Mikester

Okay, one last post on this topic before going on to…I don’t know, three weeks of talking about Robocop 2, maybe. But here’s what I’ve posted about Batman ’89 and related subjects previously: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

…And here’s what I’m posting today:

Jason had a few things to say:

“I had started reading DC Comics when Millennium came out* (So 1987 or so). So I was aware of Dark Knight and had been reading Batman for about 2 years. I was extremely excited about the movie. As a Junior in high school at the time, of course I had been aware of Batman through the usual means (The Adam West show, Superfriends, Scooby Doo), but the comics were the only real serious take on the character at the time.”

Yeah, I feel like the release of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight and its general acceptance by the public at large, beyond the usual comic-book reading suspects, along with the subsequent…”awareness,” I guess, of comics overall (helped along by Watchmen and other non-traditional, more adult-y funnybooks) helped whet the appetite for a big budget Batman film that would be dark and grim and serious and…well, we got a Tim Burton film. It had enough of the trappings of grim grittiness that the fans wanted, however, so that was good enough. Or, more to the point, it wasn’t the goofy ’60s show or the Super Friends cartoon or whatever it was fans were afraid of seeing. I mean, comics weren’t the only vector through which this demand was created, as special effect-driven action films were becoming increasingly prevalent and technology had improved to the point of making such things less costly and more feasible.

But all those previous media tie-ins were probably just as responsible for the film’s impact and success as anything else. Character recognition is a huge part of getting the public’s attention, and Batman being one of the most recognizable fictional characters in the world is due in large part to Adam West, et al. So what I’m saying is, every thank Scooby Doo for helping make Burton’s Batman a hit.

“Let it not be said that 80’s crossover events were not good jumping on points (at least for me). I started seriously reading Marvel when Secret Wars II started, and started reading DC when Millennium started. I remember Millennium being extremely confusing for a new DC reader, but it was a good introduction to a lot of DC books and characters that I had never heard of.”

Millennium had that clever gimmick of having “Week One” and “Week Two” and so on emblazoned across the top of each tie-in’s cover, which made it a lot easier for someone to decide to drop their cash on it. The cover designs all looked like it was part of the same story, so it was hard not to grab those issues. And like you say, it was a “good introduction” to other DC properties — that’s the main purpose of all these crossovers in the first place. It’s why the Justice Society appeared in All-Star Comics so long ago…if you picked it up because you were a regular Flash Comics reader and you saw the Flash was in the JSA, and then decided you liked that Green Lantern character who was also in it, maybe you’d start buying the solo Green Lantern book, too. Every crossover wants you to start buying more comics. GASP…the horrible secret, revealed!

On a related personal note, if I recall correctly one of my first shop jobs after entering comics retail was going along and pulling off all the bagged Millennium tie-in comics that had been displayed in a row on the wall above the comics rack. That was one of the very, very, very few times we had actual comics attached to a wall for display purposes.

“Of course after a couple of years, I went from obsessively buying every book from both publishers (and a lot of other publishers too) to buying no comics whatsoever, but that’s a different story.”

Ah, yes, the 1990s.

• • •
And let me wrap up things with his amazing story from longtime ProgRuin-ite Wayne, who left this remembrance in the comments for the one post I don’t have in my numbered links up there:

“Here’s [my true story]. I have no photos, because I am certain the funeral home in question did not want to be sued.

“It was a gig I had for about two weeks in October of 1989. I was broke, ready to take any job. And I ended up dressing in a Keaton Batman-like suit and attending wakes and funerals in a suburb South of Chicago. The funeral home honestly thought that the kids would be less sad if they knew that whomever was in the casket was friends with Batman. No idea why ANY kid would believe that, but there I was, bat-ears and all, sitting in the back of the viewing room and on at least four occasions, being a pallbearer and standing at the gravesite looking properly somber.

“I was in college and was paid $15 in 1989 dollars for each viewing I was able to attend, with an extra $2 thrown in if I was a pallbearer.”

