The (Comic) Book Was Better - Under the (Red) Hood

 

I hear there used to be an old saying about comic books, how only three characters ever stayed really and truly dead: Uncle Ben, Bucky and Jason Todd.  Well, in January 2005, Marvel decided to stomp all over that axiom by resurrecting Bucky Barnes as the slightly unstable and infinitely more complex Winter Soldier.  The very next month, DC followed suit by resurrecting Jason Todd as the slightly unstable and infinitely more complex Red Hood.  I eagerly await the day when Marvel revives Uncle Ben only for DC to overshadow this event by reviving Thomas Wayne, but until then, let’s talk about Jason Todd and how both comic and cartoon have handled his return.

The (Comic) Book Was Better - DC: The New Frontier

 

Since the maiden voyage of the good ship The (Comic) Book was Better didn’t completely capsize and sink, it’s time to set sail yet again, this time with the epic tale of epicness known as The New Frontier.  The comic was written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke and published in 2004; the cartoon came out in 2008.  The comic is so epic that it needed two full-length TPBs to contain the awesome (though it is all available in one volume now, from what I understand), so of course, the cartoon version had to cut quite a bit.  The question is: did it cut the right things?  And was it able to tell a compelling story with what it did use?

The (Comic) Book Was Better - Superman/Batman: Public Enemies

We’ve all heard it.  Heck, we’ve all said it—“That movie was good/bad/okay/fantastic/the worst piece of dreck ever put on film… but the book was better.”  In this new review series, I am going to be looking at movies (or TV episodes, though the emphasis will be on DC’s series of animated films) and the comic books/graphic novels that inspired them to determine which one told the story better.  I won’t really be comparing them per se, because otherwise you could probably narrow it all down to “the cartoon cut too much stuff out”—I’ll just be judging each version on its own merits as if I have never seen/read the other version, and we’ll see how this works. Today’s subject: Superman/Batman: Public Enemies!