F*ck You, Injustice Is Good Actually

 

This week I went through it all. I started at Year 1, read through all the prequel comics, played through Injustice: Gods Among Us, read the in-between-quel, played through Injustice 2 and as I sit here I need to express a thought;

I love this universe.

Look I'm a sucker for a good Batman vs Superman trope. Something about the juvenile pleasure of smacking action figures together makes my neurons fire and I love spending time in this universe.

As a long time fan of these characters the thing that stands out to me is that for any of this to work someone's gotta get character assassinated and the real victims here are Supes and Wonder Woman. But this take on them works. It works because we see our real, actual heroes and we know this is an anomaly, an elseworld, an alternate dimension where the rules are different.

Let the action figure slapping commence.

I think the other thing that sticks out to me is how sincere the story can get. Lex Luthor sitting at his desk, staring at a picture of himself, Clark and Lois and wondering how it all went so wrong. Harley getting dosed with fear toxin and seeing the return of the Joker, but also her standing up to this nightmare vision. No clown with a cheap grin and an even cheaper suit will ever put her in the corner again. That moment when Wonder Woman finds Wonder Girl buried in the wreckage and Cassie wants nothing to do with her, and that intense close up on her eyes as she swears she didn't know.

And literally everything involving Alfred, our wonderful father.

I need an Injustice 3. I need another 80 issues in between the games and I need to know how Killer Croc and Orca are doing after their touching gross wedding, I love that, I love that so much.

There's a lot I could say and there's more I will eventually say, I plan to ruin the lives of everyone I know by yapping on about the silly fighting game, but this is the last word I'll write about it here;

Of the infinite possibilities, all the paths we took and did not, all the things that could have been and never were... I am glad to be alive just in time to enjoy the hell out of Injustice: Gods Among Us.

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The Thing That Bothers Me The Most About Batman

Source: Black Metal Gun by Somchai Kongkamsri

Something that bugs me about Batman is less of like, a character thing and merely that they keep making him bulletproof.

I think a lot of tension gets taken out of Batman stories when he shrugs off 9mm slugs like nerf darts, instead of the incredible gut punches they would be. 

Every Batsuit in the modern era has basically been made into a high-tech suit of armor so advanced that gunfire isn't an issue. It's a writing conceit meant to deal with the fact that Batman routinely goes up against armies of armed thugs and without it he'd be turned into Swiss Cheese.

And while I'm sympathetic towards the idea of not having to deal with it... I also kind of think that it goes against the principal of the matter? The heart of Batman stories is that Bruce Wayne is a very human superhero. One guy using his money and privilege to change his city for the better. He isn't faster than a speeding bullet, he can't shoot laser beams from his eyes, he hasn't inherited the thunderbolts of Zeus, aliens didn't give him a super advanced light construct ring...

Batman is just a guy.

A guy that writers keep trying to turn into Tony freaking Stark.

The Tony Starkification of Batman has always been a sore point for me, Batman's superpower isn't money or super advanced tech. It's his deductive reasoning, it's his ability to get into the mind of criminals, it's and it's his humanity. 

Batman is Halloween Sherlock Holmes. We don't need a second Iron Man.

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As It Turns Out, DC's Titans Is Pretty Good

I was not rooting for this show. DC's Titans is the kind of ill-conceived premise that you'd think would leave a show dead-on-arrival. The marketing for this thing promised a surreal, overly gritty and superficially mature show with all the trappings that come with it.

Except DC's Titans is actually kind of good?

Trust me, I was the last person to expect something like that to happen. I saw the trailers, the same as you did and when Robin dropped the f-bomb and put some disrespect on Batman's name I was ready to hate-watch this thing as it turned into a glorious edgelord nightmare.

Turns out that I got a pretty great version of the Doom Patrol in the sneakiest backdoor pilot I've seen in a while, along with some pretty cathartic confrontations between Dick Grayson and Jason Todd. Hawk and Dove also turned out to be characters I unironically love and oh, man Wonder Girl? Even Wonder Girl was lovable. And I thought I was going to hate Starfire but Anna Diop was kind of acting circles around the rest of the cast and doing it while wearing actual fashion crimes.

It's not all good.

The effects can look cheap, poor Anna Diop's costuming suffers, the show dips into some adorable levels of edginess, Raven's character is kind of incoherent and there are as many gorgeous shots as there are moments of colour palette drab.

But that's as much as I can say. As it turns out, DC's Titans might not be the most faithful to the source material and it sure doesn't have a lot of respect for convention but maybe that's the best part about it. In a lot of ways, it is the superficially mature show that the marketing promised but in a lot of others, it's a clever new spin on a gritty group of characters dealing with a violent world while wearing superhero masks. For all its faults, DC's Titans is actually one of the better versions of the Teen Titans. It's not gonna compete with your nostalgia for the 2003 show but you'd be surprised how well the Teen Titans work when filtered through the lens of Watchmen.

Hard recommend. It might not be for everyone but you'll probably be surprised at how much this is probably for you.

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