comic book writers whenever a woman is cool for half a second:

The Promised Neverland vol. 4, Shōnen Jump

lady shiva you will never die

tbh an underappreciated element of the 1966 Adam West Batman:

idk how you'd communicate it in a comic book medium but i strongly feel like more superheroes should be wearing glittery materials

especially if the story is extremely dark and edgy.

imagine jason todd trying to lecture batman about the trauma of not being avenged by his adoptive father while lookin like matt bernstein

Watching the Batman Beyond episode where Ras al Ghul is in Talia al Ghul and wants to be in Bruce Wayne (old)

my friend: talia al ghul the kind of bitch who says "my pit in bio"

I am pretty annoyed about how Batman Beyond treats Max, Terry's hacker friend from high school.

The DCAU is honestly extremely starved for women in important roles and here they have someone they could've finessed into an Oracle sort of character. Her arc involves her working to impress Bruce Wayne so that she can be brought into the fold, but the show runs out of time to actually deliver on that.

I also don't necessarily like the fact that even outside of the DCAU, Robins and other various boys wonder are sort of just sucked into a role supporting Batman, while numerous women are forced to impress him or whatever.

Helena Bertinelli catches this the absolute fucking worst and while I do think it's endearing to cast her and Stephanie Brown as these underdog characters desperate to overcome a very obvious glass ceiling imposed on them by Bruce, the text doesn't seem aware that's what it's doing half the time. It does the same thing to Max, meanwhile Terry just stole the batsuit and gave a couple pep talks. It's so easy for these boys to become superheroes. We don't even really see Dick Grayson and Tim Drake (in this universe Jason Todd by a different name) struggle to become Robins, they're introduced as Robins already. It's exhausting.

I don't like how Batman treats women! I think it's noteworthy that in the comics, Barbara Gordon, Kathy Kane, Bette Kane and Kate Kane all succeed as various bat women because they just do not ask Batman's permission and do not ever give him the impression that they're going to value his opinion over their decision to be bat people. Helena does similar, but she is constantly dogged by Bruce and dude he basically super-negs her whole superhero career until she literally values his opinion so much that it destroys her life and almost gets her killed numerous times. And the whole time you're like girl he's not worth it. Oh my god. Girl he's not worth it. Go kill Rudi Giuliani or whatever who caaares about his opinion he is not worth it.

So, seeing Max on a similar trajectory of valuing Bruce's approval is frustrating as fuck.

Nevertheless, it would've been cool to have a fourth season where Bruce's arc closes out on him passing the torch to Terry and Max as a new hero in the field / advisor on the wire dynamic echoing how he was occasionally positioned with Alfred when he was Batman. That would've been the ideal ending point for the cartoon to launch a comic continuation for me.

Then if I were writing the comic continuation, I would've had Max become a kind of "Oracle Beyond," getting sucked further and further into the superhero life and, hear me out, ultimately reviving the Justice League as an actual thing and not a sad shadow of itself.

Especially because OK, Amanda Waller is around but "retired" in the Beyond continuity.

Note: I'm going to ignore the "Amanda Waller replaced Mr. McGinnis' balls with cloned balls from Bruce Wayne so that Mr. McGinnis produces Bruce Wayne's cum" plot beat from Justice League Unlimited because listen to me man, I wanna see 2030 and if I have to acknowledge the idea that Waller believes in weird eugenics DNA-as-destiny concepts so deeply that she's doing freaked up ball surgery on random white guys I'm just not gonna make it.

But Amanda Waller is around and I'd have her be compulsively pulling strings and advising her successors in the evil nightmare Bladerunner Gotham state. She wants to convince you she's just a lil ol lady grandma and she's left all of that behind her, but she genuinely cannot completely walk away. She's kind of Bruce's opposite in that regard, the right combination of factors always pulls her back in. I would make her something of Oracle-Max's opposite, they interact primarily through information assets and so on, and this is what trains Max to actually do Oracle shit. Barbara can't do it because in this continuity she becomes a boring fucking cop instead of a good character lol.

And y'know, I like the idea of Max's becoming Oracle being

idk, the DCAU leaves you so starved for cool fem characters that you'll latch onto any untapped potential and be like "OK but what if she became the most important person in the continuity"

There's a scene in Batman Beyond where Terry McGinnis says to Bruce Wayne like "but you don't believe in MAGIC and GHOSTS, right?" and Bruce Wayne explains to him that he has met ghosts, gods and witch boys plural

and we're laughing, the whole gang is laughing, and then it occurs to me dude he has actually met witch boys plural. He met Clarion and Mordred. Those are both boy witches, or witch boys

The DCAU is cool enough that it has more than one witch boy

Another Batman Beyond observation: by mid season 2, you have met THREE incel villains. My definition here is: sexist dudes who blame and / or want to acquire and hold women captive in order to somehow alleviate their discontent.

