Batman

“Batman: Arkham Origins” captures a “rawer, scarier Batman,” according to the creative leads of the next entry in the Warner Bros. Interactive “Arkham” series. The game, due Oct. 25, is set five years before the events of 2009′s “Batman: Arkham Asylum,” on a Christmas Eve when many still considered Gotham City’s vigilante to be a myth, said senior producer Ben Mattes. Mattes and creative director Eric Holmes, who were in Los Angeles last week to showcase scenes from the game, including new weapons, a new voice cast and enhanced detective abilities for Batman, said rewinding the bat clock allowed them to create a game that emphasized Batman’s more aggressive nature. Mattes often used the term “wraith-like,” as numerous scenes showed Batman evading an army of assassins and the police, as well as torturing a criminal by dangling him from a grappling hook off […]

The new game “Injustice: Gods Among Us” begins with Superman killing the Joker after one of the madman’s plots results in the death of Lois Lane, who was pregnant with the Kryptonian’s child. And things grow more intense from there. Released last month, the game stages grand battles between an impressive number of familiar faces from the DC universe — a number that’s growing with the release of new downloadable characters. First was the interstellar bounty hunter Lobo. Next up, Commissioner Jim Gordon’s daughter Barbara, otherwise known as Batgirl, will join the fray. Batgirl will be available on Xbox LIVE Marketplace for 400 Microsoft Points and PlayStation®Network for $4.99. Wii U players will have to wait until summer. NetherRealm Studios and DC spent two years developing “Injustice: Gods Among Us,” which was accompanied by a comic book prequel written by […]

Batman and Talia al Ghul deal with the death of their son Damian in “Batman, Incorporated” No. 10, due out Wednesday. The series, written by Grant Morrison with art  by Chris Burnham, has focused on Damian’s evolution from bratty child to a leader in Batman’s crime-fighting corporation. Damian became the latest in a long line of Robins before dying at the hands of a cloned version of himself. “In many ways this has been Damian’s story as much as it has been the story of Bruce Wayne, and it’s a story that had its end planned a long time ago,” Morrison wrote in a post on DC Comics’ blog, “for what son could ever hope to replace a father like Batman, who never dies?” In issue No. 10, Talia al Ghul and the supervillain group Leviathan retain their ruthless grip on Gotham, Batman […]

Writer John Layman works closely with two highly unorthodox detectives – one is a billionaire who stalks the night in a cape and cowl, the other is a federal agent who quite literally takes a bite out of crime. The Phoenix-based comics creator had developments to detail about both his Batman series for DC Comics and “Chew” for Image Comics at WonderCon in Anaheim over the weekend. The latest “Detective Comics,” arriving Wednesday, is an extra-thick case file. The 80-page volume marks the title’s 900th issue but is numbered 19 because of DC Comics’ New 52 continuity revamp and series relaunch. Titled “Mystery of the 900,” it features the New 52 debut of Kirk Langstrom, inventor of the grotesquely and perilously transformative Man-Bat formula. The issue also moves toward next month’s conclusion of the larger story of Penguin henchman-turned-usurper Ignatius […]

Batman comic fans will find out how Bruce Wayne built the Batcave in “Batman: The Zero Year,” a new origin story to be released this June. The 11-issue arc, to be written by Scott Snyder and illustrated by Greg Capullo, is meant to explain the beginnings of the New 52 version of the Caped Crusader, DC Comics announced Monday. Several key elements, such as the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents, will stay the same, Snyder told the Associated Press, adding that the new arc “builds up the mythology.” “We tried to preserve as much of Batman’s history as we could and keep what we could of this history intact,” he said. “It’s ‘The Zero Year,’ the one that no one has told the story of before. We see how Bruce became the Batman, built the cave, faced off with his […]

Robin the Boy Wonder is reportedly going to be killed in an upcoming issue. Batman’s sidekick will meet his doom, an end long planned by the comic’s writer, respected scribe Grant Morrison, who insists the move is narratively necessary. Why? Because, as Morrison writes, “what son could ever hope to replace a father like Batman?” And so Robin — Damian Wayne — will die in issue No. 8 of DC Comics’ “Batman Incorporated,” which hits shelves Wednesday. In an essay on DC’s blog, Morrison talks about his seven years on the Batman assignment and the Caped Crusader over the years, including “the savage, young, pulp-flavored ‘weird figure of the dark’ of his early years,” as well as the “smiling, paternal figure of the 1940s” and later “the hairy-chested globetrotting adventurer of the ’70s …  the brutally physical vigilante of the […]

Kevin Smith has no small amount of praise for Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns.” “‘The Dark Knight Returns,’ for many people of my generation, for many people that followed, from the moment it was published forward is kind of like ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ of comic books,” Smith said at the West Coast premiere of “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2,” the concluding chapter of Warner Bros.’ animated adaptation of Miller’s landmark 1986 miniseries. “It’s a very important book that we all carry with us and just like the ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ they’ve never done a movie of it, because most people thought it was unfilmable,” he said. Perhaps, though the animated format seems to have served the story just fine, judging from the reaction of the audience attending a screening of the new PG-13 rated […]

Frank Miller’s genre-shaking graphic novel “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” is getting the movie treatment. The second installment in the two-part animated adaptation premieres Monday evening at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills. The premiere includes a panel discussion moderated by filmmaker and geek personality Kevin Smith, featuring director Jay Oliva, dialogue director Andrea Romano, executive producer Bruce Timm and screenwriter Bob Goodman. The panel will be live streamed from PaleyCenter.org beginning at approximately 8:30 p.m. The film — which doesn’t stray far from Miller’s classic 1986 story — features the voice talent of Peter Weller (“Robocop,” “Dexter”) as a time-worn (and probably psychopathic) Bruce Wayne who becomes so disturbed by Gotham’s worsening crime that he decides to come out of retirement against the wishes of local and national government. The president turns to none other than Superman to […]

Batman and his crime-fighting corporation finally take the offensive against the ruthless Talia al Ghul and the supervillain group Leviathan to reclaim Gotham City in “Batman, Incorporated” No. 7, due out Wednesday. The series, written by comics icon Grant Morrison with gritty, detailed art by Chris Burnham, has centered around Batman, Talia and their son Damian (a.k.a. Robin). Issue No. 5 revealed a glimpse of the post-apocalyptic future that would unfold if Damian were to become the Dark Knight, and issue No. 6 pitted Batman against Talia in a maze of riddles and mind games, with an explosive ending. Cover | Variant Cover 1 | Variant Cover 2 | Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 Number 7′s story, titled “Belly of the Whale,” follows the Bat-family as they face the aftermath of the previous […]

David S. Goyer has made a living inventing outsized mythologies for some of pop culture’s most beloved figures — Batman, Superman, he’s even working on a new Godzilla movie due out in 2014. Now, he’s giving Leonardo da Vinci the superhero treatment. Starz’s “Da Vinci’s Demons” presents the gifted Renaissance artist as a born-out-of-wedlock tortured genius with a penchant for opium who is branded as a heretic by the all-powerful church. All of which, Goyer points out, is true. The eight-episode series, which is set to premiere April 12, concentrates on Da Vinci (played by English actor Tom Riley) as a young man beginning at 25 and imagines his development as a free thinker in a rigid, often-secretive society. There is surprisingly little known about the Italian artist, often regarded as one of the greatest geniuses of Western civilization, during […]