This is insane. Is this a thing that happens now? Do people go to funerals in character costumes today to, um, lighten the mood for kids? I’m half-tempted to Google search but I don’t think I really want to know if someone’s dressing up as, let’s say, Twilight Sparkle to keep the children calm during the service.

I can see maybe having like a side thing to entertain the children while the actual funeral is going on…MAYBE. But Wayne was actually carrying the coffin. Like, four times.

So if you ever had any doubt just how much of an influence that first Tim Burton Batman movie was, there you go. Batman was everywhere you looked, and followed you everywhere you would go…even into the cold embrace of the grave.

• • •
Thank you for putting up with so much Bat-talk over the last few weeks. You folks are real troopers. Back soon with more, mostly Bat-free, content!

Okay, ALMOST done with Bat-Talk…next time should be the wrap-up, but until then….

BEFORE: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

NOW:

Bryan sez

“I seem to recall the issue was less about Keaton’s comedic background (although that was certainly a factor) and more that his receding hairline and less than powerful jawline didn’t make him seem ‘heroic.’ A quote I’ve long enjoyed (no idea who to attribute it to) is ‘only Tim Burton could work on a film with Alec Baldwin and Michael Keaton, and decide to cast Keaton as Bruce Wayne.'”

I remember reading some interview with somebody at the time…let me know if I’m providing TOO much detail…that the conceit was that “well sure, Bruce Wayne would look like this, because then nobody would suspect that he was Batman.” That stuck with me, so when someone came into the shop about the time the movie opened, and noted how Michael Keaton didn’t fit what Batman should look like, I repeated that explanation. The customer kinda went “pffft, yeah right” and looked at me like I was an idiot, and he probably wasn’t wrong. That particular explanation certainly sounds like after-the-fact justification now vis-à-vis the actor’s appearance, back in the day before we realized Michael Keaton, much like the late Adam West, was perfect.

• • •
Andrew returns to say

“I wonder why today’s movies don’t have the same effect on comic book sales that these earlier movies did?”

Novelty, I guess? Superhero movies are a regular occurrence now and just part of the whole mediaweb-thing that constantly surrounds us, versus that 1989 Batman movie being like the first major serious attempt at a comic book film since the Christopher Reeve Superman run. And there were other factors going on as well, such as a preexisting heightened awareness of comics thanks to Watchmen and Dark Knight, an increased interest in comics collectability, and so on. It was just the right stuff at the right time, and thus are fads born.

Oh, and as Bryan says a little later in the comments, comics were still at newsstands and convenience stores and such, so anyone interested in Batman and his super-pals had a lot easier time of getting their hands on their adventures.

“At the time of the first Batman movies, didn’t DC start publishing the ‘Greatest Stories’ series for Batman, etc? But is there anything like that now, say for Wonder Woman?”

Well, sort of. DC published Wonder Woman: Her Greatest Battles, a $9.99 paperback with mostly recent-ish stories of her fighting various villains, and that 75th anniversary hardcover, which are probably closest to the “Greatest Stories” paperbacks you mention. Plus there were the collections of John Byrne’s and George Perez’s runs, and Wonder Woman and the Justice League of America reprinting some early ’90s stuff…there was no shortage of WW books available.

• • •
Gareth depresses me with

“One of the ‘Batman Begins’ people said they saw a TV report about poor people in Africa, and one of them was wearing a Batman T-shirt. They said it really hammered home how famous the character was.”

Well, I guess that’s sorta right, in that Batman was so famous and popular that they went way overboard in manufacturing the shirts, and the giant mountain of overstock had to go somewhere.

• • •
Longtime Progressive Ruiner (er, there has to be a better way to put it than that) Jim Kosmicki clues me in on the following

“My memory of the Legends of the Dark Knight color covers was that first, they were a cheap paper second cover, not regular cover stock.