This is unfortunately a kind of stock villain in older comic books and comic book adaptational media, because y'know, you had a lot of unbearable straight blokes in the industry back when superheroes and comic books were considered a weirdo interest for adult children. Y'know, when women like Ann Nocenti and Gail Simone talk about the shit they've seen in the office they aren't exaggerating by any means, the industry has always been a hotbed of creepy dudes and apologia for creepy dude behaviour.

Anyway, the series does play into some sympathy for them, especially with Patrick

who can be read as severely socially isolated due to a mutation. But like, also he feeds people to rats and rejects offers of friendship with reasonable limitations, so there's some element whereby his behaviour is not excused by the context he exists in.

The more interesting blokes to consider here are Howie Groote and Willie Wyatt.

The former builds a hot robot gf whom he mistreats the second his social status is elevated enough that real girls are paying attention to him (which is implied to have more to do with seeing that he isn't abusive to the girls he dates), and the latter basically engages in school shooter esque behaviour because of the classic trope of a hot popular girl dating him to make her boyfriend jealous.

The thing is, their episodes pay careful attention to make clear the problem is not that these dudes are unfuckable losers or whatever. In fact Howie is flirted with before the robot situation starts and he isn't even particularly bullied, he's about as popular as Terry. He just considers the person flirting with him low on the high school social totem pole to be worth his time. Rather, the issue they are both running into, which parallels the kinda shit you see in real life internet incel weirdos, is that they view women primarily as a proxy to social status. They don't want to just date someone, both of them can very much date. They want to date some kind of stereotypical Regina George because they think that doing so will elevate them to the point where they can be popular. Howie's episode ends with people praising him for blowing his house up at the end of a party and he's pretty satisfied with that; to him, a girlfriend basically fulfils the exact same purpose.

And I just think it's kinda interesting that this sort of trashy superhero cartoon from 1999 has a clearer take on the fact that the issue with incels is not that they're unfuckable weirdos, trust me mate no one is as unfuckable as they believe themselves to be, but that they just do not view women as equal human beings. To them, women are a tool to achieve something else they want, like social status. Even Patrick, who very much wants another person around, wants a woman as a kind of captive pet that can rub his tummybeller and make him feel good, such that he'll feed them to his other pets if they disobey him and won't let them live a life beyond him.

Anyway it is neat but also a bit weird that they have three dudes to hit this specific niche and subject matter but in a weird way I think it's kind of relatable? I finished out high school at a Catholic all-boys school and brother I met SO MANY dudes like this that the idea it'd be consolidated into just one bloke feels somewhat less realistic to me.

Watching Batman Beyond, it is absurd that the comics sent Tim Drake forward into the future to become him. Part of the appeal of BB is that horrific shit happens to Terry's villains. Most of them "die" in ambiguous PG-13 ways, in a manner that is unique to this show and not seen in Justice League, Superman, Batman: TAS, etc.

Tim Drake can't be that character.

Look the reality is that much of Batman Beyond is Edgy Spider-Man; Terry McGinnis is like an idealized version of Peter Parker who isn't fucking boring and / or going through a college conservative phase. Tim Drake can't be that boy. Tim Drake at his most interesting was a Bart Simpson who respects authority. He wears pocket protectors for god sake

Tbh if I were running DC comics I would have main continuity John Constantine date every single prominent woman from Wonder Woman to Hawkgirl until someone finally kills me

more DCAU with my friends

Dick Grayson is now named

DJ Jazzy Jeff

So because I am both autistic and powerful, every time Animated Series Hal Jordan calls his ChatGPT wife "Aya," I hear Mos Def on I Against I feat. Massive Attack from the undefeated Blade 2 soundtrack

particularly the scene where Blade and the Bloodpack do a cool superhero line-up before going to a vampire nightclub to beat on guys

we live in the shadow of a society that produced blade 2, the second greatest movie ever created (the greatest movie is blade 1)

Watching the Green Lantern animated series and I appreciate how the second Hal Jordan meets a ChatGPT car, he immediately attempts to fuck it

It is kind of funny that by avoiding The Killing Joke / Barbara's disability, the DCAU ends up with nowhere to really take her character throughout Justice League. She just disappears until it's time to show us that she quit being a superhero and became Jim Gordon in Batman Beyond lol.

