He is the night — he is Batman! Kevin Conroy has been the voice of the Bat for nearly two decades, spanning from a TV series to the recently released Batman: Arkham Asylum video game. Warner Home Video talked with Conroy about assuming the Mantle of the Bat once more in the upcoming animated feature Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, due out September 29th.

QUESTION: You’ve been doing this role for nearly 19 years. Are there still challenges to doing the voice of Batman?

KEVIN CONROY: I guess the biggest challenge to doing any kind of animation voice work is that you only have your voice to tell the story. And you want to keep it real and you don’t want to get cartoony, especially now because the audiences are much more sophisticated. Anything over the top is going to read over the top. So it’s a very fine line that people walk. For Batman, I think the biggest challenge is the timber of the voice that I established early on. I just kind of improvised it and it stuck. It’s very deep in my register – very throaty – and whenever it gets emotional, it’s a difficult sound to create with a lot of volume technically without blowing your chords out. So there’s all kinds of tricks you learn along the way of how to produce a sound, how to produce it without injuring yourself, and how to juice it enough. It’s a delicate, funny balancing act.

Recording Superman/Batman: Public Enemies was actually easy because of the cast that Andrea (Romano) put together. Tim (Daly) and Clancy (Brown) – all of us have worked together a lot over the years, and there’s a real shorthand when you’re dealing with people who have done a lot of it and know what they’re doing. Which is really a pleasure. Andrea doesn’t have to say very much for me to know what she wants.

QUESTION: What do Tim Daly and Clancy Brown bring to their respective roles?

KEVIN CONROY: Tim brings to Superman that strong voice, but there’s also a real humanity to Tim as an actor and that really comes through. So there’s strength but there’s a great sensitivity, and that’s unique about his take on Superman.

Clancy is great at being crazy. He’s a very talented actor. He’s got that great sound, that resonate voice. And yet when you’ve got that kind of power under you, you can afford to be very casual with it. It makes his sinister quality so much more frightening when this guy with this voice is just being very debonair.

QUESTION: What can people expect to find different about Superman/Batman: Public Enemies than most crossover stories?

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All right, Bat-fans, make sure you’ve got your insulin ready, because the wooby factor is about the skyrocket.

The Source has announced that next month’s Batman and Detective Comics has a little something extra — and by that, I mean a second feature by Derek Fridolfs and artist Dustin Nguyen called “Lil’ Gotham,” which basically crams all the humor and cuteness they can into their tiny little frames.

Batman Annual #27, which is due out October 7, will have “Off Rogue Racing,” while October 14th’s Detective Comics Annual #11 will have “Question & Answer.”

Nic Cage, one-time Ghost Rider and star of the Wicker Man remake, once asked “how’d it get burned??” Well, this is the answer.

That’s right, a costume test of a bemulleted Cage wearing a shiny Superman suit, presumably from the aborted Tim Burton reboot of the series. Cinematical inflicted this upon us, but you want to see more, check it out at the source at TimBurton.jp. There are sketches there, too. I feel bad, since it’s not really Cage’s fault — and I’ll bet that if you had the chance to be Superman, you’d probably rub the Vasoline on yourself.

But seriously, you’ve been warned. I feel like Nic Cage at the end of the Wicker Man.

So it’s well known in sports — prep, collegiate and professional — that the rookies get hazed. From taping football players to the goalposts, to freshmen carrying the game film and projector on the road (scroll down toward to item #10b & c to read which Hall of Famer had to do that, AFTER winning a national championship!).

But New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi may have to answer the question “How is this punishment?”
Pictured with the skipper are some of the rookies currently wearing Yankees jerseys in their day jobs. This year the theme was clearly Batman, and a couple years ago it was apparently Wizard of Oz. That time I can see how dressing up as Dorothy was the unfortunate assignment. I guess this year the raw deal went to the players suited up as Catwoman and Robin.

My biggest question was this:
That guy dressed up as the Penguin is a Major League Baseball player??

Batman: Cacophony

Writer: Kevin Smith

Artist: Walt Flanagan

Inker: Sandra Hope

Published by DC Comics

Hardcover, 142 pages, $19.99

As he throws out one self-deprecating line after another, Kevin Smith can make what he does look easy but it would be a mistake to dismiss what he’s done with Batman: Cacophony. In his introduction, he readily admits he can do better but  what he really means is that he’s inspired to take the work further. And, after reading this new hardcover collection, you should come away looking forward to more.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Smith’s take on Batman. Some of my comics friends had been put off by Smith’s Batman not saying what Batman would say. And then there’s the whole thing with the Joker taking a walk on the wild side. Well, it’s not exactly too big of a leap to see the character as gay. The one scene where he’s all too eager to act on his desires with the man who could likely kill him is beyond the pale but certainly within Joker territory. The few times Batman seems to slouch into something less than what we’d expect are minimal. Basically, along with artist Walter Flanagan, this is Kevin Smith’s Batman and it works best to go with it.

