"Escape is impossible until one perceives all of the barriers."

Dwayne McDuffie has died and the worlds of comics and animation are less as a result.

McDuffie was one of the best. He was the mastermind behind Milestone Comics, an incredibly underrated imprint that has given us quite a lot of interesting characters and poignant stories. He was a key component of the awesomeness of the DCAU shows, and I think he understands the core DC characters better than most.

And I think he may have been too good for DC. At the very least, he deserved better than what DC gave him. Milestone as an imprint was shuttered with several finished issues still to be printed, issues that would have provided closure to their respective titles. When DC finally had the sense to hand him what ought to have been their flagship title, "Justice League of America," they tied him up in so many editorial mandates and crossovers that the book was never able to find its feet. When DC integrated the Milestone Universe characters into the DCU proper, the early hype of how much would be done with them eventually petered out into a few appearances in Brave and the Bold and JLofA, and Static joining Teen Titans (apparently the only Milestone character DC actually cared about). As if to add insult to injury, DC censored McDuffie's "Milestone Forever" for unknown reasons.

And all the while he kept working on DC's characters, in one form or another, putting out some of the best stories ever told with them. I haven't been able to watch "All-Star Superman" yet, but after "Crisis on Two Earths," I think it's clear that McDuffie is one of the few people who could faithfully and excellently translate a Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely epic into a screenplay.

And now, he's gone. I wish his family and friends the deepest of condolences, and I hope that, perhaps, DC will finally do right by his characters even if they didn't do right by the man.

Bat-Month: "The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy"

Let's get this out of the way right off the bat: "The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy" is not a good "Batman: TAS" episode. It's a terrible mishmash of different concepts, none of which really work together, and the plot not only makes very little sense, but comes off making Batman look like an inefficient jerk, while everyone else just looks like an idiot.

I think the biggest problem with the episode is also the reason I decided to review it rather than some more deserving Animated episodes. The plot centers around a villainous scheme to steal Batman's cowl, much like "The Contaminated Cowl." Such a scheme, you'd think, would be a ploy to expose Batman's secret identity, or a manifestation of the Mad Hatter's twisted obsession, but it's neither of those things. But what is clear to me from watching the episode is that this idea--a criminal trying to steal Batman's mask--was the core concept around which the rest of the episode was based.

Sometimes that kind of plot-anchoring concept can work, other times, not so much. Remember when I talked about the various deathtraps in "Almost Got 'Im"? When I said that any plot designed to lead up to such a trap would almost inevitably be silly and disappointing? "The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy" is proof of that.

Take, for instance, the villain of the story, Josiah Wormwood. He's called "The Interrogator," because he's a master of torturing information from his victims with elaborate death-traps. How does he lure victims into these traps? Why, by leaving them clues in the form of rhyming riddles.

Which brings us to our very first problem: Wormwood is a cheap knock-off of the Riddler, who had yet to appear in the series. He uses his riddles and a quicksand trap to catch a diplomatic courier, in order to extract the location of a large cache of bearer bonds.

The theft brings him under police scrutiny, which naturally gets Batman involved. Batman goes after Baron Wacklaw Jozek, one of Wormwood's associates, hoping to find out Wormwood's whereabouts. To this end, Batman abducts the Baron from a society dinner, where he has just started giving a speech, in front of dozens of high-class patrons. I can understand the need for speed and the desire to publicly embarass Jozek, but it seems like it would have been in Batman's best interests to pick up Jozek in a slightly less public venue. He dangles Jozek by the suspenders from a billboard until Batman gets the information he needs.

Shortly thereafter, the Baron calls in Wormwood to offer him a job: steal Batman's cape and cowl. He does this with a poster-sized portrait of Batman, which opens up vast new questions. Wormwood is curious as to the Baron's reasons, so Jozek offers a trade: he'll explain why he wants the cape and cowl if Wormwood tells him about the bearer bonds.

At this point, any mildly intelligent criminal would have been searching Jozek for the wire that he's clearly wearing, but instead Josiah plays coy and agrees to the job. His first attempt to catch Batman--involving an amusement park and a woman tied to train tracks--failed miserably to produce any new headgear. Consequently, he lured Batman to a wax museum--which at this point I believe are frequented more by supervillains than by patrons--where he assaulted him with a hot lamp (to melt the wax, you see) and then some deadly nerve gas. Finally, Batman removed his cape and cowl to give them to Wormwood.

