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INSIDE FRONT FLAP: UNUSED TITLE CARD CONCEPT. ART BY BRUCE TIMM, 1991. ABOVE:CONCEPTUAL SKETCH OF BATMAN WITH COMMISSIONER GORDON BLEED-THROUGH BY BRUCE TIMM, 1990. BELOW: A STOCK GOTHAM NIGHTSCAPE DESIGNED BY TED BLACKMAN AND PAINTED BY JOHN CALMETTE.
Bruce Timm:
~Paetitst tare es can remember drawing Wass.
OWNSHOT BY TED BLACKMAN AND RUSSELL CHONG. MIDDLE: BATMAN:-RUNNING, ANIMATED BY TOMMY TEJEDA, MARCH 1998. BOTTOM: EPISODE TITLE CARD CONCEPTS BY BRUCE TIMM.
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OPPOSITE: ERIC RADOMSKI'S DRAMATIC BACKGROUND FOR THE ORIGINAL UNAIRED TWO-MINUTE PRESENTATION FILM, SUMMER 1990. ABOVE: BATMAN STUDY BY BRUCE TIMM, 1990.
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BELOW: SCENE FOLDER AS USED BY ANIMATION STUDIO IN ASIA.
OVERLEAF, LEFT: BATMAN TEST FILM. LIGHTBOX ANIMATION, 1990. RIGHT: THE CLASSIC BATMAN LOGO. DRAWN BY BRUCE TIMM, PAINTED BY JOHN CALMETTE, 1991
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Batman Animatep. Copyright © 1998 by DC Comics. Batman and all related characters and indicia are trademarks of DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.
Batman created by Bob Kane.
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ISBN:0-06-757531-5
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OVERLEAF: BATMAN PAINTING FROM “THE LAUGHING FISH" BY SPECTRUM ANIMATION STUDIO BASED ON BRUCE TIMM'S ORIGINAL DRAWING.
ABOVE: TMS PRODUCTION PAINTING FROM ORIGINAL SERIES TITLE SEQUENCE.
|
“Barman” props wre SC. Faw ye Fottow LAUDS To A ERoveH
STORYBOARD PAN FROM “SHADOW OF THE BAT, PARTLONE,” BY RONALDO D PW eS tan
ise ~ ye eee Cee ee
a Et i - iy
For Jean MacCurdy, who gave us the keys to the Batmobile and said, “Drive.” -P.D.
For Lauren, Sam, and Tommy (my niece and nephews), and all the talent at Warner Bros. Animation that makes them and kids all over the world walk home from school just a little more quickly. -C.K.
A-¢ Kk WN ©O W L JE D G. M E N T S
Thank you and heartfelt appreciation to:
Chip Kidd, whose boundless enthusiasm, unerring eye, and stunning designs continue to redefine Batman and his world.
Charles Kochman, who valiantly spent two years finding a home for this book and another year getting me to finish it.
Geoff Spear, who with one photo creates a level of artistry that takes us six months to accomplish in animation.
Glenn Wong, for his incredible sculptures.
The Keepers of the Bat at DC Comics, Jenette Kahn, Paul Levitz, Dennis O'Neil, Scott Peterson, Darren Vincenzo, and Jordan B. Gorfinkel. Thanks for welcoming us
into your Batcave.
All the people | bugged for artwork, interviews, and goofy cartoons, members of the greatest crew and cast it's been my honor to work with: Haven Alexander, Kevin Altieri, Ted Blackman, Kevin Conroy, Robert Costanzo, Ronaldo Del Carmen, Jon Fisher, Curt Geda, Shane Glines, Eddie Gorodetsky, Mark Hamill, Robert Hastings, Marilu Henner, Boyd Kirkland, Loren Lester, Butch Lukic, Shaun McLaughlin, Glen Murakami, Lynne Naylor, Shayne Poindexter, Michael Reaves, Dan Riba, Randy Rogel, Andrea Romano, Dexter Smith, Arleen Sorkin, Shirley Walker, Keith Weesner, Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
Tom Ruegger, the first friend | made in animation and without whom I'd be doing something a lot less fun right now.
My support crew at Warner Bros., Nancy French and Thomas Zellers; plus head of Warner's Animation Archives Geno DuBois and his tireless Batgirl of the art cave, Jenny Lynn Burnett.
My family (especially Matt and Caitlin) and all the friends who added moral support or yelled at me to just finish the book already: Barry Caldwell, Evan Dorkin, Sarah Dyer, Mark Evanier, Henry Gilroy, Richard Howell, Steve Langford, David and Maria Lapham, David Mandel, Tom Minton, Bill Morrison, Jeff Okin, Alex Ross, Ruth and Coop, Jill Thompson, Alex Zamm.
And most important, to Alan Burnett, Eric Radomski, and Bruce Timm, my partners, my friends, my heroes. —P.D.
Thanks to: Geoff Spear, who's outdone even himself this time and turned flat pieces of paper into raging landscapes. x CharlesKochman;-our-editor-and’shepherd to the sheep of these pages. (And the good news is...)
«
Bruce timm, for reasons it's hard to put into words (so we did this book instead!). we Paul Dini, whose signature | once stood in line for twenty minutes at a comic book convention years ago (though he'd never remember it). At Warner Bros. Animation: Jean MacCurdy, David McBride, Keith Weesner, Dan-Riba, Geno DuBois, Boyd Kirkland, Randy Rogel, Thomas Zellers, and especially
Jenny Lynn Burnett-the goddess of things unseen yet findable. At DG Comics: Chantal d’Aulnis, Dorothy Crouch, Elisabeth Vincentelli, Trent Duffy, Sandy Resnick, and Dana-Brass in Licensed-Publishing; Ed Bolkus,. Marilyn Drucker, and
Alyssa Kaplan in Licensing; Cindy Yeh in Promotions; Lillian Laserson, Jay Kogan, and Barbara Rich in Legal Affairs. At HarperCollins: Joseph Montebello, Mark Chimsky,-Dianne Walber, Eric Hunt, and John Silbersack. Thanks to Gene Bresler for the dust-busting. »< As always, love and thanks to J.D, McClatchy, who bravely. puts-up with it all. a And a special thanks to the Murakami Special Forces Courier Service, for operations above and beyond (or beneath and betwixt) the call of duty. —C.K. me |
—\ - \
TITLE SEQUENCE LAYOUT BY TMS.
Executive producer JEAN MacCURDY
by Bruce *hiimm
Producer-creator
BRUCE TIMM
by Ted
Blackman
BRUCE TIMM'S DESK/DRAWING TABLE,
Producer=-creator ERIC RADOMS KI by Bruce Timm
DEC EMIBE:R 1:9°9'7
By ef @ |
Voice director ANDREA ROMANO by
Rogério Nogueira
Director oy) ee =
Producer 'y by ALAN BURNETT Bay =
: crite bey Eorit-¢c: “Reardiroummsiite i A
Radomski
Art director GLEN MURAKAMI by Bruce Timm
Writer- producer ; PAUL DINI ener
by Bruce Timm
Executive producer TOM RVEGGER by Bruce Timm
Background designer se ne = On OO |
by Ted Blackman 4
Diitrrexc:t or KEVIN ALTIER! by Bruce Timm
Designer J OUN “FolSsHvE R by Ted Blackman
Associate producer
HAVEN ALEXANDER
by Lynne Naylor
pI We Vehicle designer
SHAYNE wR c SORKIN DeSigMe r __ sosmersnurer sux marc POINDEXTER by i WC by Bruce Timm
Lynne by Bruce Timm Nay oor
CN fk OD oT ly (ORRIN
The first thing | can remember drawing was Batman. Not that it actually was the first thing | ever drew, mind you, it’s just the first thing can remember drawing. It was a straight-on shot of our hero running toward the "camera," most likely copied from the title sequence of the 1960s Adam West television series. (Imagine the frustration of a five-year-old trying to explain the concept of foreshortening to a perplexed adult: ‘See, Mommy, Batman's only got one foot because the other one's behind his knee." Seeing as how the knee itself probably looked more like a melting sausage, Mom's confusion was perfectly understandable in retrospect!) It certainly wouldn't be the last time | drew him.