The quirky moments, I came to see, did not take me out of the story, especially if I’ve already accepted the world that I’m in. And, for the purists who may not even want to give this a chance, the quirk works and it does not overwhelm what is a solid story.

We start at the gates to Arkham Asylum. Due to the recent economic crash, frenzied cost cutting measures by the board lead to the firing of the front gate security guards. The money saved, however, promptly goes to the board’s year-end bonuses. Of course, who would ever want to break into Arkham Asylum? This night, it’s two separate killers both looking for the Joker.

As the story unfolds, we see one of the killers is Kevin Smith’s villain, Onomatopeia, from his Green Arrow run. And the other killer is a vigilante, Deadshot. Each will play supportive roles as will another minor baddie, Maxie Zeus, who has built an empire by converting the Joker’s venom into a designer drug. The Joker, in the scheme of things, has been reduced to the role of bait in a plot to lure Batman but he’s definitely the star of the show as well as a great vehicle for Smith’s humor to boot.

This book also includes the first draft script to Issue Three so you can get a sense for yourself of the number of revisions that went into the final work. Needless to say, Kevin Smith is a huge talent and he still won’t win over everyone. Having just read the first issue of Smith’s latest Batman run, The Widening Gyre, I would highly recommend getting this collection and it will likely win you over if you’re receptive and add to your appreciation of the current run.

Say your comic book won an Eisner Award for something, say, Best Publication For Kids or Cutest Redesign of a Jack Kirby Character, whatever. You’re definitely going to want to let everyone know about the honor, right? Now, what’s the best way of doing it?

There’s the standard strategy, of putting a blurb or tag about it on the cover, which Tiny Titans #20 employed…

…which is definitely effective. But surely there’s a better way to make sure your readers know that you totally won an Eisner. Perhaps by having it on panel for an entire page, as in this sequence from the issue, in which Alfred is shown dusting it while Robin and his friends ask if they can play in the Batcave?

But have they gone far enough? Perhaps to be on the safe side, they can have the Eisner Award gain sentience and start attending Sidekick Elementary School and hanging out in the Titans Treehouse with the rest of the kids.

(By the way, Tiny Titans #20 is awesome.)

Did you read Blackest Night #3 this week? Did you see this ad?

In addition to hyping the new Justice League of America creative team of James Robinson and Mark Bagley, it looks like it fills in all those silhouettes on the previously released image.

It looks like they didn’t quite play fair with those silhouettes, as the characters are drawn at random sizes, so as to make them difficult to identify, but who cares, they’re filled-out now. So is that the line-up? Or just characters appearing in the issue? My guess is the former, if they went to the trouble of obscuring the characters when initially releasing the image in the first place.

If so, it’s a pretty interesting line-up, seemingly chucking the roster and its changes from the Brad Meltzer-to-Dwayne McDuffie run on the title completely in favor of an (almost) all-new team drawing from three sources: Robinson’s Justice League: Cry For Justice series, Robinson’s Superman and the original New Teen Titans line-up.

But are they worthy of Justice League membership? We’ll take a closer look at that cover image, and then I’ll discuss my (admittedly arbitrary) criteria for Justice League worthiness, after the jump.
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Ready for the next wave of DC Universe Classics?

Well, Mattel has graciously sent over some pictures of the latest figures, which will ship in the Spring of 2010. You can pre-order the whole set or individually at Entertainment Earth, and see more images after the cut!

Mary Marvel:

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TV Guide provides is with the first look at Brian Austin Green (Beverly Hills 90210, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) as John Corben, better known to Superman fans as METALLO. Thanks to this, by way of Smallville, I now have a reason to gladly stay home on Friday nights.

Power of — water! Shape of — Tom Welling getting hosed!

Sci Fi Scoop, who illustrated the point with the image above, has reported that Smallville might get a bit more… wonderful… with the introduction of the Wonder Twins.

According to them, David Gallagher (the 7th Heaven actor, not to be confused with the similar-yet-different spelling of the High Moon creator) and Allison Scagliotti (Warehouse 13) are going to be on the show, and are rumored to be playing the Wonder Twins.