And y'know, space for Oracle existed. Martian Manhunter is the DCAU's incredibly boring version of Oracle. Note: I have never met a diehard Manhunter fan who likes the DCAU version of the character. The best, most comics-accurate moments he has are in the goddamn Christmas episode where he learns the meaning of sharing. When he resigns to go be a white bloke for a while, creating space, he is replaced by the most boring version of Mr. Terrific, who if you don't know who he is from the comics is just some fuckin dude. The show never tells you what his deal is beyond a throwaway line about him being one of the smartest people in the League, that's all.

Bluntly, neither of these characters even remotely deliver the character of "supervisor on the wire" like Oracle does in the Birds of Prey comics. And I think, considering there are two whole episodes devoted to just showing you a glimpse of a potential Birds of Prey, at least some of the writers on the show were aware of the comics and the potential that obviously could've been, right?

idk, I think ultimately the industry and fandom discourse around the wheelchair, especially after The Gail Documents dropped in the late 90s, led to avoiding a very obvious direction to take the character, and so they just kind of left her off-screen in Gotham. While I do think this because I am an insane misogynist who hates women and blames Gail Simone for everything from climate change to AIDS, especially the continuing nerd backlash to the batchair.

The thing is, We see a LOT of Supergirl development in Justice League Unlimited, but her bestie is nowhere to be seen. The drama hook of having a by-now developed Barbara who's been chatting with Kara in the background every so often learning about the Galatea clone, so someone in the room who cares about Kara other than Ollie and Steel (note: we never actually see Steel's friendship with Kara develop) is there when Kara confronts and kills her evil clone. Such an obvious slam dunk, right? Instead, Kara does all this intense shit, she has what could've been one of the strongest arcs in the whole show -- but she has no one to play off of. She barely even has conversations with Superman. The closest to friendly chemistry she has is with a barely cooked concept of Stargirl.

It didn't have to be a The Killing Joke thing. You never have to explain why she's in the chair. In fact, I would like more portrayals of people with physical disabilities wherein no explanation of their disability is given, because in real life you are not owed that explanation and should learn to just be normal about mobility aides. They could've had Jonathan Jonestar stand down. Beat, Wonder Woman: who's going to run things up here now? Batman: I know someone. Cut. We see the interior of Barbara's apartment. We pan past her wheelchair and a framed Batgirl costume, maybe a few newspaper clippings of the glory days. Another cut. We see her on a high bar doing chin ups. The Batphone rings. She turns dramatically in close frame. Next episode opens and Oracle is just at the control station in the Watchtower bossing people around.

also it is astounding how much better the DCAU version of Huntress is for the simple fact that she is introduced trying to murder someone, and spends the whole episode working relentlessly, huntering them if you will, so she can murder them

most of Helena Bertinelli's early role in comics, especially Denny O'Neil and cuck Dixon comics, is Batman being like >:( no huntress... no. you have to stop hunting huntress. you're going to kill someone

and she's like you're goddamn right, but then she literally does not try to kill someone. She keeps using nonlethal methods. And Batman keeps escalating these bullshit fucking morality tests for her, to the point where he almost gets her killed and then blames her for nearly dying, all because he's like convinced she's the loose cannon danger to society, even though she never actually tries to shoot a goober

Meanwhile, the DCAU, it's her first focal episode, opening scene, she tries to shoot some dude. Then J''''''''on J''''''''''''''ones is like no huntress oh my goddddd we've been over this you can't murder guys and she's like OK suck my cameltoe you greenbean bitch, hands in her credit card and immediately continues working to kill that fuckin guy

If 90s comic book Huntress was at all written with the competency of DCAU Huntress, Batman's response to her would make sense. Instead, Denny and cuck write themselves into such a corner that they eventually have to have Jim and Bruce discuss why they don't like her being a vigilante and all they can come up with is "idk she reminds me of barbara i guess," because they both only know two women and struggle to differentiate them

More DCAU

So a take I've seen around the series is that the episode where Lex (being secretly puppeteered by Brainiac) convinces Superman and Captain Marvel to fight over a fake-out bomb under a housing project is bad, because "Superman wouldn't do that."

A problem I have with this take is that this Superman very much would do that and a whole season has been built around justifying Superman very much doing that.

