Although they may lack the big budget releases of their live action brethren, the DC Universe Original Animated Movies (DCUOAM) are by no means inferior works.
Don’t let their direct to DVD release fool you; the voice talent and stories featured in the DCUOAM are more than worthy of the big screen. Stars like Neil Patrick Harris, Kevin Conroy, John DiMaggio, Alexis Denisof, Bryan Cranston, Nathan Fillion, Christina Hendricks, and James Woods have all lent their voices to DC characters, while the source material that these films are based on is even more impressive.
The stories that make up the plot of these animated movies are adaptations of legendary tales from the DC Universe, stories that honestly could use their own gritty Christopher Nolan or slow-mo heavy Zack Snyder film. Everything from JLA: Tower of Babel, the best Superman story, All Star Superman, to the brilliant Batman: The Dark Knight Returns have all already been adapted into animated films.
With all of these hallmarks of the DC Universe covered already, and adaptations of Superman: Brainiac and Flashpoint on the horizon, you may begin to think that the DC Animated Original Movies are running out of quality comic books to use as inspiration. I am here to put your fears to rest, as the DCUOAM has only just begun to scratch the surface of this six-color iceberg.
Here are five tales from the DC Universe that deserve animated adaptations of their own:
5. Kingdom Come
In Alex Ross’ and Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come, a man nearing the end of his life is granted a glimpse into the future, courtesy of the Spectre — a future where DC’s mightiest superheroes have aged into Sisyphean caricatures of their former selves. Batman is a withered old Darth Vader of a hero, his gadgets and wonderful toys allowing his one man war on crime to continue when his body cannot by utilizing bat-themed mechs, instead of brightly-dressed boy wonders, to make Gotham a Bat-Police-State. The Flash is simply that: a flash, a red blur that is on constant patrol. And Superman? He has returned to his proverbial Olympus, indifferent to the fate of mankind.
As the old age of heroes begins to circle the drain, a new age of cyberpunk ultra-violent walking guns of superheroes has emerged to seize the torch, believing more in the Smith & Wesson than truth and justice. This generational divide of course brings about a war of the super-powers, beautifully painted by Alex Ross, which can only become more glorious if brought to animated life.
In addition to the war between superheroes and vigilantes, there is also the Lex Luthor-run Mankind Liberation Front, an octogenarian Legion of Doom, that wishes to rid the world of heroes all together. In summation, you have the old Justice League battling against these new gun toting vigilante heroes, while The MLF stretches its resources thin to fight a war on both fronts, as a mecha-suit wearing Batman gathers up his own group of younger heroes to stealthily punch anyone whose face hasn’t been punched enough already.
Coincidentally, a Kingdom Come adaptation couldn’t come at a better time. It’s a dystopian future of the DC Universe where heroes in it for one last justice-based score have to deal with gun-obsessed superheroes. If there are two things I know audiences love these days, it’s dystopias, and guns.
4. The Killing Joke
In Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, the caped crusader plays second fiddle to The Joker’s klaxophone as we learn the origin of the clown prince of crime. Though there have been many explanations of the Joker’s bleached beginnings, The Killing Joke forges it’s own canon by telling us the tale of a sad, failed comedian who tried to forge some semblance of a life worth living for his pregnant wife by flirting with the golden-haired seductress otherwise known as crime. It’s a tragic tale, told to us in flashback, as in the present the Joker tries to demonstrate to a kidnapped Commissioner Gordon that all it takes to turn a man into a flamboyantly-themed Batman villain is one bad day — a spine-shattering, home-invading, achondroplastic dwarf in dominatrix-cherub gear whipping you in the junk with a cattle-prod kind of bad day. All the while the Batman tries to deal with the increasing brutality of the Joker’s crime spree, hoping beyond hope that trying to reform the criminally insane isn’t an insane task itself.
So if The Killing Joke is one of the best Batman stories, and the quintessential Joker mythos, then why is it so low on this list? Well while not serving as direct adaptations, some elements of The Killing Joke have been briefly touched upon in other DC Animated Works. Batman Beyond’s Return of the Joker featured a Batman pushed beyond his brink pleading with the Joker, borrowing a few key phrases from The Killing Joke, and we witness a glimpse of the man who would be Joker taking a hydrochloric acid dip in The Rise of the Red Hood. Despite these allusions a full adaptation is a perfectly cromulent necessity. When South Park has more direct references to The Killing Joke than you do, it’s due time to get started on an adaptation of your own.