Now, here's a scene that should have been tense and suspenseful. Batman's in the shadows, having removed his mask, and Wormwood is forcing him to step into a spotlight to deposit it! How will he protect his secret identity? As he stepped into the light, the viewer would have seen the unexpected--Batman's wearing another mask underneath! Unfortunately, all that suspense was spoiled long before Batman reached the spotlight, thanks to this image:

Even before Batman reaches the spotlight, it's trivially obvious that he's wearing another mask. A scene that might have brought this episode up from bad to mediocre and memorable, thanks to a stunning example of Batman's foresight, was robbed of all drama by this poor direction, lighting Batman just enough to see the trick.

Wormwood takes the prize back to Jozek, asking again why he wanted them. Jozek reminds him of the quid pro quo agreement, so Wormwood spills the bearer bond beans. Jozek then reveals his reason for wanting the cape and cowl: to wear them! Because he's Batman in disguise!

Naturally, the place was bugged, and Jozek had fled the country after his run-in with Batman. So the police got Wormwood's confession, and after a too-long fistfight, Wormwood got apprehended.

Unfortunately, this episode spectacularly fails the fridge logic test. If the information about these bearer bonds were so important, why waste so much time setting up this overly elaborate cape-and-cowl scheme? If Batman were behind the plan the whole time, why did he defeat Wormwood's first deathtrap? If Wormwood is so intelligent, why didn't he realize that he was being bugged? If Batman knew he was going to get Wormwood to confess--on tape!--then why didn't he have any police standing by, rather than letting Wormwood fight him through the penthouse and its rec center?

But the real nail in the coffin for this episode, as far as I'm concerned, is the thematic one. You have a villain who is expressly said to torture people with deathtraps in order to get information from them, a villain known as "the Interrogator." You have the Batman, who routinely--including in the first act of this very story--puts criminals and informants into potentially life-threatening circumstances in order to make them confess or otherwise give up their information. The thematically satisfying plot would be to have Batman out-interrogate the Interrogator, to pit his own deathtraps against him, and to ultimately turn all of his careful plans back in against him. This doesn't happen--despite being wildly foreshadowed--instead proffering a silly plot about stealing Batman's mask.

Not only does this insanely circuitous plan make Batman look like he's just toying with both his enemies and the police, but his abduction of Jozek and the way he casually belittles Commissioner Gordon when they're examining Wormwood's riddles ("of course! Isn't it obvious?") makes him come across as a bit of a dick.

Overall, "The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy" is a less-than-mediocre episode hampered by its generic, cobbled-together villain. It suffers worse from comparison to better episodes in the same season, featuring the villains who The Interrogator evokes.

Bat-Month: "Mad as a Hatter"

Oh, hey, it's a Batman: TAS episode about date rape!

Which, I guess, is better for the Mad Hatter than various comic insinuations that he's a pedophile or a...chapeauphile.

I really enjoy this version of the Mad Hatter, and I think Roddy McDowall made the perfect voice actor for the character. Sure, I'm a fan of Gail Simone's deranged version in "Secret Six," but I think the "diminutive bizarrely perverted mind-controlling supervillain niche" is already filled by Dr. Psycho. Jeph Loeb's version has never made much sense to me, partnered with the Scarecrow as the two personality-free villains who constantly talk in verse and quotations. At least the quotes make some sense for Hatter; that version of Scarecrow is just weird.

The problem with most of those versions is twofold: first, Gotham City, for whatever reason, is teeming with insane criminals patterned after Alice in Wonderland characters--Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Wonderland Gang, Humpty Dumpty, and now the White Queen--so it's easy to strip Jervis of the traits which make him stand out as an individual. Second, the foremost of those individual traits is that he has various devices which allow him to control people's minds, and when you turn him into someone so insane that he can no longer speak except in Carroll quotations, then you make him seem like someone who could never have developed such technology.

So the Animated Series, as it so often does, strikes a balance: Jervis Tetch is a nerdy scientist, and Alice in Wonderland is his favorite story (so he quotes it occasionally) and has mind control cards which are connected to a headband. He conceals the latter in a hat and, for flair, puts the Hatter's fractions on the cards. And then he woos a co-worker named Alice by mind-controlling everyone they come in contact with, providing the perfect date.