So this episode happens after a season and a half of Lex (again puppeteered by Brainiac) fucking with Superman in increasingly ridiculous ways, coupled with Superman's ongoing doubts that stuck around after the Justice Lords episode. He is constantly being pilloried in the press and suspected by his own buds of potentially sliding into fascism. He is being taunted with the concept of the Justice Lords' history repeating, and him becoming corrupted by power.

This is the theme of the season, to the point that the Question straight up starts to believe that the Justice Lords are not an alternate reality, but the people he knows in another iteration of a time loop. They weren't from another dimension, they were from a future or past in the JLU Earth's repeating cycle. Which is probably not metaphysically true, but I say this to say that upon examining all of the evidence within the setting, the Question becomes absolutely convinced that Lex is destined to become the President (which almost happens) and kill the Flash (which almost happens twice), only for Superman to freak out and laser his brains off (which almost happens), which will result in him becoming the fascist ruler of Earth (which does not happen but that "almost" is important).

Part of the criticism is that it's a very naive, childish kind of villain scheme, y'know Lex is doing this comically benevolent thing and Superman is being a big stupid party pooper. My thing is, that's also kind of the point. The episode is contrasting current-series Superman, who is now this glowering cynical dad who yells at people, with Captain Marvel, who is intentionally very much in-line with how Superman was in the earliest eps of his own solo series, which had a much more classic comic book-y black and white morality tone.

This is so much the point that Batman even kind of comments on it while Superman is like, "how come people like Marvel and not me?" Superman just isn't that dude any more, he's been developing for five seasons of TV and is now the kind of dude who has become paranoid and had his reputation absolutely ripped apart by orchestrated moments like this. Y'know, Lois reminds the audience of how Superman's rep has been bad since Darkseid controlled him into being a dickhead. So, if you want to contrast Supe with Billy, you kind of need to have the premise be some kind of candy optimistic situation that is organic to Billy, so that Superman's reaction to it seems off and strange.

Ultimately I think it's a criticism that comes from people mad that it makes Superman look bad, but it's supposed to.

The thesis of the season is, after all, that trusting a global policing power uncritically even when they have WMDs and can very much dictate how the world "should" be, is probably a bad idea, and in the midst of that is a solid season-long deconstruction of the "evil Superman" narrative. It's actually a banger and the episode where she smacks Billy around is rad as fuck.

Anyway unrelated but justice for Galatea, I would've tossed her something that implies a redemption arc. Another subtext of the series is that people do deserve second chances and we should be kind. Hawkgirl literally acts as the spearpoint of a fascist, colonialist project that involves putting random people of Earth into slavery, and the series forgives her, but it makes no time to forgive Galatea. It just has Supergirl either kill or comatose her and then spares no time to tell us anything more, which in DCAU terms generally means she's dead. The DCAU can't actually kill anybody hardcore style, but they do this to imply a death occasionally, like this is what happens to Plastique in the Suicide Squad ep.

Galatea unfortunately is one of the more interesting concepts in the whole series, but she's kinda just used as a dumb thug and then killed off in a way that does not contribute to Kara's development because the only woman who develops in the whole billion season series is Hawkgirl.

No two women in the Justice League cartoon like each other lol

It's very much from that era when men thought the trick to make women seem complex and realistic was to make them hate every other woman. Vixen hates Hawkgirl, Wonder Woman hates Hawkgirl, Canary hates Huntress

Meanwhile in the Batman and Superman shows. Supergirl and Babs like each other but they only hang out on screen once

More DCAU with friends:

They are captivated by Scott Free, Big Barda and Oberon.

I am also captivated by Oberon but that's because I want to fuck him. They are mostly fascinated instead with the idea that Jack Kirby believed that lil people dress like Snow White dwarves.

So, Scott Free episode involves Scott having constant PTSD flashbacks about being tortured into becoming like a magical Flash Gordon space escape artist by an evil grandma on Planet Fascism. Of course we discuss the hypothetical: Batman and Scott discussing their respective childhood traumas.

Bruce is like, yeah, that's why I put on the suit. That's why I risk my life every night. I know I'll never succeed, but the idea that I might prevent some kid like me from losing his parents to a thug with a gun is everything to me. What happened to me could happen to anybody.

And Scott takes a drag on what I assume must be an electronic cigarette, because if Kirby knew about ecigs every single one of his characters would own one, and he says, yeah my situation is more of a uh, individual kind of thing

she put me in the shrinking cube, batman