Before | got into the animation business, my entire training consisted of copying art from comic books (don't try this at home, kids— stick to art school). Regardless of who my current artistic heroes were, the one character | drew more than any other was, of course, Batman. In the style of my favorite illustrators, | drew Marshall Rogers—esque Batmans and Michael Golden-ish Batmans and even weird Walt-Simonson-meets-Jack-Kirby-and-Wally-Wood-on-a-bad-day Batmans. But it wasn’t until 1990 that | came up with a design that was uniquely a “Bruce Timm Batman.”
| was drawing storyboards for Tiny Toons when Jean MacCurdy, then vice president of Warner Bros. Animation, announced at a staff meeting that we would be developing Batman, as well as other Warner-owned properties, for possible cartoon series. | rushed back to my cubicle, tossed Plucky Duck into the corner, and in about an hour, filled an 8 '/>-x-1!-inch sheet of paper with designs that, with very minor tinkering, became the main model sheet for our show.
Earlier in my career, when | was doing character designs for action-adventure shows like G./. Joe and Ghostbusters, | was frustrat- ed that the producers and directors always insisted on a design approach that actually worked against the strengths of animation: the characters always had to be drawn “realistically,” with “realistic” facial features and anatomy, too many folds in their clothes, and way too much detail overall. Having done assistant-animation work (cleanups and “in-betweens") at Don Bluth Productions, | knew that, at twenty-four drawings per second, every little line had to be drawn thousands of times; the more lines on a character, the less time an animator has to draw those lines correctly, especially on a TV budget and schedule. Result: crappy animation.
Every time I'd do a design that even remotely resembled what would eventually become the “Batman animated style,” my bosses would say, “No, that's too flat” or “too designy” or (my favorite) “too cartoony.” Hell, and here | thought we were making cartoons!
That initial page of Batman drawings incorporated a lot of the design theories I'd been dying to try out, marrying the angularity and exaggerated style of Disney's S/eeping Beauty with the elegant simplicity of Alex Toth's designs for numerous Hanna-Barbera action-adventure cartoons of the sixties, especially Space Ghost. (| wish | could say Batman's alter ego was as easy to pin down, but the truth is, | drew at least twenty different versions of Bruce Wayne before | did one that felt right, combining aspects reminiscent of Walter Baumhofer's Doc Savage and Chester Gould's Dick Tracy.)
Fortunately, Jean loved my designs when | showed them to her at the next staff meeting, and the rest, as they say, is history.
It's gratifying that our series has been met with a certain amount of critical as well as commercial enthu- siasm—enough to warrant the publication of this book, anyway! And while it's certainly flattering to hear peo- ple say that Paul Dini and | are making the best, most faithful filmic version of Batman ever, synthesizing the best elements from previous film, TV, and comic book incarnations of the character, | have to let you in ona little secret ...
We didn't do it alone.
Paul and | get the lion's share of the credit mostly, | think, because we're the two highest- profile creators on the show (translation: we're the biggest publicity hogs). The truth is, Batman would be just another mediocre cartoon if we weren't surrounded by some of the most talent- ed artists, writers, composers, actors, and craftsmen in the business. The real secret of our suc- cess: There are no weak links in our chain.
My coproducer, Eric Radomski, was a major force in the development of the overall look and
LEFT: HUGH FERRISS'S SOARING SKYSCRAPERS WERE A PROFOUND
INFLUENCE ON THE BACKGROUND STYLINGS OF BATMAN'S ANIMATED
GOTHAM CITY; HERE, THE CHANIN BUILDING, LEXINGTON AND FORTY-SEC-
OND STREET, NEW YORK CITY, 1928. OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTTOM: THOUGH
LIMITED IN DETAIL, SPACE GHOST STILL RADIATES PRESENCE AND
POWER, AND A GENERATION OF ANIMATORS HAS EMBRACED ALEX TOTH'S 1966 CREATION AS THE LAST WORD IN SUPER HERO DESIGN (COURTESY HANNA-BARBERA). OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP: PRELIMINARY CEL SETUP FROM AN UNPRODUCED MAX AND DAVE FLEISCHER THEATRI- CAL SUPERMAN CARTOON, CIRCA 1940.
tone of the series. It was his innovative notion, for instance, to paint the backgrounds on black illustra- tion board, creating a dark, film-noir mood, as well as ensuring that the style would easily survive trans- lation into overseas production paintings. Beyond his duties as background-paint guru, Eric's nuts-and- bolts animation training and impeccable taste influenced every aspect of production, from story direc- tion to color design, to casting and music. After eighty-five episodes and one feature-length movie, Eric felt it was time to move on. He's currently pushing the cartoon envelope with HBO's Spawn series. | miss having him around.
Helping to fill the void left by Eric's departure for blacker pastures is our current art director, Glen Murakami. We used Glen as a general artistic jack-of-all-trades on our first two seasons, where he did a little bit of everything: storyboards, props, color, and zillions of character designs and model-sheet turn- arounds. Over the course of the series, he absorbed enough of my design theories that | felt comfort- able promoting him to art director when we began work on the Superman series in 1995. The slightly more graphic look of that show and the even more extreme angularity of the current “new-look” Batman episodes are a direct result of his influence.
It's no exaggeration to say that Alan Burnett almost single-handedly saved the Batman series from ruin. In the first few months of preproduction, Eric and | had serious creative differences with our first story editor. We felt that the scripts weren't quite reaching the level of sophistication we were aiming for, and she felt that our directors and storyboard artists were taking too many liberties with the scripts, and why should she have to listen to a cou- ple of arrogant, upstart, no-track-record artists anyway? You have to understand that in the early 1990s, it was a very rare thing indeed for artists-producers to have story input on their cartoons. Back then, story editors were God, and artists drew pictures. Period.
Quite right she was, too—to a point. Even though it would be many months before we would see if any of our newfangled ideas of how to make decent cartoons would bear fruit, we felt that it was our duty to make the shows as high-quality as possible, by whatever means. If the dialogue was too corny and typically ‘Saturday morning,” then boom! Quick rewrite at the recording session. If an action scene didn't make sense, or could be done in a more exciting, cinematic way, boom! Let the director and board artists wing it. If a sequence was illogical, too goofy, or superfluous, boom! Cut it! Certainly, egos were bruised and toes were stepped on. There's no getting around the fact that we were pretty damn brash and outspoken. | recently came across some old script notes from those days in my files and was positively aghast at how snotty and mean-spirited | sounded. | like to think I've grown up a bit since then.
Before the situation could get any uglier, Jean MacCurdy brought the production to a full stop. It's to her eternal credit that she didn’t simply fire the two of us and replace us with someone less opinionated. There had to have been pressure for her to do so; this was a big, expensive (by TV standards) show, with high expectations for fur- z May) 66 thering the Batman franchise, we were months behind schedule, and the folks at the ;
Fox Network hadn't exactly warmed up to us yet, either. Instead, she did a very WE GO. with THis : smart thing: she hired her old pal Alan Burnett as senior story editor-coproducer. ore NOTE EM BLEM, Fortunately, Eric and | hit it off with him right away, as he seemed to be very much ; NON on
in sync with our concept of the series. Well, we'd learned that talk is cheap, but baby, AZOUND :
he delivered. We were pleasantly astonished by his first script for us, part one of “Two-Face.” My God, it was bloody perfect! Humor, pathos, adult situations and dia- logue, great heaping gobs of atmosphere-this sucker had everything we'd been wanting to see. Okay, maybe not as much action as we normally liked, but what the hell—when the story is that compelling, you don’t want to cut a single line.
Soon after, Alan cajoled/coerced Paul Dini into coming aboard as story editor and, later, coproducer. Equally adept at both comedy and tragedy, Paul has written many of our most memorable episodes, from the dynamic tearjerker “Heart of Ice” to the hilariously sexy “Harley and Ivy." He and Alan spend most of their time script-doc- toring other writers’ work these days, but Paul somehow manages to script the occasional stunner, like his recent “Over the Edge” (which many on our crew regard as the all-time best Batman episode ever-it's certainly the grimmest!) Between the two of them, they've raised the standard for action-adventure animation writing to a level that no other series has even come close to.
There are so many other people whose efforts contributed to the excellence of Batman that | could easily fill up this entire book waxing poetic about them all. Briefly, then:
Our directors, Kevin Altieri, Boyd Kirkland, Dan Riba, Dick Sebast, Frank Paur, Butch Lukic, Curt Geda, Atsuko Tanaka, Hiroyuki Aoyama, Yuchiro Yano, and Kenji Hichizaki, used every weapon in their artistic arsenal to turn poor scripts into
watchable TV shows and great scripts into outstanding short films.
Our first-season background design supervisor, Ted Blackman, brought just the right combination of elegance, atmosphere, and fun to his vision of Gotham City. Drawing inspiration from the moody architectural illustrations of Hugh Ferriss and the stark simplicity and exaggerated scale of Paul Rivoche and Seth's Mister X comics, Ted created a world that felt at once familiar and yet fresh and exciting. He's often imitated, but never equaled (and he'll laugh his ass off when he reads this).