Now, you could argue, as Topless Robot does, that this means the show is officially out of ideas. I, for one, am curious to see if Gleek will make his live action appearance.

[Original Source: Kryptonsite]

Because min seems to be missing some pages.

See, the first issue of DC’s big summer event series (which will, of course, last well into winter) cost $3.99 and was 40 pages long. But the second issue, which still costs $3.99, is only 24 pages long (27 if you want to count the three-page illustrated prose back-up, presented as an excerpt from Blackhand’s diary.)

DC didn’t deliberately publish fewer pages in the second issue of a miniseries while leaving the price at the elevated, for-40-pages level, did they? (The solicitation on their website says the book is 40 pages long; that’s counting ads though, as #1’s solicitation says it’s 48 pages long, and the average 22-page DC book is solicited as 32 pages—22 story pages and 10 pages of ads. But even subtracting 10 pages for ads, that 40 page figure is still off by three-to-six pages).

Because that’s not very cool. That’s what Marvel Comics did with Secret Invasion—start the series with an oversized $3.99 issue and then drop back to 22 pages for the rest of the $3.99 sereies—which was the point at which $3.99-for-22-pages pricing went from something reserved for Max and Marvel Knights imprint books to being commonplace among the Marvel Universe books too.

With their embrace of back-ups in their $3.99 books, I thought DC was going to eschew Marvel’s strategy of “Eh, the suckers will buy it no matter what we charge for it! Mwa ha ha ha!” It was looking like DC might be less evil in their pricing strategies, but perhaps they’re just slower to be evil…?

This does not bode well for future.

I’m sure Hawkman and Hawkgirl would beg to differ!

Courtesy of Player vs. Player, August 10, 2009.

PW’s Beat blog posted its monthly analysis of the sales charts this week, and while I read those posts with great interest all the time, I did so with greater interest this month simply because I was curious to see how The Big Two’s embrace of $3.99 comic books might be effecting their sales.

I was surprised at the answer: Apparently not at all.

At least, not in any obvious ways. Here’s Paul O’Brien’s look at Marvel’s direct market sales in June. Marvel has been testing the $3.99 waters for so long, I can’t remember when they first started, but this year they’ve been much more aggressive, making some of their most popular titles $3.99-for-22-pages, as well as a majority of their miniseries. (I noticed last week, for example, that of the 28 new comic books Marvel shipped, 24 were at the $3.99 price point.)

But Marvel’s top books remain New Avengers and Dark Avengers, plus a Dark Avengers spin-off (Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia). Ultimatum, another $4 book, is right behind that little Avengers-related pack.

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No, my linkblogging posts don’t come on any particular day, they just tend to appear when I’ve gathered enough links that I like but don’t really have enough to say about to warrant their own posts. In case you were wondering. Now, onward!

At The Nation (full disclosure: I’m currently a Nation intern), Melissa Harris-Lacewell talks about the conservative campaign to paint President Obama as the Joker, and does an excellent job teasing out some interesting political parallels with The Dark Knight film.

Via When Fangirls Attack, a post on close female friendships in comics. How many female “buddy” or “bromance” pairings can you think of?

A comparison of Marvel Divas and Gotham City Sirens, also via When Fangirls Attack.

Johanna Draper Carlson looks at Huntress: Year One.

From Splash Page, Charlyne Yi of Paper Heart and Knocked Up is doing a comic with Oni Press. Insert random blather about how Yi is actually a geek here, right? Well, because she’s not Megan Fox (read, sexy girl everyone slobbers over) this hasn’t gotten that much attention, but it makes me happy: Charlyne Yi is funny, and from what I’ve seen of Paper Heart, is actually creative as well.

Jezebel looks at my favorite superheroine from childhood: She-Ra.

Finally, Defamer wants to know how gay Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is going to be. Apparently word leaked out that there was going to be some sexual tension between the leads (Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr.), which was enough to send Michael Medved into a panic. Apparently there’s nothing to offend Medved in the screenplay, at least, and so he can go back to doing what he does best–which certainly isn’t knowing what women would like to see in a film. Or at least, this woman.

From the UPI…

Really, if you want to push a right-wing agenda, you may want the help of a dictionary. I’ll let the Chicago Sun-Times‘ Richard Roeper explain:

Just a few ways in which Obama’s policies differ from a socialist agenda: socialism would mean no health insurance companies; decriminalization of drugs and prostitution; immediate withdrawal of all troops on foreign soil; a certain cap on all salaries in any situation and public funding for the media. I don’t see the White House calling for such measures, do you?

What say ye? Inventive comic tie-in? Guerrilla propaganda at its finest?