“But that’s because they were a last minute addition. I remember reading interviews in the day where DC administrators said they added the color covers because they were VERY concerned that comic stores had ordered way too many copies. They borrowed a trick from the paperback publishing side of the house in terms of having different colors (remember The Hotel New Hampshire and other best-sellers would do this at the time) as a marketing gimmick. They were trying to make some sort of distinction that might help stores sell more than one copy to customers…

“But since it was a last minute decision after the orders came in, they weren’t able to put the plan in the ordering information. And as I recall many stores were unhappy because they would have ordered MORE if they’d known about the 4 different colors. So the plan DC had to help sell what they thought was over-ordering would have potentially led to MORE orders if they’d publicized it in the solicitations…”

Just thought I’d plug that whole enchilada into the main body of a post…I do remember that the different colored covers were just overlays over the regular cover. I didn’t recall any of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that resulted in those covers in the first place since that was early in my comics-selling career and just probably forgot. However, as someone who haunted all the local bookstores, I do remember the “variant” paperback covers that were available at times. If memory serves, the novelization of Raiders of the Lost Ark had shiny metallic covers that came in different colors. (Mine was silver, in case you were wondering.)

I wish I could tell you just how Legends of the Dark Knight sold, but it was a new Batman #1, so I’m assuming it sold just fine. I do remember instances of people buying all four color variations, which felt really strange to me, since the comics boom was in full swing just yet and that kind of behavior hadn’t really caught on during my then-brief comics retailing experience.

• • •
argh.sims arghed

“And [Batman Returns] set up the Catwoman ‘mythology’ that lead to the Halle Barry movie. That Halle Barry was in a Catwoman movie that is almost impossible to watch is a crime. It could have been so good. :-/”

I think I mentioned on this site, or on Twitter, or on MySpace, that the Halle Berry Catwoman movie at its start feels like it could be a good, if not great, superhero action film. BUT IT’S A TRICK, DON’T FALL FOR IT LIKE I DID

But yeah, you’re right…dead gal revived by heaps of cats, live action or CGI or otherwise. That’s how you get your Catwomans.

• • •
Zoot Koomie zoots

“There were an enormous number and variety of tie-in products for Batman. The whole world was branded Bat for a short while there. But there was no indication that there were any comics. All the schwag was very movie specific. The comics Bat-boom could have been even larger if any effort had been put into cross-branding at all.”

And the comics boom was enormous, so imagining it even larger puts images in my head of me diving into my money bin. I wonder if the assumption at the time was that “we don’t need to cross-promote Batman comics with movie merch…of course everyone knows Batman is from the comics.” And as we know from most comic book movies that came after, a lot of the people into the mass media tie-ins and adaptations don’t necessarily cross over to the source material. Now, in the case of Batman, it was such a huge fad that it couldn’t help but drive people into comic book stores to buy comics, but I know from my experience then that a pretty good percentage of folks were more interested in the shirts and toys and posters than they were in following the various monthly publications. Which is fine…if they preferred their Bat-adventures to be live action rather than on the print page, then who am I to argue?

• • •
DanielT wonders

“Has there been a pop culture phenomenon in the last 28 years that’s reached the height of Bat-mania? The Star Wars prequels and Harry Potter are the only things I can think of that come close, but I don’t feel like either really reached the same level of frenzy.”

Oh, I get what you mean. That first Star Wars in 1977 is probably the closest, in that basically Everything Changed because of that movie. Between the Prequels and Harry Potter, I’d probably say Harry came closest, in that it gave the ol’ Young Adult market a boost, paving the way for other similar book series to follow. The Prequels were more about the revival of Star Wars as a marketing brand, not so much reinventing culture as just reestablishing its place in it. Though in terms of pure frenzy I suppose it’s hard to top the pre-screening line-ups that were all the rage at the time.

Anyway, we probably won’t see another huge world-changing movie event like 1989 Batmania until James Cameron gets all those Avatar sequels out. YOU MARK MY WORDS.