Voice director Andrea Romano is justly renowned as the best in the business. She is the reason that our vocal tracks sound better than any action-adventure cartoon before or since, coaxing sincere, low-key, naturalistic performances from our actors, rather than the overemphatic, squeaky-voiced shouting nor- mally heard on other cartoons. Our astonishing casts have been a pure joy to work with, especially our “regulars”: Bob Hastings, Loren Lester, Bobby Costanzo, Matt Valencia, Tara Charendoff, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. As for Kevin Conroy, what can | say? For my money, he is Batman.
Shirley Walker and her team of composers extraordinaire consistently deliv- er lush, emotionally resonant, feature-film-quality musical scores on a punish- ing TV budget and schedule.
Our overseas animation houses, especially the teams at TMS and KOKO/Dong Yang, take over our model sheets, background designs, and storyboards, and bring them to life. Their work is never less than very good and often startling- ly brilliant.
The sound design crew at Monterey Post, headed by Tom Maydeck, Rob Hargreaves, and Russell Brower, are the true unsung heroes of our show. With extensive use of sound effects, background ambience, and voice filtering, they've helped make Batman's world a stylized, yet convincingly believable place. Again, they've raised the standard of how TV cartoons should sound, and have yet to be topped.
Film editors Joe Gall and Al Breitenbach are our resident alchemists. Many an episode has been saved in their editing bays. Trimming a few frames here, losing an entire scene there, often rearranging the sequence of shots, they control the rhythm and pace of the shows. Occasionally, when an episode comes back from overseas in particularly weak shape, they can transform a sow's ear into a silk purse. And if a show comes back in great shape, they can make it work even better.
Executive producers Jean MacCurdy and Tom Ruegger gave us advice and support when we needed it, and left us alone when we didn't. If you've never worked in this business, you can't even begin to understand how rare and won- derful that is.
The various writers, artists, timing directors, painters, and support staff at our preproduction studio in Sherman Oaks are the backbone of Batman. They all deserve special credit just for putting up with me!
Last, but never least, all the wild talents in whose footsteps we tread: Batman's creator, Bob Kane, who truly caught lightning in a bottle; comic book writers and artists Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Dick Sprang, Denny O'Neil, Neal Adams, Frank Robbins, and countless others who took the ball and ran with it, adding new elements—some wacky, some creepy-to the Batman mythos (and much of which we have appropriated and amalgamated into our series, thank you very much); William Dozier, Lorenzo Semple Jr., Stanley Ralph Ross, and Adam West, whose Batman TV series inspired a new generation of Bat-fans
(myself included); Frank Miller, who reinvented Batman for the postmodern world with his groundbreaking graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns; and Tim Burton, who first brought the concept of a “serious” super hero to a mass audience. Without these gentlemen, there would never have been a Batman: The Animated Series.
You'll forgive me if this intro sounds like the Emmy Speech I'd Never Have Time to Deliver, but | felt these people deserved recognition. |'m infinitely proud to have been associated with each and every one of them.
The preproduction artwork you'll see in this book was never intended to be seen by the general public, out of context, as it were. But much of it works amazingly well as art in its own right, particularly the gorgeous storyboards by Ronaldo Del Carmen, Butch Lukic, and others, which are as beautifully ren- dered as any first-rate comic book. |’m thrilled to see this work showcased here, beautifully photographed by Geoff Spear and stunningly presented by one of the preeminent graphic designers of the day, my new pal (and lifelong Batman fanatic) Chip Kidd. Those in the know actually consider Chip to be the best designer in the field, and you won't get an argument from me. The word “genius” is bandied about a bit overmuch these days, but based on his work here, his previous tour de force, Batman Collected, and numerous award-win- ning book jackets, I'd say it might be an understatement. He's The Man.
Now, stop reading this—go look at the pretty pictures!
—Bruce Timm
Producer
Warner Bros. Animation, Los Angeles March 1998
BELOW AND OPPOSITE: PRELIMINARY BATMAN SERIES LOGO DESIGNS AND CONCEPTUAL STUDIES BY BRUCE TIMM, 1990.
ee
OVERLEAF: f~" LEFT, TOP: HELD PRISONER IN A DESERT WORK CAMP, AN AMNESIAC BRUCE WAYNE WAKES FROM A NIGHTMARE. STORYBOARD BY BRUCE TIMM FROM THE EPISODE “THE FORGOTTEN.” BOTTOM: y STOCK SHOT OF A GOTHAM STREET AT NIGHT. DESIGNED BY KEITH WEESNER, PAINTED BY JOHN
‘> CALMETTE.
RIGHT, TOP: BACKGROUND FOR “CATWALK" PAINTED BY STEVEN BUTZ. BOTTOM: FROM “THE FORGOTTEN”: BRUCE WAYNE'S MEMORY SLOWLY RETURNS. STORYBOARD BY BRUCE TIMM.
GATEFOLD, EXTERIOR: PRELIMINARY TITLE CARD ROUGH BY BRUCE TIMM FOR “THE STRANGE SECRET OF BRUCE WAYNE."
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OVERLEAF GATEFOLD: These imaginatively rendered title cards were a high point of each Batman episode. While some (like “Harley's Holiday” and “Time out of Joint’) were char- acter portraits, most often the cards depicted an emotional impression of the given episode's theme. According to Eric Radomski, who designed many of the cards, “Going with the overall retro-forties feel we were giving the show, we wanted to treat the episodes as mini-movies. The title cards allowed us to create great drama in a very sub- tle fashion. It was a process of trying to capture what the overall episode was, and not just show a scene or moment from it.”
When Eric did select an actual shot from an episode, such as the image of Batman in a straightjacket from “Dreams in Darkness,” he stripped it down even more, casting the figure into silhouette, picking up little highlights on his costume and lighting him from above with the vertical shadows of his cell bars. Right away the audience would see
Batman had gone nuts, he was in an insane asylum, and they would be hooked into see- ing what happened next.
Coming up with the perfect image was sometimes harder than it looked. Case in point “Harley and Ivy.” Remembers Radomski, “It was natural to go in and draw these two lus: cious babes, but at the same time it was just looking too toony. And we certainly couldn't depict them sexually because the network would have screamed at us for that.” Wha' Eric and artist Glen Murakami ultimately devised were abstract swirls of red, black orange, and green, representing each villainess's color scheme and conveying the gen: erally lighthearted mood of the episode.
When Batman moved to the Kids’ WB! network the title cards were dropped, partially to differentiate the new Batman series from the old, and partially because Eric's depar ture left no one with time to devote to them.
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7 : Cid | team at Warner Animationhas created a blueprint for translating a character from one medium
to another. They have tal en Batman's sixty-year history, ignored the stuff that didn't work, put a
~-COl sense spin to e stuff that did, and executed the project with a combination of affection, style, and, most important, respect.” -Rick Burchett, Illustrator A Y
“Batman: The Animated Series restores my faith in animation as a storytelling medium. Its graphics put it head.and shoulders over the competition—while its terrific voice casting brings a level of sub-
tlety to material that in other hands might be severely over the top.” —Howard Chaykin, Writer/Illustrator
‘
"Gee, an intelligent, well-designed, well-crafted kids’ cartoon with strong story line and characters?
It'll never work!" —Mark Chiarello, Art Director, DC Comics
“Superlatives fail me. This series is accomplished with a style, wit, and respect for the source mate- rial that is absent from the big-screen versions. In every episode there’ s at least one scene that makes me slap my forehead oa ay, ‘Why didn't / think 0 that?’ A godsend to every Bat-fan in the universe.” ; F 4 » Chuck Dixon, Writer
language. To realize a distinct vision in those environs is about as easy,as he oker...and a lot more dangerous. It. n be positively lethal with a subject/mat- the subject of countless interpretations, some aberrant, other: merely bland, in Joyously, the creative minds behind Batman: The Animate Seri were able
pp ULE TL A RIT: : "TV ned anassembly line that often runs thtough other mo artists who do
cate: someone has oa some serious coin to get it right, even nif tha’ means be recouped for many a run. But that’s a wise investment, as these shows will be rerun as ions of kids love Batman, which is to say, forever.”
imated Series is the moodiest, coolest-looking cartoon since the i Spee ifs Neil Gi , Writer
;
: ~
“On Broadway | played some of the most complex, richly detailed, and blissfully demented roles of my career. | never dreamed they would be equaled by a so-called cartoon character. And what a character, one of the all-time icons of villainy, the Joker, a part that finally allowed me to live up to the ‘ham’ in my sur- name. |'m so grateful, not only for that opportunity but for this book, a first-rate keepsake of that landmark series. And that's no joke!”