And the date actually is pretty thoughtful. Sure, it's clearly a "perfect date" concept that has been rattling around in Tetch's mind for a long time--dinner at a fancy restaurant with VIP treatment, an after-hours trip to an amusement park (with an Alice in Wonderland-themed exhibit), and even a dance. There's always the sinister undercurrent--the mind-control cards in everyone's hats or hair, illustrating the lengths to which Tetch has gone to ensure that nothing goes wrong. Knowing that Tetch is the kind of person who would even consider mental enslavement as an acceptable alternative to mild embarrassment paints him as somewhat unhinged, but he's clearly not malicious or harmful...yet.

But this kind of personality is teetering on the edge of violence, and when Jervis finds out that Alice has forgiven her boyfriend--and accepted a marriage proposal--he goes a little over the edge.

And so the situation escalates until Batman is fighting a mind-controlled army of Carroll-inspired thugs in the Storybook Land Amusement Park, while Alice sits as a glassy-eyed puppet through the whole battle.

The episode ends, fittingly enough, with the Hatter trapped under a fallen Jabberwock sculpture, while Alice is happily reunited with her fiancé. The reunion bit wasn't entirely necessary--Alice and Billy weren't particularly three-dimensional characters--but it's a nice moment, made all the more symbolic by the fact that their happily ever after rescue happens in the Storybook Land park.

In any case, this is probably the best episode about the Mad Hatter. It does for Jervis what the Animated Series tended to do so well, providing villains with sympathetic backstories and moderately comprehensible motivations. It's not the best episode to feature Hatter, however, and I'll see about getting to that one in the near future.

Bat-Month: "Vendetta"

In looking at my Batman: The Animated Series DVDs for episodes to review, I've found it interesting what my initial judgments are upon reading the titles. For a lot of the episodes, I think "Oh man, that's a great episode"--"Almost Got 'Im," "Heart of Ice," and so forth. For a few, I think, "jeez, that was a bad episode"--"Christmas With the Joker," "Heart of Steel," etc. And then there are some that make me scratch my head and wrack my brain to remember what the heck they were about. "Vendetta" was one of those episodes, so I decided to cure my curiosity--plus, it's on the same disc as "The Clock King."

As it turns out, "Vendetta" is the introductory episode for Killer Croc. It's interesting, in that the plot turns mostly on the sorts of plot devices you'd find in a police procedural, not a children's cartoon. At the beginning of the story, a convict is getting paroled early for agreeing to testify against Rupert Thorne. Unfortunately, the boat he's traveling on is bombed, and he appears to have died--leading to the only use of the phrase "draggin' the bay" (as in, to search for a body) I know of in children's television. Gordon takes Bullock off the case, in order to prevent conflict with Internal Affairs, since in the past Bullock was accused of working with Thorne. Ultimately, someone frames Harvey for the crime, as well as the kidnapping of Joey the Snail.

I was frankly a little shocked to see terms like "Internal Affairs" get tossed around in a cartoon, especially without any explanation.

Anyway, Batman's role in this is mainly to investigate around the periphery of the plot's main events. At first, the evidence seems to implicate Bullock, and Batman is perhaps a little to eager to accuse the police force's biggest Bat-detractor. Eventually, though, Batman finds a scaly bit of flesh at one of the crime scenes, and--thanks to Alfred's fortuitous discussion of cookware--deduced that it might be from a "croc." Bruce then goes to the zoo, where a helpful recording outside the crocodile enclosure explains that crocodiles live in underwater caves.

Seriously. Batman goes to the zoo. To do research. On crocodile habitats. Unless the zoo is next door to Wayne Manor, I can think of about ten different ways that he could have done that research more quickly and efficiently, and thus less ridiculously. Are you telling me that nowhere in stately Wayne Manor is there an encyclopedia? The Bat-computer database doesn't contain anything from Zoobooks?

Naturally, Batman rescues the criminals, gets beat up a bit by Killer Croc, and eventually clears Bullock's name. The episode is not bad, and surprisingly enough the worst bits in it are the ones with Batman and Croc doing superhero/supervillain stuff. Croc's self-exposition is painful at best, and Batman goes to the zoo. The police procedural parts are great, though, and Bullock really shines.

The other really surprising aspect of the story is how intelligent Croc seems. While the series sometimes plays the character for comic relief, the Croc-centric episodes (this and especially "Sideshow") show him to be a relatively bright guy. Here, he's successfully able to impersonate and frame Harvey Bullock, which is not the easiest thing for a giant reptile-man to do.