3. Secret Six: Unhinged
Do you know what my favorite episodes of every superhero cartoon were? The ones where the villains realize that if they pool their resources, they could kill their shared nemesis by just bum-rushing him. Usually this doesn’t work, oftentimes due to internal bickering or a Deus Ex Machina device that separates the sinister team-up forever. Gail Simone and Nicola Scott take the super villain team up trope one step further with Secret Six. This is the story of six B-list super-villain strangers, picked to live in a mansion and have their missions followed, to find out what happens when rogues stop being evil — and start getting badass. The Secret Six is essentially The Real World of the DC Universe, however instead of the bootless banter of troglodyte coeds, you get wrist-mounted handguns and a talking bipedal shark that calls himself King Shark.
While the other tales on this list feature recognizable characters, Secret Six banks off of the lesser-known foes of the DC universe, proof that you don’t need a bat in your name to be interesting. That being said, Secret Six’s field leader is The Cat Man, which is exactly what it sounds like– a guy in a feline themed Batman costume, but an internally-conflicted badass guy at that. Cat Man is supplicated by recovering venom-addict Batman-back-breaker Bane, walking trigger finger Deadshot, gothic Lolita banshee Jeannette, nigh-immortal daughter of a caveman Scandal Savage, and the comic-relief triple-jointed Ragdoll, who is a cross between Gollum and Glenn Quagmire. Though the sobriquets might be unrecognizable at first, I assure you that reading just one issue of this dysfunctional team turns them into instant household names.
In Unhinged, the Secret Six are tasked with recovering a magical demonic artifact that is a spiritual Carte Blanche — a “get out of Hell free” card. Though some members of the team doubt the existence of the afterlife — somewhat absurd given how commonplace resurrection is in comicdom — while other team members secretly pine for it themselves, the theological debate between the Secret Six is put on hold as a twenty million dollar bounty has been placed on the head of each team member (netting a cool 120 million USD for the entire team), garnering the attention of nearly every antagonist ever, from Wonder Woman nemesis Cheetah, the aforementioned bipedal shark King Shark, to a new incarnation of The Crazy Quilt (a batman villain whose “power” is seeing colors so bright they made him crazy), resulting in the rarely seen super-villain team-up versus super-villain army, whose aim to kill the team or simply snatch up the card for themselves.
No doubt if given the original animated movie treatment, Secret Six: Unhinged could give more life to these D-list villainous antagonists in addition to letting the perfectly crafted personalities of these six villainous protagonists shine as they battle the horde of DC’s obscure rogue gallery in a stolen ice cream truck. Yeah, the most recognizable character in it is Bane, likely sans The Dark Knight Rises’ Romani accent, but in a world where someone thought it was necessary to make Superman vs. The Elite, which was based on what is essentially a big F-you to Mark Miller’s The Authority, perhaps shifting the spotlight isn’t such a bad idea.
If you can’t figure it out, I’m a fan of King Shark
2. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth
Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is a bit of a controversial item on this list, as it may be impossible for Arkham Asylum to exist as anything else other than a graphic novel. Even then Arkham Asylum, the book, bucks off any and all semblance of graphic novel maxims. It’s a tale about a prison uprising at Arkham Asylum, where the inmates agree to only let their hostages go if the Batman comes “back home” to the Asylum. Sounds simple enough, right? In theory, this is a traditional Batman adventure, but every page of the work just seethes with a hidden arcane power. Individual frames contain hidden references to Tarot cards and glyphs of Aleister Crowley magic-with-a-K levels of mysticism that twist the unconscious fibers of your mind into delirious ecstasy with its grotesque beauty. It’s a work of dreamscape, a graphic novel that reads like a song, and it’s a perfectly synchronic cacophony of a song at that.
As Grant Morrison describes in the attached script for the fifteenth anniversary collection of A Serious House on Serious Earth, the work was meant to be a right-brain twist on the traditional left-brained Bat-venture, complete with transvestism voodoo ritual, Two-Face soiling himself because he can’t make a decision of his own, and the Joker grabbing Batman’s bat-ass. Not an inch of a page goes to waste as David McKean’s surrealist twists on Batman and his rogue gallery bleed and echo into Arkham’s very halls as we learn the origins of its creation, as well as the inherent lunacy in the Batman himself. If I had to describe the interior artwork of Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth to a blind person, I would describe it as a German expressionist film making love to a Michael Bay-crafted implosion on a bed composed of the notebooks from Se7en while a weeping J. D. Salinger smashes his head against the wall to the beat of “Circuits of the Imagination” by SHPONGLE.