—Mark Hamill, Actor
“Simply the best version of Batman ever produced. Dark, forbidding, and with sly, black humor. The ani- mated series stands as the greatest representation in any medium of the Dark Knight. For that I'm grate- ful...and a bit jealous.”
Kelley Jones, Illustrator
“The animated Batman is one of the great versions of the character, and the best translation of comics-to- screen ever done by anyone.”
—Dennis O'Neil, Writer/Batman Group Editor, DC Comics
“The Batman team is made up of artists, storytellers, and visionaries. They are an inspiration.”
—Joel Schumacher, Director
“The one period of history that Paul Dini and | share a fascination with is
one that never happened. It is that postwar era when idealistic urban
#}-architecture took over. As ‘the city’
produced its. riminals and madmen, it was only natural.that it would also produce an equally mad nemesis for them. Though this version of the Batman was fresh and excitin when it debuted, it was dy familiar, already a classic. The hero, the villains, and the city itself have been part of America’s four-color folklore for over half a century, yet the creators of this series managed to make them almost as mysterious, as if we were discovering them for the first time.”
—Dean Motter, Writer/IIlustrator
# ~
“Messrs. Burnett, Dini, and Timm should
_... be proud of their contribution to the leg-
Roker, NBC Today and official
Gotham City forecaster
“The work accomplished with the Batman
imated series not only did the great-
est good to the character in furthering
~ his legend, but it is also a phenomenal
work of art, conceptually and visually outstanding. This is the Batman.”
~Alex Ross, Painter
“The Batman animated television show is super"
—Julie Schwartz, Editor/Consultant,
DC Comics
Noo The Animated Series transports = sn the most. jaded adult viewer back to ‘those prepubescent days of yester- year when one held a sense of wonder for super heroes in one's heart. No sim- ple feat, that. But by blending their unique designs with their superlative gifts*for storytelling, Dini and company Manage to-make us believe, again, that a man can fly. sat least with the aid pt
the Batwing.” Kevin Smith, Writer/ Director
“This dark and stylish version is the best interpretation ~ of Batman available today. To those familiar with the Batman legend, this series is always fresh and exciting. To those who are experiencing it for the first time, what a fantastic world they've been given to explore!”
—Jill Thompson, Writer/IIlustrator
“AS a character with sixty years of con- tinuous history, Batman has” been . through the hand of many cooks. From/ spooky to campy to high be st the © Caped Crusader's expioks are a stew of
Batman's legend into a.fine broth that
rises above all the rest-the definitive
Dark Knight.” +a —Matt Wagn Writer/ustratr
“The Batman cartoons p ove for the first time that it is ible to produce spec- fecular, animation on a television bud-
shows how.”
— eee
—Les Daniels, Author
N \
“In 1992, when | was handed the assignment of producing a comic book, The Batman Adventures, based upon the Batman animated show, | was more than a bit trepidacious. How on earth could
\ any book possibly live up to such lofty standards? Rather than simply adapt the shows that Paul
Dini, Bruce Timm, and-the rest of their team had already produced, Kelley Puckett, Mike
robeck, Rick Burchett, Ty Templeton, and | tried to do what Paul and Bruce had done: lift directly what we could from the source material (in.our’c case the animated show; i ‘in their case, our original comics), regretfully abandon what wouldn't translate effectively from one medium to the other, and try most of all to re-create the magic the animated guys had captured so effort-
_ lessly—a Batman who's dark, mysterious, moody, but above all, human. Craft stories around him
that are rock solid in substance, but startlingly original; you-never know exactly where the story's going, but you know it’s going to be incredibly good. In the end, that's the hallmark of the animated series—some of the stories are grim, some are goofy, but they're all great.”
-Scott Peterson, Editor/Batman Group Liaison, DC Comics
“When the Batman cartoons premiered in the fall of 1992, they represented the most exhilarating animation ever created for the television screen. The art relied on mass and volume, not on line, giving the characters a substance that was as much contextual as visual. The superbly controlled palette filled Gotham with an atmosphere of brooding and menace, a sense that anything could happen in a city limned day and night by shadow. And it did. Owing to the masterly storytelling of the writers, who know that everything stems from character, each episode gripped us and sur- prised us. To the Batman team, and especially to Jean MacCurdy, Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, and Bruce Timm, our heartfelt thanks. They not only honored the legend of the Dark Knight, they added to it.” —-Jenette Kahn, President and Editor-in-Chief, DC Comics
4
“It's always a delicate issue when you give your children over to others. Whenever we 0 a movie, a TV show, or even a radio program based on our heroes, the DC team watches goa produc- tion, fretting, fussing, and worrying. And worrying even more about every step the creative team takes away from the ‘canonical’ path laid out by our history. When Batman began, the first con- cept sketches were far from the path of our history...but we instantly saw they were a road into a beautiful range of possibilities. Compatible with our past, subtly evoking the legendary Fleischer Superman cartoons, and at the same time a genuine new artistic evocation of the essential characters and world. The kids were in good hands.”
—Paul Levitz, Executive Vice President and Publisher, DC Comics
‘
TMS PRODUCTION BACKGROUND FROM ORIGINAL BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES TITLE SEQUENCE.
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RADOMSKI'S COLORED PENCIL ON BLACK PAPER TECHNIQUE CAPTURES THE MURKY BEAUTY OF GOTHAM CITY.
ERIC RADOMSKI
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In 1990, after several decades of near-dormancy, Warner Bros. Animation was in the mid- dle of a creative resurgence. The studio famous for its Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical shorts had entered the world of syndicated television animation, scoring a hit with Tiny Toon Adventures, a series created by director Steven Spielberg. Among the immensely talented individuals Warner Animation President Jean MacCurdy hired to bring Tiny Toons to the small screen were writer and senior producer Tom Ruegger, sto- ryboard artist Bruce Timm, background painter Eric Radomski, and background designer Ted Blackman. Each would play a key role in the creation of Warner's next series, an ani- mated version of that studio's hottest super hero property, Batman. Chances are, anyone who's reading this book already knows a fair amount about Batman. But for the uninitiated, a fast history lesson: Batman was created in 1939 by twenty-two-year-old comic artist Bob Kane, and first appeared in the May issue of Detective Comics #27. Working with writer Bill Finger and artist Jerry Robinson, Kane fashioned a nightmarish world peopled by criminal freaks of every description. Looming over this urban inferno was the Bat-Man, a grim, demonic-looking vigilante. In reality this costumed adventurer was millionaire START Bruce Wayne. Orphaned when a street robber gunned down his parents, young x = PIss. Bruce swore to devote his life and fortune to the eradication of crime. He spent years traveling the world learning the secrets of martial arts, criminol- oan T ogy, and other skills that would aid him in his crusade. With his training com- . C plete, Wayne returned to Gotham City. In order to strike terror into the hearts oC. of criminals, “a superstitious, cowardly lot,” the young adventurer garbed himself in the costume of a fearsome batlike creature. For a brief time he even used a blazing automatic in his war on crime, reminiscent of another great contemporary pulp hero, the Shadow. The gun was soon dropped in favor of more ingenious (and less lethal) crime-fighting weaponry and, in issue #38 (April 1940), a kid sidekick, Robin, was added to boost the strip's appeal among young readers. Over the next decade the fame of the Batman and Robin team grew, not only in comics but in movie serials, a syndicated daily newspaper strip, and as guest heroes on the , ; 2 : THIS PAGE AND THE FOLLOWING SEVEN PAGES: THE ORIGINAL Superman radio show. On January 12, 1966, a milestone in the Caped Crusaders’ careers BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES TITLE SEQUENCE STORYBOARD, occurred, when ABC aired the first episode of the now classic live-action Batman televi- DRAWN BY BRUCE TIMM AND COLORED BY ERIC RADOMSKI, 1992.
sion series. Faster than you could say “holy household word," Batman was hot. To adults he was a semi-remembered character from their childhood reborn as a campy pop icon. To kids Batman was the ultimate hero, at least until they caught on to the deliberate self-parody of the series. Like most of us in my neighborhood, | would do anything to see Batman twice a week, even cutting con- firmation class on Thursdays so | could see how Wednesday night's cliff-hanger turned out.