I really like Wednesday Comics. Actually, check that. “Like” might not be strong enough a word. I love Wednesday Comics. No, I lust—wait, wait, that’s too strong a word. Let’s stick with love. I love Wednesday Comics.

Part of it is the simple fact that it’s there every week, which is the same thing I liked about 52 and Trinity—the comforting knowledge that no matter what the vagaries of comic book scheduling, I could count on at least one comic featuring my favorite DC heroes every Wednesday.

The other, greater part of that is that Wednesday Comics is chockfull of some of my all-time favorite comics artists, many of them doing great work.

That it’s also a project that offers a unique reading experience, that it prioritizes art and tone over plot and script (but not to the detriment of the story), that it prioritizes comics as a reading experience over comics as collectibles, that it emphasizes serial comics over trade collections to the extent that it’s difficult to even imagine a latter version of the former and that it’s a damn good value doesn’t hurt any either.

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You’ve probably already seen the image to the right already, which DC released at San Diego, revealing a couple of characters who will be appearing in James Robinson and Mark Bagley’s upcoming run on Justice League of America. Between Donna Troy on the right and Dick “Batman” Grayson is Mon-El, who’s been keeping the Superman monthly comic warm for Superman while the Man of Steel’s off starring in World of New Krypton.

As you can see, Mon’s got a new, more Superman-like costume, complete with an S-shield and belt to hold up the underpants he is now wearing over his tights. (Will he be changing his name to SuperMon? I hope he’s changing his name to SuperMon…!)

Here’s another look at his new costume, which Alex Segura posted on DC’s The Source blog last weekend:

I like it. You know who  it reminds me of?

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For those of you who didn’t watch Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night, you missed out on some comicky goodness!

In last night’s episode, the comedian went to the San Diego Comic Con met up with industry figures like Stan Lee, Dan Didio, Geoff Johns, and Jon Favreau to discuss his comic book character, which I will refer to as “Rechargo Boy.” He’s solar-powered, and looks suspiciously like a late-night host.

While Johns kind of made me chuckle with his response, it’s Stan Lee that (as always) steals the show. You can see the full episode, which this is in the first segment of, by clicking here.

Hollyscoop.com has picked up on an amusing rumor, regarding the possible third Batman film (which Gary Oldman let slip to AICN might start filming as early as next year)…

That Miley Cyrus wants in. And she’s not afraid to cosplay to do it.

Hollyscoop said that the young Hannah Montana star allegedly surprised Warner Bros. execs by arriving fully dressed in her own Batgirl costume, spouting off lines (of dialogue, not anything else, despite what you might think about this situation) that she had made up herself.

She apparently really wants to become Barbara Gordon, even as uber-realist Christopher Nolan has said that in his Batman films, Dick Grayson is “still in a crib somewhere.”

Now, I’ll be honest in saying that I’m pretty sure this rumor is bunk, but that is the rumor going around Hollywood these days. What say you, ‘Rama Readers?

Well I sure hope not, because here’s another post on the subject (albeit one small aspect of it).

While I found little to be surprised or overly excited about in the first issue, given the fact that writer Geoff Johns was dealing with various story elements from throughout most of his time writing for DC Comics, and while it was pretty much exactly what I was expecting, it did seem like Johns would eventually get around to discussing the role of death in the DC Universe in general. The series may therefore have a lot more to say beyond “Wouldn’t it be cool if all the dead DC characters came to life to brutally murder the living ones?” by the time it really gets rolling.

It occurred to me while reading this issue that the scheduling difficulties involved with many of DC’s various events may end up hurting the way that whatever Johns might be trying to say ultimately gets received. Or, at the very least, that the big, event comics of the DCU line—particularly those written by Johns himself—really seem to be sucking the suspense away from one another.

If you’re not reading Blackest Night, the basic plot is that some characters from Green Lantern’s cast have started a Black Lantern Corps in which the dead are given magic rings and matching costumes and then sicced on the living—characters who have escaped death seem to be special targets. The first issue is set during a national day of mourning in the DCU, a sort of Memorial Day for superheroes (and the normal folks that tend to die around them), allowing Johns to check in with a huge cast of characters.

Among these are a couple who are still in the process of being brought back to life in other books. Other books that should have wrapped up by now but haven’t, making aspects of the conclusions of those series somewhat foregone conclusions. I wouldn’t say that Blackest Night #1 ruins those stories, but they certainly change the way we’ll read them, essentially making us all read a bit more like editors and a lot less like excited fans (as well as encouraging a great deal of cynicism among the readership).

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