It's 'Toon Time!

Greetings once again readers of the graphic printed media!


Before I into today's topic I want to thank Robert Kirkman and Shawn Kirkham for being such good sports and great guests on the Geeked Out podcast last week, if you haven't had a chance to hear it definitely take a listen, we had a lot of fun doing it!

I watched the latest DVD from DC Animation the other day, "Doom" which was an adaptation of a Justice League story from Mark Waid's run on that book.  Watching it reminded me just how DC is killing Marvel in the DVD Cartoon market.  Granted, Marvel is dominating DC on the Big Screen, but that's not the point today.  Looking at some of the recent DC DVD cartoon offerings, there was Justice League: A New Frontier written and drawn by  Darwyn Cooke originally, and the animators closely matched his style on the DVD, there was All Star Superman written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely, and again the animators managed to bring Quitely's art style to life in the cartoon, and the two Batman entries, Under the Red Hood and Batman: Year One were equally outstandingly done.

Marvel hasn't released any DVD cartoons lately, and the ones that they did release...just weren't good.  There are two seemingly based around there analog to DC's  Justice League, The Avengers.  But Marvel also has a super team called The Ultimates.  The Avengers are in the Marvel 616 universe, or the "normal" Marvel Universe, the Ultimates are the Avengers of the "Ultimate" Marvel Universe, the same one where the Ultimate Spider-Man is enjoying some new popularity. And neither of them should be confuse with the Marvel "MAX" Universe where that universe's Punisher just died after a brutal final battle with that Universe's Kingpin. And then there is the Marvel Zombie Universe....too many to list really  The two Avengers DVD's from Marvel called "The Ultimate Avengers" one and two that visually looked like the Ultimates but were making Avengers references...it was all very confusing.  And just not very well done.  There was an Iron Man DVD, more of the same, and the Dr. Strange DVD was just unwatchable.  I give Marvel credit for trying something with Dr. Strange who is a lower-tier character at best, but the execution was still sub-par.  But Marvel did step their game up with the Hulk Vs. DVD and the Planet Hulk DVD.  The "Hulk Vs." featured two shorter cartoons, each featuring the Hulk against an opponent.  For this DVD the Hulk went into Canada and duked it out with Wolverine, with some instigation by Deadpool, Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike and Omega Red.  In the other feature, the Hulk made his way up into Asgard home of the Norse Gods.  That means Thor.  And where there's Thor, there's always his brother Loki around to start some static.  This DVD was a departure from prior Marvel efforts in that it was entertaining and actually very good!  In the Planet Hulk DVD, the story was taken from a run in the Hulk comic of the same name.  The DVD stayed about 85% true to the actual story, thy punked out on the ending a bit and they replaced the Silver Surfer in the story with Beta Ray Bill.  While seeing Bill in animated form was cool, that wasn't the story.  But maybe there was a licensing issue with use of the silver Surfer, I don't know, but I do know it was still better than most of their other ones.

Historically for me Marvel was always the better cartoon provider.  When I was a kid in the late 60's-early 70's I remember watching the Marvel Super Heroes cartoon, with Captain America, Thor, and others.  Hanna-Barbera also did a Fantastic Four cartoon, but I was about the Marvel Super Heroes show. They were taken directly from the comics, in a style that would be called "motion comics" today.  The animation was primitive at best, but I LOVED them!!  They were the same characters that I was reading about in the comics!  And the same stories that I had seen too!  It was great!  Later from the same animation company came The Amazing Spider-Man, with the song that everybody knows...and in the first few seasons the stories featured villains from the comics, The Green Goblin, The Rhino, Dr. Octopus and many others.  It also had supporting characters, Aunt May, Betty Brant and my buddy, J. Jonah Jameson.  (Who was captured brilliantly by J.K. Simmons in the first Spider-Man film)  In later years the stories went from the familiar to the avant-garde courtesy of producer Ralph Bashki, of "Fritz The Cat" fame.  He even introduced a character named "Sky Boy"....ugh.

At the same time DC was keeping pace with the DC Super Heroes.  That featured Aquaman, Superman, Superboy, Hawkman, The Teen Titans and a few others.  Batman was present too, but in his own show, and later teamed with Superman to form the Batman/Superman Hour.  All in all it was a good time for both companies in the way of cartoons.

But.

After those shows left the air....

Crap.

Marvel didn't do any cartoons for a while until the late 70's when they did another Fantastic Four cartoon that didn't include the Human Torch but had H.E.R,B.I.E. the robot in his place.  It was awful.  There are rumors about why the Torch was left out, fears that kids would light themselves on fire to there was a planned Torch film in the works, I don't know the actual story.  I just know it sucked.  In later years there was Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, which was Spider-Man, Icemen from the X-Men, and Firestar. Firestar?? Who in the blue hell is that ? Well according to rumor the Torch was supposed to be included but fears of kids setting themselves on fire was the reason he was left out.  Firestar was created to fill that void and was given microwave based powers so she could generate heat without making flames.  It was still a bad cartoon.  Marvel was pretty bad until the launch of a slate of cartoons in the mid 90's.  There was the X-Men, a new Spider-Man entry, Fantastic Four, Iron Man and the Hulk also had new incarnations.  And they were all \very well done after a shaky start.

But DC, until they launched Batman:The Animated Series in 1992, was complete drivel.



The worst offender was the Super Friends.  And let me be clear here, I HATED the Super Friends.  I didn't read a lot of DC as a youth but I was familiar with their characters and thought it would be fun to see them on tv.  But they introduced Wendy,Marvin and that damn Wonder Dog..
 and Marvin and that damn dog both were capes! It was torture! They were introduced to give kids someone to relate with, I found it to patronizing and pandering and hated it instantly.  In later years they tried again with the Wonder Twins, same result, instant hatred at being pandered to.

But all that changed with the introduction of Batman:The Animated Series.  That was done in a new style, reminiscent of the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons from the 40's, and was very well written and no idiot teen sidekicks pandering about the show.  It was an instant hit.  It spawned a Superman cartoon as well which was also well done.  And several years ago Justice League premiered on the Cartoon Network.  It was great! It had the core members of the Justice League, but in later years they would expand the roster to include dozens of guest stars.  Then they did what they should have done in the beginning, they started to incorporate classic stories form the books.  Marvel had done that in the past and it worked very well, and once DC followed suit it was equally successful.  The one that leaps out is an Alan Moore story about getting a present for Superman, and I can't possibly do it justice here, but it was a magnificent adaptation of a classic story.

But going back to the DVD's, what DC is doing is recreating storylines form the comics in the DVD's and killing Marvel in the process.  And I don't understand why Marvel hasn't followed suit, they have TONS of great source material to mine from.  There are so many classic stories featuring their most popular characters as well as some that aren't in the big screen movies, but would make for equally entertaining DVD's.