Around this time Batman and Robin began showing up in animation, first in a series of short car- toons from Filmation, and later in the seventies as team members in Hanna-Barbera’s long-running Super Friends. \n those cartoons Batman was only a pale version of his live-action persona, thanks to the restrictive nature of TV cartoons at that time, which demanded that his tragic past and moti- vating anger be completely ignored.
Still, in 1989, when it came time for Tim Burton to revive Batman in a major motion picture, it was the classic Dark Knight version of the earlier Kane and Finger comics that made it to the screen, fixing the idea of Batman as a driven avenger in the public's consciousness once more.
In an open meeting with her staff, Jean MacCurdy announced that anyone with ideas for a new animated Batman series was welcome to develop a proposal. “After Jean’s meeting,” Bruce Timm recalled, “Il went back to my desk and drew what would become the finished Batman model sheet, the body shot and a few head-turns, in about an hour.” Lightning struck. Bruce is one of those rare artists who not only has a love of comics, painting, storytelling, and drama, but can do them all better than most people can do just one. He's also a tremendous fan of film noir, crime fiction, and Batman, making him the ideal illustrator to conceive an approach for the Dark Knight and his world.
While Bruce worked on his character designs, background painter Eric Radomski was experi- menting with a new technique to add an extra element of darkness to Gotham City. Thinking of a painting he had done when he was twenty of a street corner on a rainy night, Eric remembered he had painted the background black and only suggested the foreground details in lighter highlights. This seemed the natural way to go for the look of Batman's nightmarish hometown, and Eric quick- ly worked up some background samples. “You'd let your imagination fill in the blanks,” Eric said of his new color styling, “which always struck me as a cool technique, not just for animation but as perception of the night. You can create a lot more illusion and depth and detail by showing less.”
Though Bruce and Eric had established a casual acquaintance around the studio, each was unaware that the other was submitting ideas for Batman. Upon seeing their individual pieces Jean MacCurdy felt Eric's dark, noirish backgrounds would perfectly complement Bruce's angular, styl- ized Dark Knight. She paired the two artists up, gave them the go-ahead to produce a two-minute presentation short, and encouraged them to create the Batman cartoon they'd always wanted to WEL
Bruce set to work designing the characters and storyboarding the film's action. Meanwhile, Eric and Tiny Toons background designer Ted Blackman were refining what Timm had dubbed the “dark deco” look of Gotham's skyline. A month later, the completed layouts and backgrounds were sent to Canada's Lightbox Animation, where the final film was dazzlingly animated by Greg Duffel. After moody computerized shadow effects had been added, Bruce and Eric mixed in sound effects and voices (Bruce supplied Batman's grunts, Eric did everyone else's) and set the film to music pulled from Danny Elfman’s original Batman movie score.
THE BRAINS BEHIND THE BAT; SERIES PREMIERE WEEK, 1992. LEFT TO RIGHT: ALAN BURNETT, ERIC RADOMSKI, JEAN MacCURDY, BRUCE TIMM.
The result was a dramatic vignette that thrilled everyone who saw it. In the mid- dle of a rooftop heist, a gang of underworld thugs is interrupted by the silent, shad- owy Batman. After dispatching the crooks in a dramatic fistfight, the Caped Crusader vanishes into the night as an awestruck Commissioner Gordon looks on. In just two minutes Timm and Radomski had perfectly captured the essence of Batman in anima- tion. Their short film helped sell the studio on both Batman and Timm and Radomski as its coproducers, and became the template for the animated series, setting the look and tone for all that was to come.
Batman: The Animated Series was now officially a go, with an air date of September 1992. This left precious little time for development, and first-time producers Timm and Radomski had to scramble to get things under way.
From the outset MacCurdy, Timm, and Radomski made it clear to Fox, the network that had bought the series, that they intended to deliver a more serious version of Batman than had ever been seen on television. Their Batman would not crack jokes with a pun-happy Robin while running around in daylight-the heroes would be believ- able, their enemies threatening, and the world they all inhabited dark and frighten- ing. Happily, Fox Kids execs Margaret Loesch and Sidney Iwanter were longtime Batman fans who respected the intrinsic power of comic book heroes and were all in favor of Warner's serious take.
Bruce and Eric were aiming for a dramatic feel that harkened back to the original Batman comic books of the 1940s. As crafted by Kane with Robinson and Finger, Gotham City was a brooding landscape constantly beset by freakish villains. Its only savior was the Batman, a mysterious avenger who struck quickly, then vanished back into the shadows.
Timm, Radomski, and their growing staff of artists pored over these early stories. They also found inspiration in the styles of later Batman artists: Dick Sprang, well- known for his fight sequences choreographed against huge working props; Neal
Adams, whose dynamic pencils and story interpretation shattered the bad taste of camp left in Bat-fans’ mouths after the mid-sixties TV series; Frank Robbins, who in the early seventies brought nightmare, distortion, and shadow back into Gotham; and, most important, Frank Miller, whose 1986 graphic novel masterpiece The Dark Knight Returns once again established Batman as a brooding, urban crime fighter.
The influence of other comic artists more infrequently associated with Batman also found its way into the series. Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, and Will Eisner are all known for their elegant character designs and keen abilities to tell stories through action. The cinematic approach they took to their graphic storytelling was often admired, stud- ied, and interpreted by members of the art crew.
Movies themselves also contributed to the look and feel of the series. A short list of films favored by the artists included such film-noir classics as The Big Sleep and The Third Man, thrillers such as Vertigo and The Night of the Hunter, Japanese ani- mated features such as Akira, Laputa, and The Castle of Cagliostro, and examples of German expressionism such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis.
But no films played a bigger part in the shaping of Batman than Max and Dave Fleischer’s seventeen theatrical Superman cartoons. Produced between 1941 and 1943, they still stand as the best animated super hero adventures ever made. Each seven-minute short is a masterpiece of design and animation, enhanced by heroic music scored directly to the picture. Early on, Jean MacCurdy suggested that Bruce and Eric look to the Fleischer cartoons as their guide, and the producers enthusiasti- cally agreed. More than cartoons, the Superman shorts are brilliant mini-movies, just as timeless and innovative now as when they were first released more than fifty years ago.
It was that same feeling of timelessness the producers wanted to create for Batman: The Animated Series. Refusing to put their hero in a completely contempo- rary world (or slavishly follow the distinctive design style created by Tim Burton for his live-action Batman films), Bruce and Eric fashioned a Gotham City that was stylish
but dangerous. It could be identified as twentieth-century America, but it was impossi- ble to pinpoint it to an exact decade. Batman would often be shown working at his super-sophisticated Batcomputer, but televisions would broadcast only in black and white. Likewise, Batman might fly the futuristic Batwing, but Bruce Wayne would drive a Cord. Tommy guns, VCRs, lasers, and zeppelins all happily coexist in Batman's tech- nologically unified world. Bruce and Eric did not want the series to visually date itself, as many cartoons do when they try too hard to ground themselves in contemporary cul- ture. Instead, they looked back over sixty years, took what had endured, and made it their own.
With more or less complete artistic freedom, Timm and Radomski quickly assembled a diverse team of artists who shared their vision and passion for Batman. Four units were established, each with its own director and storyboard artists.
Animation director Kevin Altieri was drawing Buck Rogers comic books when called in by Bruce. At first Altieri dreaded that the series would be no different than any other soft Saturday-morning-style version of Batman. But the script “On Leather Wings,” with its police blimps, SWAT team shoot-out, and ghoulish adversary Man-Bat won over the action-loving Altieri. With his interests in ancient weaponry, martial arts, and classic airplanes, Kevin was a natural for Batman. He did have a penchant for axing dialogue and changing scripts, habits that caused the less-tolerant writers no end of grief. However, no one complained too much when each of Kevin's finished episodes con- tained several incredible visual sequences and still remained true to the writer's orig- inal story.
Boyd Kirkland was the next director to come on board. Whereas Kevin found his drama in action sequences, Boyd's strength was in character interplay. He was a mas- ter of acting and staging, instinctively knowing how to get the most emotion out of characters in what otherwise could have easily been a static dialogue scene. It's hard to get any animation out of a man talking to a puppet, but Boyd's staging of the Ventriloquist and his wooden dummy Scarface in “Read My Lips” plays both characters as twisted, funny, and more than a little frightening.