It's not one of the greatest episodes of the series, and it has some silly moments, but overall "Vendetta" is a pretty good story. I don't think I'll be forgetting it again anytime soon.

Bat-Month: "Almost Got 'Im"

This probably isn't a controversial statement, but I think "Almost Got 'Im" is the perfect Batman story. Forget "Year One," forget "Dark Knight Returns," even forget "The Dark Knight"--"Almost Got 'Im" is pure Batman, distilled down to the basic elemental components.

If you've never seen the episode, please stop reading this and go find it. I'm sure it's on YouTube or Hulu if you don't happen to own the entire Animated Series on DVD (in which case, I think that's grounds to take away your comic fan license--for shame!).

Anyway, the episode plays out as a series of vignettes told by Batman's rogues around a poker table in a seedy bar. The beauty of this setup is that it cuts right to the chase--Batman escaping from insane deathtraps--without trying to justify those deathtraps or those dire circumstances by building a whole plot around them. We don't have to know how Two-Face got Batman tied up to a giant penny on a giant penny-flipping device, and I think any story they tried to tell which led to that scenario would be disappointingly ridiculous. Instead, we get to see Batman pacify Poison Ivy's perilous pumpkin patch, survive the Penguin's Aviary of Doom, and earn the Batcave's second-most-famous prop. And of course, there's Croc's deathtrap, which while hilariously apt, is also probably the most likely to work.

If the episode had just been Bat-villains sitting around and sharing war stories, it might have been entertaining, but it wouldn't have been great. What catapults this episode up to the legendary level is when the framing story takes over as the main plot, and there's that incredible, unforgettable reveal. That twist--and the one that follows it--present us with everything we need to know about Batman: master of disguise, world's greatest detective, and prepared for absolutely everything. This is Chessmaster Batman, achieved so perfectly and effortlessly by the Animated series staff.

And then Batman saves the day again, leaving us with just a taste of the Batman/Catwoman romance, and the perfect end to a perfect episode.

I'd worry about overhyping this story, about raising your expectations so high that they couldn't possibly be fulfilled, and that's certainly possible. It's also possible that you could watch ten seconds of this episode for one screen capture, having seen it dozens of times before, and still be unable to control the wide grin and giddily triumphant giggle at seeing Batman be Batman. I'll let you guess which camp I'm in.

Bat-Month: "On Leather Wings"

I watched the first-produced, second-aired episode of Batman: The Animated Series again recently, for the first time in quite awhile. I actually remember watching the episode--and, for that matter, "The Cat and the Claw" before it--when it first aired. Right off the bat--no pun intended--the main pieces are present: the jarring shifts between Batman and Bruce Wayne, the mesh of detective work and sci-fi superheroics, the jovially antagonistic relationship between Bruce and Alfred (even if Alfred does sound really weird in the pre-Efram Zimbalist days), Harvey Bullock's distrust of Batman--even Harvey Dent as the District Attorney and the first taste of the animal transformations that would become something of a motif for the series.

The story is a relatively simple one, and honestly a somewhat strange choice for a first episode. Man-Bat is a fairly minor villain, and only shows up once more in the series' entire run, as I recall. On the other hand, what this episode lacks in intricate plot and iconic battles, it makes up for by giving us a very well-rounded introduction to Batman. Not only do we get to see him playing the monster-battling superhero and the clue-analyzing detective, but we also get some great scenes of the bumbling playboy (and the genius who can use that persona to great effect), the fugitive vigilante on the wrong side of a tenuous relationship with the law, and the antidote-concocting super-scientist. While this episode doesn't do much to introduce the viewer to Batman's rogues gallery, it gives a fantastic introduction to Batman himself.

The episode is still just a little rough around the edges, as you might expect from a first episode (I hesitate to call it a "pilot," because I think it technically wasn't, and I can't call it a premiere, because it wasn't the first episode aired, so "first episode" is the best I have). One of the most jarring scenes is when Danny Elfman's Batman theme makes a prominent appearance, which seems somewhat out of place among the rest of the Shirley Walker orchestration. Obviously, that problem--if it could even be called that--would be worked out quickly, as evidenced by the series' amazing soundtrack. To date, I have a hard time thinking of any animated series that has had anything approaching music as incredible as B:TAS.

So, overall, a pleasant reminder of that afternoon in 1992, and a fantastic taste of the series' potential.