So if it may be impossible to turn McKean’s art to animation, why does Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth make it onto the list? Because the resulting animated movie would just have to be legitimately insane. How insane? Remembering that GC1-61 was the experimental chemical in The Secret World of Alex Mack but forgetting that a human lung is not a suitable substitute for a hat, levels of insane. Even with the script on hand, some of the symbolism and events of the book are hard to grasp, which, I now realize, may have been intentional. Seriously, if someone can explain to me what exactly the Scarecrow does in his one page appearance it would save me countless hours of listless pondering. He just stands there, and yet the Batman runs away…why? Scarecrow’s mere presence instills fear of the unknown, which is what the Scarecrow is all about. To try to capture this feeling, as well as the whole dark, mangy beauty of the novel itself, would be either a breakthrough in animation or the most interesting car crash ever.
Maybe an animated version of Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth would be able to clear up some of the ambiguous events, as well as fueling the nightmares of children accidentally watching this film, and most likely a few fully grown adults, for decades to come.
1. The Sinestro Corps War
Truth be told, while researching this list I was shocked that The Sinestro Corps War animated movie hadn’t been made yet. For those unaware, The Sinestro Corps War was an 11-issue event that was essentially The Empire Strikes Back of Green Lantern stories, with the entirety of the Green Lantern Corps fighting against the fear-powered yellow legion known as the Sinestro Corps. The Green Lanterns, a long running series with multiple spinoff titles, feature a roster of malachite warriors drafted out of the woodwork and obscure Silver Age comics to join the war effort. I’m talking everyone, from the non-Daily Show John Stewart and fan favorite Hal Jordan to a talking flying squirrel, granted lethal force to kill flying avatars of fear across a glittering cosmos.
But what if you don’t really care about the Green Lantern Corps? Well then you’re just like me when I originally picked up the title, as the Sinestro Corps’ ranks are where the truly interesting characters lurk. Since the yellow Corps of fear is relatively new, pink headed commander Sinestro had to do some recruiting across the DC Universe, adding not only a cyborg Superman and the pike-toothed dragon-bug fear-alien Parallax to his Corps, but also an alternate universe Superman-Prime (imagine a teenage emo Superman and you get the gist), Batman rogue The Scarecrow and, yeah, even The Batman himself for about five seconds. The beauty of The Sinestro Corps War lies is in the fact that there are just so many characters to cover and endless possibilities for how the fights ultimately turn out that you get these beautiful splash pages of brightly-colored kill zones against a stunning galaxy backdrop. Look hard enough in these skirmishes and you’ll even notice cameos from other significant pop culture aliens, including E.T., Predator, and an Alien (which incidentally is called a Xenomorph) from Alien!
The only thing better than these large war-splashes would be an animated war-splash. A great sense of speed and urgency is implied throughout the work, and while I love green and yellow tracer tails as much as the next nerd, The Sinestro Corps War can honestly only look better when taken off the page. Even characters that would require their own movie to truly encapsulate the gravitas of their presence (unless you were around comic book stores in the late eighties, the term Anti-Monitor likely means nothing to you, but he’s here too and it’s super significant and ominous, as he’s essentially the intergalactic Hitler of the DC Universe), could easily be substituted for other characters, as The Sinestro Corps War serves as a grab-bag of the best heroes and villains the DC Universe has to offer. You could focus on just the living planet Mogo who just slowly orbits around, as planets do, and it would still be an epic of the grandest scale.
To recap: Empire Strikes Back, but everybody has a light-saber and can fly, with Cyborg Superman fighting alongside the biggest comic book villain from the eighties, and the goddamn Batman with a power ring why doesn’t this movie exist yet?
But as I said about four web-pages ago, these five stories are just the tip of the DC universe iceberg, and there are countless long boxes worth of tales likely worthy of their own animated original movies —so which ones would you choose?
Am I insane for not placing The Killing Joke at #1? Am I insane for listing The Killing Joke in the first place? Would the zombie-killing antics of Blackest Night serve as a better film? Should I have just stuck to my initial draft and listed only Batman stories? Let us know in the comments!