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Veteran animation directors Dick Sebast, Frank Paur, and Kent Butterworth also joined the Batman crew. Butterworth quit after his first and only episode (“Christmas with the Joker") and Sebast departed later that season after completing such episodes as “Dreams in Darkness” and “Robin's Reckoning, Parts One and Two.” Dan Riba, Sebast's key storyboard artist, inherited his bosses’ reins, taking over as codi- rector on the episode “Zatanna.” Dan became adept at bringing human emotions to even the most bizarre members of Batman's Rogues Gallery, especially in such episodes as “Trial,” “Riddler's Reform,” and “Baby-Doll.”
As 1991 got under way, word began to circulate around Los Angeles that Batman was looking pretty sharp, and a number of artists wanted in on the project. A few jumped ship from Tiny Toons and Warner's other new Fox series Taz-Mania, but quite a number of the new recruits had never worked in animation before. In several cases enthusiasm and a willingness to learn meant more than having a professional portfo- lio. It helped if the hopeful artist also had an appreciation for illustrators close to the producers’ hearts. “'l took a storyboard test and it was pretty bad,” remembered Glen Murakami, now art director on Warner's animated Superman series. “But | think because | had studied such artists as Jack Kirby and Alex Toth, Bruce and Eric took me on.”
Storyboard artists Ronaldo Del Carmen, Doug Murphy, and Jeff Snow, each with lit- tle experience in TV cartoons, picked up the animated style and quickly rose to the ranks of the series’ best illustrators.
Producers Timm and Radomski never stopped encouraging the artists to find new inspirations. “We would always have these big show-and-tell sessions where we would bring in whatever artist we were excited about,” Bruce Timm said. “Maybe someone would have a really obscure piece the other guys hadn't seen. When we brought in Alex Toth's work, Ronnie Del Carmen quickly fell under his spell. We called Ronnie an ‘art sponge,’ because whatever he was looking at started coming out in his work. His ‘The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy’ board looked like an Alex Toth board. When we were all in our Frank Robbins mode, oohing and aahing over his artwork, Ronnie put a lot of Robbins inking touches into his storyboard for ‘Birds of a Feather.’ ”
While the look of Batman was established with comparative ease, writing the show was another matter. The first scripts did not capture the darkness and drama of Bruce and Eric's visuals and were quickly scrapped. The big problem was, it took a long time for the writing staff to gel. | had been one of the first writers hired on Tiny Toon Adventures and when the opportunity came to work on Batman, | was very interest- ed. | cowrote an early series bible with Bruce and screenwriter Mitch Brian, but a pickup on Tiny Toons kept me working with the Spielberg crew. For the time | initial- ly spent on Batman, we did set down four rules for other writers to follow. It's inter- esting to look back on them and see what has changed over the years:
1. Batman is a solo act, usually working alone. He has allies in Alfred and Robin, but it is Batman himself who carries the bulk of every episode. (This changed per Fox's second-season edict that we see Robin featured in every episode-kids sell toys.)
2. Batman does not work directly with the police. He's not a member of the force or a deputized agent. There's no Bat-Signal or hotline, and they can’t contact him. If he needs to inform the police of anything, he'll phone them. (When Alan Burnett came on board, he said he missed the Bat-Signal because it looked cool. He was right.)
3. Robin is not Batman's full-time partner. Although adopted and trained by Batman, Dick Grayson now leads a separate life as a college student and solo crime fighter. (Kenner agreed with Fox—kids do sell toys.)
4. Our stories will be hard-edged crime dramas with villains who play for keeps. Though many of them will come from Batman's famous Rogues Gallery, they will be as wild, dark, and sinister as we can make them. Each episode will also feature a big set piece—an incredible visual action sequence that will be a looked-forward-to element in each show. (Okay, so we're one for four.)
Veteran animation writer Sean Catherine Derek was hired for a brief tenure as series writer and story editor, bringing with her an image of Batman as a lighter, more socially conscious hero. Needless to say, Sean's take never completely meshed with the darker vigilante envisioned by Radomski and Timm. While the producers were pushing for gritty action stories, Sean lobbied for Batman to help the homeless and install a recycling bin in the Batcave. One point on which everyone agreed was Sean's inspired flair for writing female characters, particularly when it came to breathing new life into Catwoman. Neither completely heroine or villain, Sean's Catwoman/Selina Kyle became an alluring, strong-willed challenge for both Batman and Bruce Wayne.
Though he is acknowledged as one of animation’s top comedy writers as well as a key creator of Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, and Pinky & the Brain, Warner Animation senior producer Tom Ruegger also has a strong talent for writing suspense and drama. With the early Batman scripts still seeking direction, Tom stepped in to rewrite the series bible, adding greater dimension to both Batman and Gotham City. He then went on to write and oversee a number of stories that rank among the series’ very best-“It's Never Too Late,” “Pretty Poison,” and “Beware the Gray Ghost,” the episode that brought together the Batmen from two generations, Adam West and our own Kevin Conroy. Scripting the meeting between Batman (Conroy) and his childhood idol the Gray Ghost (West) was a particular delight for Tom, who, like most of the crew, carried fond memories of Adam's portrayal of the Caped Crusader.
Tom's many contributions as writer and executive producer helped put our series back on track. But by early 1991 Warner Animation was growing by geometric propor- tions and with new episodes of Tiny Toons in production and development in full swing on Animaniacs, Ruegger's already demanding schedule left him less time to write for Batman.
Recognizing the need for a full-time writer-producer, Jean MacCurdy approached writer and Batman fan par excellence Alan Burnett. Jean had worked with Alan some years before at Hanna-Barbera, where they had unsuccessfully tried to sell a serious take on Batman to network television. “At that time you couldn't do a dramatic car- toon on Saturday morning,” recalled Burnett. “The networks wouldn't touch it.” But Bruce and Eric's two-minute presentation film got Alan excited about Batman again, and he joined as the series’ third producer.
Prior to his arrival, Alan read my early development work and liked it. He contact- ed me and asked if | would rejoin the crew. At that time | had actually left Warner to write a movie, but | did agree to do a couple of freelance scripts, “Heart of Ice” and “Joker's Favor.” | enjoyed working with Alan, who was always open to my weirder ideas, and encouraged me to take traditional villains like the Joker and Mr. Freeze in different directions. By the time | was writing ‘Mad as a Hatter,” | was back on staff again and having a blast.
| was hardly alone; many other talented writers were soon telling stories of Batman and his world. Brought in by Alan as a writer and story editor, well-known science fic- tion/fantasy novelist Michael Reaves tapped into the noirish look of the show to script “| Am the Night" and “A Bullet for Bullock.” Michael, in turn, brought in his wife, writer Brynne Stephens, who would develop the character of Barbara Gordon in the “Heart of Steel” episodes and guide her transformation into Batgirl in “Shadow of the Bat, Parts One and Two.” Martin Pasko, a screen and fiction writer with no small cred- its in comics, also came on board as a story editor. With him came prominent writers who had handled the comic book Batman over the years, including Dennis O'Neil, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Mike W. Barr, Elliot S. Maggin, and Gerry Conway.
Multitalented writer and actor Randy Rogel had impressed Alan with a Batman spec script and was soon working with the producer adapting the origin stories of both Two-Face and Robin. When his stint on Batman was over, he went on to Steven Spielberg's Animaniacs, finding fame as composer of many of that series’ charming comic songs. Most recently Randy and director Boyd Kirkland served as the cowriters and producers of the Batman/Mr. Freeze home video SubZero.
Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski were also significant contributors to the story process. Alan Burnett and | would generally tell Bruce and Eric each premise we had in the works and we'd all shoot around ideas for action set pieces, character twists, jokes, or anything else that would make the episode fun to do. Likewise, the directors were encouraged to think of the scripts as springboards from which to redevelop scenes visually. This gave each episode a cinematic atmosphere more associated with live-action adventure films than with traditional Saturday-morning TV cartoons.
Though many animated series rely on story pitches from outside writers, we soon learned our strongest scripts were those developed by our in-house writers and story editors. As a rule, most of the freelance submissions we received would be either clichéd cartoon plots (hero gets shrunk, hero goes back in time, hero gets split into good and bad personas, etc.) or contrived team-ups between Batman and other DC super heroes, extraneous to both the story and the Dark Knight's world. By generat- ing most of the stories within the staff, the writers were able to create scripts based on character dynamics rather than on plot contrivances, give new dimensions to old villains, and make Batman a more compelling character than he had been previously in animation.
