as an intermediary period). Looking forward to next issue’s Mighty Crusaders article. I’ve always had a soft spot for that era of those characters, even though finding those issues was difficult in the part of Orange County where I grew up. – Doug Abramson

When I saw the ad for Shazam! #34 and its dramatic departure from that look, I was stunned… but in a good way! I was already a fan of Alan Weiss’ work, but just never imagined that DC would get him to draw something like Shazam! So when I saw that ad, I couldn’t wait to pick up the comic—and oh, man, I was just entranced with what he did. I thought it was perfectly suitable to E. Nelson Bridwell’s story and it got me extraexcited for the future of the comic. I was slightly disappointed that Weiss didn’t follow up and continue with the feature, but I quickly became a fan of Don Newton’s work afterwards. Basically, I didn’t know I even wanted this sort of look to the character until it was presented to me, and when it was, Shazam! #34 immediately became my favorite issue of the entire run with its dynamic new take on the characters. As a regular on the BI Facebook page, it doesn’t seem that a week goes by without someone (other than me) saying that they want to see Don Newton’s run on Shazam! collected up in trade or omnibus form. I know I’d certainly love to see that, but in that collection, I think it would be just as important to have Alan Weiss’ work and Gil Kane’s work included as well—don’t just do a collection solely of Don Newton’s work, but on this entire run of wonderful stories by E. Nelson Bridwell and the other artists who contributed to the run— especially Alan Weiss, who got the ball rolling with the new look. Karl Heitmuller, Jr. mentioned in his “Prince Street News” strip that he thought the perfect formula for the Marvel Family lies somewhere between goofy and serious, a mix of whimsy and adventure. As far as I’m concerned, this was done perfectly by E. Nelson Bridwell, Don Newton, Alan Weiss, and Gil Kane, and this is a stretch of stories that deserves preservation in a collected treatment. One other thing, and I’m sorry, but this is a little criticism of some of the graphic design in the magazine. For the vast majority of the magazine, I think it looks terrific, I really do. But again in reference to Alan Weiss’ work on Shazam!, his cover featuring the characters for the Amazing World of DC Comics fanzine was brought up. BI reprinted that image in the background of pages 12 and 13 of this issue, and sorry, but you can barely, barely see it. I understand that space is at a premium in each issue of BI and you want to include as much art as possible, but unfortunately, this solution isn’t really doing the art any favors. Maybe raising the opacity of those background images might help, but as a graphic designer my own self, I know you also run the risk of making the text illegible. Thanks for hearing me out and of course, continued thanks for every issue of BACK ISSUE. – Darren Goodhart

Doug, we’re with you on that Bronze Age timeline, and as such you’re right, the Losers’ Crisis appearances and one-shot should have been addressed. Thanks for this opportunity to do so.

SHAZAM I AM

I loved the “All-Captains Issue,” BI #93, in particular Captain Marvel [Shazam!] of the Bronze Age. Finally! To me, the Captain Marvel I was introduced to was the Bridwell/ Schaffenberger issues starting with Shazam! #28. I loved the whimsy and the art. Only after it ended did I go to those great back-issue bins of three for a buck and complete my collection! Those were the days! Did DC ever reprint the Shazam!s from World’s Finest and Adventure Comics? I would love to see the Don Newton art as well as that wonderful art from Alan Weiss from issue #34, which I believe was not included in the DC Showcase Presents black-and-white collection. Did BI ever do a feature on Power of Shazam! from the ’90s, the wonderful Jerry Ordway graphic novel and series? To date that was

