The Four Color Media Monitor

I think DC's animated movie videos are on their way to becoming a farce. The Colorado Springs Gazette writes a sugary article about Judd Winick, turning his pointless return of Jason Todd into an animated movie:

This Robin never had the chance to soar.

Jason Todd was the second Robin to Bruce Wayne’s Batman, taking over the role after the first Robin, Dick Grayson, grew up and left the nest. Jason’s career was cut short, though, when he was killed — the victim of the Joker and of DC Comics readers who voted for Jason’s death in a telephone poll.

Winick once claimed he took part and voted against killing Jason, but it turned out he lied as a publicity stunt, and if he had taken part, he'd be willing to vote for Jason to kick the bucket.

In 2005, as the writer on DC’s “Batman,” Judd Winick brought Jason back from the dead, with the former Robin now operating as a deadly vigilante called the Red Hood. Winick is revisiting that storyline as the screenwriter for “Batman: Under the Red Hood,” the latest in a series of DC Universe animated films from Warner Premiere, DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. Animation. “Under the Red Hood” will be released July 27 on Blu-Ray, DVD and On Demand.

[...]

“Under the Red Hood” resulted from a pitch Winick made to Warner Premiere executives. He thought the Red Hood story line would be a natural for film, capturing the dark, psychological tone of Christopher Nolan’s live-action “Batman Begins.” The executives agreed. But boiling down two years of story into a 75-minute feature definitely wasn’t a snap.

“It was both a challenge as well as kind of a treat,” Winick said, because it involved stripping away anything extraneous and getting back “to the heart of the story.”

Ha ha, very funny. There was no heart and no point to how Jason was brought back, and to date, not much has come from it. Jason has actually been portrayed quite dismayingly personality-wise, with little to distinguish from his last year or so as the second Robin.

USA Today described Jason’s Red Hood guise as Batman’s “nastiest new villain.” And, in the simplest terms, Jason is indeed a bad guy, Winick said. “But, thankfully, he’s a little more complicated than that.”

Jason wants answers from Batman, Winick said. He wants to know what he really meant to the Dark Knight, who never avenged his death.

Excuse me? He tried, even if he never actually killed the Joker, which is admittedly one of the biggest problems that's followed all those years: the Clown Prince of Crime commits murders galore, leaves scores of corpses in his wake, and yet no one ever thinks to send him to face God's Law. I have a bad feeling that this is going to come off as one of the weakest of Warner's animated productions based on DC comics, only making the Masked Manhunter look more like a failure.

In the comics, Jason’s resurrection was tied to DC’s “Infinite Crisis,” a big, reality-shifting event unfolding at the time. The reason for his return in the movie “differs greatly from the comic,” Winick said, without offering any details.

“For me, it was less important how he came back than what happened when he did.”

Winick is also the writer of “Red Hood: The Lost Days,” a six-issue miniseries from DC Comics; the first issue is in comic book shops now.

The series promises to plug some gaps in Jason Todd’s history.

Oh, I'll bet it will. More likely it'll be just as pointless as it was in the comics, which aren't exactly doing big numbers ever since he came back. This'll likely be just as bad as Geoff Johns' own renditions of Green Lantern in animated format.

While we're on the subject, here's the USA Today item on the same subject, and Winick repeated his very confession of how he lied for the sake of publicity a couple years back:

"At the time, I was a snot-nosed 16-year-old art student who had just stopped reading mainstream comics a couple years earlier, and when The Dark Knight came out and whatnot, I started discovering black and white comics," Winick says. "But this caught my attention because they were going to kill off Robin, so that dragged me back. I read it just for that reason, so the marketing worked!"

For the record, Winick says he didn't vote one way or the other. "In previous interviews, when I was promoting the Red Hood run, I would lie," he says, laughing. "I would say I actually voted for him to live, because I knew it made a much better story that I wanted him to live and now I'm bringing him back from the dead. I would have definitely voted for him to die.

"It was an amazing thing, and it's fun in a way to be a little part of history — or [mess] it up depending on who you're asking."

It's not often I've seen USA Today publish something this snide, and I doubt Winick will find much further mileage after letting everyone who still reads them know what a cynic he is.

Labels: Batman, dc comics, dreadful writers, msm propaganda