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The approach to casting voice actors was as unique and groundbreaking as the series’ visual style. From the start Alan Burnett, Bruce Timm, Eric Radomski, and voice direc- tor Andrea Romano were in agreement that they did not want Batman to sound like a typical cartoon show. The first auditions were held in early 1991 and the prospective actors were told to play the characters “real,” as if they were interpreting them for a live play or movie. This would give the vocal performances in Batman a distinctive level of sophistication that complemented the somber look of the series and more adult tone of the scripts. “Sometimes when you hire a theatrical actor who hasn't had much voice-over experience,” explains Andrea Romano, “they assume all cartoons are big and broad like Scooby Doo or The Smurfs. But we are really trying to do some- thing very different. What | describe to actors coming in to work on Batman for the first time is they are doing mostly their own voices with just a slight bit more energy."
Naturally, the most important voice to be cast was that of the Dark Knight himself. But true to his nature, Batman proved to be an elusive figure. Nearly forty actors were auditioned, but none of them quite filled the cape. Finally it was Kevin Conroy, an accomplished Broadway actor with numerous TV and feature film credits, who won the part. Remembers Andrea: “We wanted Batman's voice to have a dark side as well as a kind of sexy side. There’s something very appealing to women about the Batman character, different from the Superman character, which is a bit more proper. Batman is a rule breaker. We felt his voice should be inherently sexy, not something the actor was playing. A lot of the other actors would tend to read the part sort of Clint Eastwood-raspy. Kevin came in and did this voice that is really his own, just made a little bit more intimate. We all went, ‘That's it. We're done. We found it.’ It's a won- derful moment in casting when you can just go, ‘This guy's got it.’ “
The casting of Kevin as Batman set the tone for the rest of the series. Although Robin was initially conceived as an infrequent guest star, Andrea looked for an actor who would both complement and contrast Conroy's Dark Knight. “Robin has the same tragic history as Batman. He's got some of that seething anger, but he’s younger and not quite as bitter. While | was looking for a younger sound, | certainly didn’t want to go, ‘Gee! Golly! Gosh!’ with it, either.” Loren Lester, a top voice actor, brought that important vocal balance to Robin, and later dramatically expanded the character when he became the older and more hardened crime fighter Nightwing.
“When you're doing voice-over casting,” states Andrea, “there are two different types of casting. One is when you're talking about people who do character voices. And then there are people who have voices with character.” In assembling the regu-
THE VOICES BEHIND BATMAN AND SOME OF THE MORE NOTORIOUS MEMBERS OF HIS ROGUES GALLERY, CAPTURED AT THE RECORDING OF “ALMOST GOT '‘IM," 1992. STANDING, LEFT TO RIGHT: ARON KINCAID (KILLER CROC), MARK HAMILL (THE JOKER), RICHARD MOLL (TWO-FACE), PAUL WILLIAMS (THE PENGUIN), KEVIN CONROY
(BATMAN/BRUCE WAYNE). SEATED, LEFT TO RIGHT: DIANE PERSHING (POISON IVY), ARLEEN SORKIN (HARLEY QUINN).
lar cast for Batman, Romano and the producers were absolutely looking toward the latter. Robert Costanzo (Detective Bullock), Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (Alfred), and Bob Hastings (Commissioner Gordon), while far cries from the traditional types of actors heard in cartoons, all brought a distinctive and defining characterization to their roles. They formed the spine of our vocal cast, and in Efrem's case, the heart.
If Efrem's Alfred supplied the show's heart, then Adrienne Barbeau's Catwoman provided the heat. “She does not play the part sexy,” Andrea explains, “she just has a natural sexiness to her voice and | thought it would lead to an interesting energy between Batman and Catwoman. Part of us, | think, as women viewers of the show, want to see her succeed at seducing him. You want to see both Batman and Bruce Wayne succumb to her charms because she’s beautiful, she’s rich, she’s smart; she just has this one main character flaw, which is this mad desire to steal.”
Embraced by a generation as Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill had expressed an early interest in working on the Batman project. The crew all thought that would be wonderful, and Andrea had the idea of casting him as an evil yuppie executive in “Heart of Ice.” “You wouldn't think Mark Hamill would be playing a bad guy,” Andrea laughs. “Even if you recognized his voice, it would be a shock to learn later in the episode that he's actually the villain. After it was done, Mark came up to me and said, ‘Thank you. | had such a great time, but what | really want to do is play one of the main Batman villains.’ "
Hamill's name was at the top of the list when Andrea had to recast the role of the Joker. Not only was Mark able to nail the part, he also proved to be a whiz at ADR (additional dialogue recording), redoing previously recorded vocal tracks to the com- pleted picture. “Aside from his talent,” Andrea recalls, “Mark's excitement for the project was so massive. We soon learned about his remarkable love of comic books and all the various different incarnations of Batman. Mark's the kind of guy that when you start to describe a script, he goes, ‘Oh, well you mean that was from Batman num- ber such-and-such when this character first appeared.’ He knew far more than any of us, So he really added a nice level of enthusiasm.”
Over the years Batman has attracted a number of celebrities from television and movies, many who have never done animation voices before. Paul Williams, Dana Delany, Heather Locklear, David Warner, Marilu Henner, Ed Asner, Elizabeth Montgomery, and Roddy McDowall are just a few of the talented performers who've “come to play,” as Andrea calls it. Even a U.S. senator, Vermont's Patrick Leahy, a life- long Bat-fan, added his authoritative voice as a western governor in the episode “Showdown.” “Major celebrities have worked on our show and it’s wonderful,” Andrea relates. “The benefit, of course, to this kind of work is, there’s no memorizing, no makeup, no wardrobe. They come in and they can look great or look like hell and there's no difference. They put the script in front of them, we rehearse through it once, then record it. The whole process takes us maybe two hours and they get to play these wonderful characters. | think of casting a series for animation the same as | think of casting a party: Who's going to have fun together? Who's going to play well with the other children?”
Great as it is to have well-known performers among the cast, a big nod of appre- ciation must also be given to the talented actors who have spent hours of voice work on the series but haven't received as much time in the spotlight. Actors like Frank Welker, Tress MacNeille, Jeff Glen Bennett, Neil Ross, Diane Pershing, and Mari Devon are among the top names in the voice-over field, and we depend on those actors and many like them to add a certain texture and quality to the series. “Very often,"Andrea explains, “we'll have what | call ‘stunt casting,’ where there's a very specific kind of creature or animal that we need to get acting out of, but we can’t just strictly use sound effects. So we'll bring in an actor like Frank Welker, who is just a genius at this stuff. Performers who are there to do straight-ahead voices watch Frank at work and they are absolutely astonished. Or you bring in Tress MacNeille to do three different characters in a show, from a four-year-old boy to a twenty-five-year-old mom, to an evil sorceress, and she does them all completely convincingly—and separating them, so you have no idea they're the same person.”
Newer cast members like Tara Charendoff (Batgirl) and Matthew Valencia (the lat- est Robin) have quickly become part of the Batman family. And, according to Andrea, her phone never stops ringing from big-name actors who say they want to do an episode. Ditto for those who have done the show. “I've never known anybody to walk away from a Batman recording session and not say, ‘Please, | want to come back again. Please write more for my character.’ "
MPLS ewe OTF etal j= Noa SC. Hi T Few composers capture the musical essence of science fiction, fantasy, and action as deftly as Shirley Walker. An acclaimed composer for feature films (Turbulence, Escape from L.A.) and television (China Beach), Shirley first attracted Bruce Timm’s attention with her stirring scores for the TV series The Flash. Though Shirley had enjoyed her stint composing for that particular DC Comics super hero, she thought the last thing she wanted to do was to work on a cartoon version of Batman. Yet, she was encour- aged by her agent to at least meet with Jean MacCurdy and producers Timm, Burnett, and Radomski. “Once | saw the dramatic depth of both the artwork and the stories,” Walker relates, ‘I was in heaven. It's the most fun to work in a genre whose charac- ters and stories take you into another world.”
Using Danny Elfman's rousing Batman movie theme as her starting point, Walker began to musically construct themes for Gotham City and all its diverse residents. Where other studios traditionally use a library of stock cues as background music for their cartoons, Warner Bros. Animation has always insisted on original music scored directly to the picture. That gave Shirley and her team of composers (including Michael McCuistion, Lolita Ritmanis, Todd Hayen, Harvey R. Cohen, and Carlos Rodriguez) opportunities to musically explore each major character in depth. Batman's dark look and brooding nature, of course, determined his distinctive themes. Robin, not so dark but just as heroic, was given a brighter, more energetic cue. In terms of the villains, Walker admits it was a combination of factors, including voice, design, and mannerisms, that inspired the composers. Shirley successfully blended the Joker's playful clownlike theme with an undercurrent of lurking menace. Likewise Two-Face's ominous signature music played on the discord between the character's good and bad sides, each ready to explode at.a moment's notice. Catwoman's dangerous and sultry theme was based both on her visual design and the catlike way she moved, whereas Harley Quinn's happy-go-lucky musical signature was inspired largely by Arleen Sorkin's brash-to-the-point-of-manic vocal characterization.