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the most faithful relaunch ever. Does BI plan on doing any feature of the Lone Ranger comics of the ’70s and ’80s? There was that wonderful newspaper strip by Gerry Conway and the great Russ Heath, which most of us LR fans never got to see. As far as my personal series of the ’80s? I would put Blackhawk as my favorite comic ever, then New Teen Titans, Atari Force, Swamp Thing, and X-Men. Does DC ever plan on putting out an omnibus that would collect all the Evanier/Spiegle Blackhawk as well as the unfinished miniseries? It would be wonderful to see Dan Spiegle’s art on high-quality paper. He is one of the most underrated artists of the medium. Loved the [Spiegle] book put out by TwoMorrows. I love what you’re doing with BACK ISSUE… it never gets dated and I find it to be far more interesting than most comics being put out today. Thanks for a great magazine! – Yaakov Gerber

MORE UNPUBLISHED GULACY

As you’re probably aware, Dan Spiegle passed away on January 28, 2017. I don’t believe those Shazam! short stories have ever been reprinted. A second Showcase Presents: Shazam! volume is in order, don’t ya think? BI #20 cover-featured a Jerry Ordway interview about Power of Shazam! The Lone Ranger? That’s an interesting idea. And speaking of Atari Force, eventually we’re going to cover some video gameinspired comics of the ’80s, but that won’t happen until early 2019 at the earliest. A lot of people tell me they enjoy BI more than they do current comics. I’m proud that we’ve created a safe haven!

Thanks for sharing this, Dave!

Great job with BACK ISSUE magazine #93. I especially liked the Captain Marvel article, which included some new comments from Jim Starlin. I also liked the title you gave my letter of “Unpublished Gulacy Revisited” in the letters section. The space you used to present the two additional unpublished Gulacy art pieces was just right. I just came across one more really great, unpublished Eternal Warrior cover by Paul, which only recently appeared on the internet. It was referenced in my article in BACK ISSUE #88 as an unpublished cover to Eternal Warrior #38, although I had no picture of it at that time. Here it is, in all its glory [bottom left]. Interestingly, it is labeled B.S. #40, as in Bloodshot #40, although it was not used in that issue. The additional labeling of “Gilad Abrams” lets us know it is indeed the Eternal Warrior. Keep up the good work, Michael. – Dave Lemieux

DOUBLE YOUR AD DISPLEASURE

Nice Cockrum cover! As a 40-plus-year fan of the original Captain Marvel, I had to purchase issue #93 when I saw in in Previews. And I did enjoy it! However, some things caught my attention while reading it, such as the caption on page 29 listing the featured cover and splash page as belonging to Captain Marvel #25, even though the visible indicia on the splash page says it’s from #27. Oops! [Oops, indeed!— ye red-faced ed.] I also enjoyed seeing that small portion of the Robert Kanigher portrait with Christopher Larochelle’s Captain Storm/Losers article. Didn’t care much for or about Dewey Cassell’s Captain D write-up, but I am quite interested in his Mike Grell work-in-progress. Captain Universe didn’t raise my interest either, and Captain Victory didn’t arrive until my senior year of high school, with Captain Carrot and Captain EO not seeming to be worth my interest. – Howard E. Michaels, Jr. P.S. On the inside back cover advertisement, BI #94 and 95, as well as Comic Book Creator #15 and 16, were pictured twice. Why? Wasted space. And seemingly very careless. Howard, I noticed that ad duplication when I thumbed through my copy of BI #93 and asked our fearless leader, publisher John Morrow, how this happened. Says John, “I must’ve been working on two mags’ ads at the same time, and accidentally pasted the wrong ad on page 80 of BI #93, when it should’ve gone on the last page of another mag. Since the file for the interior (with page 80 on it) is a separate file from the cover (with the inside back cover on it), I guess I thought I had it straight, but didn’t. My apologies.”

