Sorry for the delay on this one, but it couldn’t be avoided! On this episode, I run through five fantastic straight-to-video animated Batman flicks that I encountered thanks to my new gig writing for Looper.com! I’m talking about Batman & Harley Quinn, Batman: Return Of The Caped Crusaders (and it’s sequel Batman vs. Two-Face), Batman: Gotham By Gaslight, Batman Ninja and Batman: Soul Of The Dragon which are all streamable on HBO Max and hopefully available at your local library!
You want links? I got a couple! You can read my Looper Heathcliff article here and check out my original review of the Gotham By Gaslight comic here!
As always, you can email me at high5tj at gmail.com or follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Also feel free to subscribe to my YouTube Channel!
On today’s episode of The High Five podcast, I’m taking a look at some of Brian Michael Bendis’ DC work, none of which I had read until this week!
Throughout the episode, I mentioned a few stories I read online:
George Marston’s Newsarama story about Bendis’ Jinxworld imprint moving to Dark Horse is what spurred me on to read these books in the first place. It’s also where I learned that he was no longer DC-exclusive starting earlier in 2021.
Before wrapping up, I also mentioned the debates between Bendis and Kirkman about creator-owned comics, which you can read a recap of on CBR from 2008!
As always, you can email me at high5tj at gmail.com or follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Also feel free to subscribe to my YouTube Channel!
Get into the Halloween spirit with this sampler of Neil Gaiman goodies that I think will give you a nice launchpad into his fantastic work! The best part? It’ll only take a few hours!
Link time! You can find the Neil’s Works section of his website here and read the Colleen Doran interview I did here.
I also tackled five more films in It’s All Connected 2021 to keep that moving along. I finished my Jill Schoelen mini-marathon, indulged a bit on my favorite slasher franchise, watched another John Carpenter film and then got to one wacky killer animal flick!
I tried something different this week and put together a video based on The High Five Episode 32 – Spooky Brave And The Bold Team-Ups! It was a lot of fun…and a lot of work, but it looks nice! I have a few ideas for other episodes to do this with to expand on more visual topics.
On this week’s episode, I went through years’ worth of Bronze Age Brave And The Bold Batman team-ups to come up with a list of fun, Halloween-themed issues. If you’re looking to follow along, you can check them all out on the DC Universe app or the first two volumes of Batman In The Brave And The Bold The Bronze Age.
As always, you can email me at high5tj at gmail.com or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.
I’ve spilled a lot of digital ink this season talking about how much I love Kelley Jones’ work, especially on Batman (in posts here and here), but there’s another artist whose work is synonymous with horror in my mind: Mike Mignola. The genius behind Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. has done all sorts of work in the comics world and this post will give some love to a few of his other works that are lots of spooky fun! Here are some interesting comics you might want to check out if you don’t want to dive too deeply into those sprawling epics.
I’ve been having a great time watching connected films and a variety of horror books this season, but it’s very possible that re-visiting the Batman run by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones has been one of my favorite experiences so far. As I mentioned in the first part, these post-KnightFall books were bedrock-forming for my knowledge of not just the Dark Knight, but also the imagery of horror as put through Jones’ incredibly capable lens. As good as the Batman developments are in these issues as he regains his life after the Bane and Azrael incidents, it’s equally exciting to see these two creators work their magic on a variety of villains and co-stars.
Every Halloween (or Scare Season, if you will), I find myself taking on some kind of film-based project, but also trying to read through as many horror-themed books and comics as I can. Last year, I focused solely on Vertigo titles, but this year I’m mostly pulling books off my shelf or out of my To Read box. Of course, I’m always looking around to see if there are any books I just NEED to add to my library, though. While scoping out Amazon, I came across two volumes of Batman By Doug Moench and Kelley Jones. I was immediately interested and began comparing prices when I realized, “Hey, I have these issues in the garage!” As you can see from the above pic, that proved to be true and I saved myself some scratch and also had a far more immediate dive into some very important comics from my childhood!
Even though this week’s Trade Pile isn’t quite as robust as others, I still wanted to get a few thoughts down on three books that I read this week that I thought were pretty darn spiffy. One set an established character out on his own in a way that really worked for me while the other two featured brand new characters, one set in an equally new world an one rooted in a far more familiar one!
I call together this first meeting of The Midnight Comic Club in 2018 to order! This time around, I assembled a Frightful Five of gateway horror comics that are good for kids of various ages. As always, I recommend you read the books first before passing them to the young reader in your life, but I think there’s some solid options in here!