MIA: CAPTAIN COMPASS

While the Captains covered had the usual high quality we’ve come to expect from BI, I was a little disappointed that DC’s Captain Compass was not included, even in a short blurb. Sure, he mainly appeared in the ’50s, but also showed up in Bronze Age issues of Detective as well as a Crisis tie-in for Swamp Thing. – Vinny Bellizia Wow, Vinny, you sure picked an obscure character to lobby for! Even in his “heyday” from 1948–1955, nautical detective Captain Compass sputtered between several DC anthologies and later only earned a half-page entry in the original Who’s Who (which was deliciously drawn by Gray Morrow and is shown on the next page). This is a good opportunity to restate that our issue themes aren’t meant to be all-inclusive source guides, but instead a means of editorial structure. In the case of BI #93, had we included every comic-book “Captain” we would’ve had no room for any real content… and we’re also obliged to maintain our Bronze/Modern Age focus, with Golden/Silver Age content (like Captain Compass) being the domain of Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego magazine.

78 • BACK ISSUE • Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue

WHAT ABOUT WHAT IF…?

“IN SPITE OF”

Congrats on another fine issue of BACK ISSUE (#93). As with any themed issue, not every article had the same appeal (15 pages of Captain Carrot??), but there was enough to satisfy. Highlights, for me, were the Losers, Captain Victory (one of the last Kirby concepts not to be collected in any form?), and [Marvel’s] Captain Marvel. The latter two got me thinking about a possible future issue entitled “In spite of.” It was great to see some Captain Victory pages with nice color and on decent paper, two things largely missing in the originals; elsewhere, the point was made that the constant change of inkers drove Starlin from Captain Marvel. Some series (like those two) succeeded and could have done better/lasted longer “in spite of” changing teams (most especially in the artwork), bad reproduction due to ever-cheaper paper, plastic plates, etc. Another series falling into that category is Marvel’s “War of the Worlds” run in Amazing Adventures, which suffered from all three—the run contained some brilliant stuff, but as a whole had great problems (see also the first Warlock run, which started promisingly with Thomas and Kane before getting hopelessly lost until Starlin resurrected the whole thing). Certainly it’s worth looking at artist/inker mismatches, an idea explored often in terms of Jack Kirby in The Jack Kirby Collector and elsewhere: for every Colan/Palmer or Byrne/ Austin there’s (insert names here). These hindrances are separate from sales figures—sometimes the best-looking, best-written comics just fail to garner a following. But they all deserve their best shot. We’re talking here about “if only things hadn’t deteriorated in terms of teams and reproduction,” sometimes several times over. A vague idea, I know, but I hope it makes some kind of sense. – Geraint Davies Geraint, that’s an interesting idea, but “in spite of” discussions tend to naturally surface in articles when exploring series’ failures. To do an entire issue on that topic would skew quite negative and critical, which isn’t BI’s tone. Speaking of Captain Carrot, the next letter thought BI #93’s 15 pages were well spent… Characters TM & © the respective copyright holders. BACK ISSUE TM & © TwoMorrows Publishing.

Thank you so much the excellent article covering the history and background of Captain Carrot (and also his Amazing Zoo Crew!). The Crew has always been a favorite of mine and like their creators, I wish someone would try to bring these characters back again, even if they were Digital First comics. I agree with Mr. [Scott] Shaw! that if Rocket Raccoon can be popular now, so could the Zoo Crew, and without making them “current and dark.” The comic market frequently complains about the low numbers of new (and younger) readers, and maybe this could be another title to try that could attract old and new fans alike. In any case, this was a great companion piece to the equally extensive article in Alter Ego #72. Other than Captain Marvel/Shazam!, I knew very little about the other characters and groups featured in this issue. In addition to being an “All-Captains” issue, it could have equally been called the “Characters publishers have around but don’t know what to do with them” issue. [LOL.—ed.] It’s sad that some of the others, like Captain Carrot, seem to have come under the label of no one wanting to bother with them, or even outright dislike of the character, causing them to be mismanaged and canceled. Of course, Jim Starlin’s Captain Mar-vell is a legend and at least holds the distinction of being one of the few characters who has truly stayed “dead.” (At least for now.) Speaking of dead characters coming back, any chance of an extensive article covering Marvel’s What If…? (and maybe even What The--?!). Going one step further on that topic, I would almost think a whole issue could be devoted to the many alternate realities and universes of both Marvel and DC (Elseworlds, Counter Earth, etc.). I’m looking forward to the Marvel Fanfare issue, and I know some of those stories were considered outside what used to be mainstream continuity. Thanks again for producing another great issue, and I’m looking forward to the next year. Can’t wait to see what’s in store for your 100th issue! – Scott Andrews Scott, I’ve been thinking about Marvel’s What If…?, especially after seeing how well BI #96’s spotlight on Marvel Fanfare turned out. Eventually I plan to either devote an entire issue to What If…? or do exactly what you suggest, an issue on alternative timelines that includes an in-depth look at What If…? What do the rest of you think? Would you buy an issue devoted to What If…?? And speaking of BACK ISSUE #100… next month we celebrate our centennial with a 100-PAGE ISSUE featuring Bronze Age Fanzines and Fandom! The story of The Buyer’s Guide by founder ALAN LIGHT, an interview with Comic Book Price Guide founder ROBERT OVERSTREET, BOB ROZAKIS’ DC Comicmobile memories, a Super DC Con ’76: We Were There “Backstage Pass,” and histories of The Comic Reader, FOOM, Amazing World of DC Comics, Squa Tront, Charlton Bullseye, and Fawcett Collectors of America! Plus a special “Prince Street News” cartoon from KARL HEITMUELLER, JR. Contributors include ALLAN ASHERMAN, BOB BUDIANSKY, SCOTT EDELMAN, CARL GAFFORD, BOB GREENBERGER, JACK C. HARRIS, ROGER HILL, TONY ISABELLA, DAVID ANTHONY KRAFT, BOB LAYTON, PAUL LEVITZ, MICHAEL USLAN, J. C. VAUGHN, and JOHN WORKMAN… and go behind the scenes of BACK ISSUE magazine in an interview with ye ed. Don’t ask— just BI it! See you in thirty! Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, Michael Eury, editor-in-chief

Batman: The Animated Series 25th Anniversary Issue • BACK ISSUE • 79

Celebrate KIRBY’s 100th birthday with

KIRBY100

TWOMORROWS and the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR magazine celebrate JACK KIRBY’S 100th BIRTHDAY in style with the release of KIRBY100, a full-color visual holiday for the King of comics! It features an all-star line-up of 100 COMICS PROS who critique key images from Kirby’s 50-year career, admiring his page layouts, dramatics, and storytelling skills, and lovingly reminiscing about their favorite characters and stories. Featured are BRUCE TIMM, ALEX ROSS, WALTER SIMONSON, JOHN BYRNE, JOE SINNOTT, STEVE RUDE, ADAM HUGHES, WENDY PINI, JOHN ROMITA SR., DAVE GIBBONS, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and dozens more of the top names in comics. Their essays serve to honor Jack’s place in comics history, and prove (as if there’s any doubt) that KIRBY IS KING! This double-length book is edited by JOHN MORROW and JON B. COOKE, with a Kirby cover inked by MIKE ROYER. (The Limited Hardcover includes 16 bonus color pages of Kirby’s 1960s Deities concept drawings)

(224-page FULL-COLOR TRADE PAPERBACK) $34.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-078-6 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 (240-page LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER with 16 bonus pages) $45.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-079-3

SHIPS AUGUST 2017 New book by MICHAEL EURY, editor of

HERO-A-GO-GO!

Welcome to the CAMP AGE, when spies liked their wars cold and their women warm, good guys beat bad guys with a pun and a punch, and Batman shook a mean cape. HERO-A-GO-GO celebrates the camp craze of the Swinging Sixties, when just about everyone—the teens of Riverdale, an ant and a squirrel, even the President of the United States—was a super-hero or a secret agent. BACK ISSUE magazine and former DC Comics editor MICHAEL EURY takes you through that coolest cultural phenomenon with this all-new collection of nostalgic essays, histories, and theme song lyrics of classic 1960s characters like CAPTAIN ACTION, HERBIE THE FAT FURY, CAPTAIN NICE, ATOM ANT, SCOOTER, ACG’s NEMESIS, DELL’S SUPER-FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA, the “Split!” CAPTAIN MARVEL, and others! Featuring interviews with BILL MUMY (Lost in Space), BOB HOLIDAY (It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman), RALPH BAKSHI (The Mighty Heroes, SpiderMan), DEAN TORRENCE (Jan and Dean Meet Batman), RAMONA FRADON (Metamorpho), DICK DeBARTOLO (Captain Klutz), TONY TALLARICO (The Great Society Comic Book), VINCE GARGIULO (Palisades Park historian), JOE SINNOTT (The Beatles comic book), JOSE DELBO (The Monkees comic book), and many more!

SUBSCRIPTIONS ECONOMY US Alter Ego (Six 100-page issues) $65 Back Issue (Eight 80-page issues) $73 BrickJournal (Six 80-page issues) $55 Comic Book Creator (Four 80-page issues) $40 Jack Kirby Collector (Four 100-page issues) $45

EXPEDITED US $83 $88 $66 $50 $58

PREMIUM US $92 $97 $73 $54 $61

INTERNATIONAL $102 $116 $87 $60 $67

DIGITAL ONLY $29 $31 $23 $15 $19

2017 RATES

(272-page FULL-COLOR TRADE PAPERBACK) $36.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 ISBN: 978-1-60549-073-1 • NOW SHIPPING!

ALTER EGO #148

ALTER EGO #149

ALTER EGO #150

ALTER EGO #151

DRAW #34

Relive JOE PETRILAK’s All-Time Classic NY Comic Book Convention—the greatest Golden & Silver Age con ever assembled! Panels, art and photos featuring INFANTINO, KUBERT, 3 SCHWARTZES, NODELL, HASEN, GIELLA, CUIDERA, BOLTINOFF, BUSCEMA, AYERS, SINNOTT, [MARIE] SEVERIN, GOULART, THOMAS, and a host of others! Plus FCA, GILBERT, SCHELLY, and RUSS RAINBOLT’s amazing 60-foot comics mural!

Showcases GIL KANE, with an incisive and free-wheeling interview conducted in the 1990s by DANIEL HERMAN for his 2001 book Gil Kane: The Art of the Comics— plus other surprise features centered around the artistic co-creator of the Silver Age Green Lantern and The Atom! Also: FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT, and BILL SCHELLY! Green Lantern cover by KANE and GIELLA!

STAN LEE’s 95th birthday! Rare 1980s LEE interview by WILL MURRAY—GER APELDOORN on Stan’s non-Marvel writing in the 1950s—STAN LEE/ROY THOMAS e-mails of the 21st century—and more special features than you could shake Irving Forbush at! Also FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), BILL SCHELLY, and MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Colorful Marvel multi-hero cover by Big JOHN BUSCEMA!

Golden Age artist FRANK THOMAS (The Owl! The Eye! Dr. Hypno!) celebrated by Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt’s MICHAEL T. GILBERT! Plus the scintillating (and often offbeat) Golden & Silver Age super-heroes of Western Publishing’s DELL & GOLD KEY comics! Art by MANNING, DITKO, KANE, MARSH, GILL, SPIEGLE, SPRINGER, NORRIS, SANTOS, THORNE, et al.! Plus FCA, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

GREG HILDEBRANDT (of the Hildebrandt Brothers) reveals his working methods, BRAD WALKER (Aquaman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Birds of Prey, Legends of the Dark Knight) gives a how-to interview and demo, regular columnist JERRY ORDWAY, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY’s Comic Art Bootcamp! Mature Readers Only.

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BACK ISSUE #101

BACK ISSUE #102

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #15 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #16 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #17

ROCK ’N’ ROLL COMICS! Flash Gordon star SAM J. JONES interview, KISS in comics, Marvel’s ALICE COOPER, T. Rex’s MARC BOLAN interviews STAN LEE, PAUL McCARTNEY, Charlton’s Partridge Family, David Cassidy, and Bobby Sherman comics, Marvel’s Steeltown Rockers, Monkees comics, & Comic-Con band Seduction of the Innocent. With MAX ALLAN COLLINS, JACK KIRBY, BILL MUMY, ALAN WEISS, and others!

MERCS AND ANTIHEROES! Deadpool’s ROB LIEFELD and FABIAN NICIEZA interviewed! Histories of Cable, Taskmaster, Deathstroke the Terminator, the Vigilante, and Wild Dog, plus… Archie meets the Punisher?? Featuring TERRY BEATTY, MAX ALLAN COLLINS, PAUL KUPPERBERG, BATTON LASH, JEPH LOEB, DAVID MICHELINIE, MARV WOLFMAN, KEITH POLLARD, and others! Deadpool vs. Cable cover by LIEFELD!

Celebrating 30 years of artist’s artist MARK SCHULTZ, creator of the CADILLACS AND DINOSAURS franchise, with a featurelength, career-spanning interview conducted in Mark’s Pennsylvanian home, examining the early years of struggle, success with Kitchen Sink Press, and hitting it big with a Saturday morning cartoon series. Includes rarely-seen art and fascinating photos from Mark’s amazing and award-winning career.

A look at 75 years of Archie Comics’ characters and titles, from Archie and his pals ‘n gals to the mighty MLJ heroes of yesteryear and today’s “Dark Circle”! Also: Careerspanning interviews with The Fox’s DEAN HASPIEL and Kevin Keller’s cartoonist DAN PARENT, who both jam on our exclusive cover depicting a face-off between humor and heroes. Plus our usual features, including the hilarious FRED HEMBECK!

The legacy and influence of WALLACE WOOD, with a comprehensive essay about Woody’s career, extended interview with Wood assistant RALPH REESE (artist for Marvel’s horror comics, National Lampoon, and undergrounds), a long chat with cover artist HILARY BARTA (Marvel inker, Plastic Man and America’s Best artist with ALAN MOORE), plus our usual columns, features, and the humor of HEMBECK!

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TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History. BRICKJOURNAL #48

KIRBY COLLECTOR #71

KIRBY COLLECTOR #72

KIRBY COLLECTOR #73

THE WORLD OF LEGO MECHA! Learn the secrets and tricks of building mechs with some of the best mecha builders in the world! Interviews with BENJAMIN CHEH, KELVIN LOW, LU SIM, FREDDY TAM, DAVID LIU, and SAM CHEUNG! Plus: Minifigure customizing from JARED K. BURKS, step-by-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art, & more!

KIRBY: OMEGA! Looks at endings, deaths, and Anti-Life in the Kirbyverse, including poignant losses and passings from such series as NEW GODS, KAMANDI, FANTASTIC FOUR, LOSERS, THOR, DEMON and others! Plus: The 2016 Silicon Valley Comic-Con Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, STEVE SHERMAN & MIKE ROYER panel, WALTER SIMONSON interview, & unseen pencil art galleries! SIMONSON cover inks!

FIGHT CLUB! Jack’s most powerful fights and in-your-face action: Real-life WAR EXPERIENCES, Marvel’s KID COWBOYS, the Madbomb saga and all those negative 1970s Marvel fan letters, interview with SCOTT McCLOUD on his Kirby-inspired punchfest DESTROY!!, rare Kirby interview, 2017 WonderCon Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by DEAN HASPIEL!

ONE-SHOTS! We cover Kirby’s best (and worst) short spurts on his wildest concepts: ANIMATION IDEAS, DINGBATS, JUSTICE INC., MANHUNTER, ATLAS, PRISONER, and more! Plus MARK EVANIER and our other regular panelists, rare Kirby interview, panels from the 2017 Kirby Centennial celebration, pencil art galleries, and some one-shot surprises! BIG BARDA #1 cover finishes by MIKE ROYER!

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