With the episode “The Laughing Fish,” director Bruce Timm wanted to make the Joker scarier than he had been before. Unfortunately, the finished animation came back weaker than expected, and many of the frightening touches Bruce put into his board played rather flat on screen. To overcome the disappointing animation, Bruce turned to Shirley's score to pick up the slack: “I asked her to make it sound like a hor-
ror film,” Bruce recalled. “Not a forties Boris Karloff film, but like Aliens or The Exorcist, with really dissonant, nonmelodic music. At the time | had just read a piece about Psycho and it never dawned on me before, but there are no woodwinds or brass in that film. The entire score is done with strings. And | started thinking that might be kind of a neat thing to do with this show, just play everything stripped down and haunting. There's a full symphonic orchestra in there, but a lot of the earlier cues are just moaning violas. From the first moment the Joker shows up, even though he’s act- ing funny and wacky, Shirley has the strings doing something really strange. They're not playing his silliness, they're playing the underlying threat of what he’s doing. It kicks the scene up a notch in terms of tension. It's one of our most unusual scores and it works really well.”
The creation of the score is a collaborative effort between Shirley, her composing team, and Bruce Timm. Once the rough cut of a new episode is in, they review it, shar- ing suggestions for places to heighten the mood, underscore a funny beat, or move the action along as dramatically as possible. After that the music editor breaks the show down to time, and the episode's given composer (Shirley and her team work in rotation) starts writing the music to the agreed-upon scenes.
The finished eleven to fifteen minutes of original score are recorded on a profes- sional movie scoring stage (usually at Warner Bros. or Paramount) by a thirty-piece orchestra complete with brass, strings, and woodwinds. Occasionally an electronic synthesizer is used alongside the traditional instruments for scores requiring a high- tech feel.
For Mask of the Phantasm, Shirley used a hundred-piece orchestra and a twenty- five-voice chorale to create a feeling of operatic drama. A few fans have wondered what the chorale is actually singing. It sounds like Gregorian chant, but it is actually the names “Timm,” “Radomski,” “Burnett,” and those of a few of the shows’ com- posers chanted backward.
It's often said that music is the soul of a cartoon, with the power to make it fly or sink. A good score moves the action along, adds punch to the jokes, defines a char- acter's motivations, and becomes a “personality” every bit as vibrant as the animat- ed ones on screen.
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Not yet acceptable for broadcast.
Some of Batman's greatest conflicts have not been with the Joker or the Riddler, but against a much more excruciating adversary: the censor. Broadcast Standards and Practices (BS&P), ever vigilant to shield America’s youth from objectionable program content, closely oversees every script, storyboard, and rough cut, ordering the omis- sion of action and dialogue they feel is too intense for the kiddies. Needless to say, this rarely sits well with the creative staff, charged with turning out an exciting super hero show week after week.
It has always been a struggle to preserve the dark integrity of Batman's world, though sometimes BS&P cuts prompt the artists to develop creative alternatives to scenes that would be axed otherwise. In ‘Robin's Reckoning” we were forbidden to show the on-screen murder of Dick Grayson’s parents in a sabotaged trapeze “‘acci- dent.” Director Dick Sebast and his crew staged the action with only the Graysons’ silhouettes seen against a circus spotlight. Suddenly their shadows dropped away and the severed rope swung back into frame accompanied by a music sting and the
Bruce, the network says it is not their practice to show- animal excrement hitting. anyone on a children's show.
crowd's horrified reaction. The sequence came off just as chilling as if we had actu- ally seen them fall to their deaths.
In all fairness, the BS&P restrictions on Batman, both at Fox and at the Kids’ WB!, have been much more lenient than at any other network. One of the unsung heroes of the series was Avery Coburn, Fox's BS&P liaison. We were getting into new territo- ry with this show, and Avery understood exactly what we were going for. She changed the rules for daytime animated series, which were long due for an overhaul. In past Saturday morning shows the hero wasn’t even allowed to make a fist, much less hit anyone with it. The idea of Batman as a dark, sometimes violent crime fighter has generally been respected by BS&P, which we appreciate. And in each episode we've come to expect the usual cautionary notes about punches to the face, gunplay, or the inappropriate skimpiness of Harley Quinn's underwear. Still, the censors always man- age to throw us a few curves, and presented here are our internal comments on the various BS&P notes we've received over the years.
They
want us to cut the bat guano landing on Alfred's. jacket and send them a fixed version of the episode.
“Page A28:
gut with his fist. whole arm or some such is okay.
Network says no to Batman slugging Torch; Kicking him, striking him aia is
in the
Page 15: Page 10:
They won't let Scarface call anyone a "Scumbag".
It'll break Alan's heart, but Penguin.’ 8 joke. about
“picking up all the soap" in prison is out.
Network wants to cut. Batman saying "Qh my God" from the audio °
cassette.
They realize it's the
gical thing for the .characte:
to say in the situation, but feel many religious families would
be offended by hearing Batman take the Lord
okay for him to gasp. -1-4- ee)
s name in vain. It
The third” thug rst be caucasian.
Page C4l1-42 Censor says Ras’
looks too. much me the ° devil...
They want to lose the horned demon mask, gtoweoe: eyes, - ‘fangs. and flames as he: emerges. from the pit. — ;
Page 19: BSEP says ‘Bane picking up Robin by the head ts too
easy for a kid to copy with a pet or smaller kid.
Page C16: man in the face.
“Page C39:
Censor has a a problem with Batman punching the skinny
Tell Dan ‘he's. going to have. to restage this so
Miriam isn’ t kicking Batman in the head.
Pages C97, C99, and C124-125:. ‘the face with Mr. Happy Head.
Page c58:-
Baby-Doll can't bash Barman in.
much.
A body kick is ‘okay.
Robin kicking the thugs in their faces is ‘too
Pages 4- 5: LI can’t believe they want us to change the scene of the — pata their heads into the oe ca and or down !
HavaiSha . Unites ba Clear enough. davley's dialogue: "I erik
I made a mess on your cape" that she only barfed.
- Pages 15 and 1s Censors want us to be more sensitive toward the families of those with mental illness. As Harley's just been released from the Laughing Academy, ‘ they don't want Bullock calling her a "fruitcake" or gcrewball”.
Page AlS5: It's okay to have. Catwoman rake. Batman's face, just” don‘t show any blood. |
| Pages C10, C15, and C21: Censor wants us to Figure. out - someplace for Catwoman to land other than on. her face or breasts.
Page. 26: We have to make it iene in the board that Batman's kneeing the Walrus in the stomach.
‘- Page 12:. Network has a
problem with Bruce's line:
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DOMSKI'S FIRST TAKE ON GOTHAM CITY: A NIGHTMARISH, IMPRESSIONISTIC COLLAGE OF COLOR AND SHADOW PAINTED ON BLACK PAPER, 1990.
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“Night in Gotham City. Only the faintest rays of moonlight break through the steamy darkness. Shadows are black, twisted, and frightening. The thick night air carries many sounds: breaking glass, sputtering neon, harsh, bitter voices, and police sirens. Always police sirens. Most of Gotham's daytime inhabitants have long since fled to the suburbs or into security-gated apartments. This is not a safe place after dark.”
The above was our very first description of Gotham City, excerpted from the original series bible written by Bruce Timm, Mitch Brian, and me. We determined that if Batman was to indeed be the Dark Knight, Gotham would be his dragon: monstrous, corrupt, and parasite-ridden. Villains would come and go, but the never-ending fight would really be between one heroic man and one very nasty city.
When developing the “personality” of Gotham, our designers and writers were told to keep New York in mind, and then exaggerate it. We wanted it to be big, imposing, and boast many fanciful art deco touches, but there had to be something inherently sinister to the place as well. Some unseen element that birthed and nurtured the grotesque, both in its people and its architecture.
In Gotham Harbor, the city's wharves would move more criminals than cargo, with an international flood of evildoers streaming in to seek sanctuary. And whereas New
York harbor welcomes visitors with the Statue of Liberty, Gotham's welcoming struc- ture would be Stonegate Penitentiary.
The rich and powerful would live in palatial towers high above the common folk, who in turn would be crammed into squalid lower regions such as Gotham’s notorious Crime Alley.
The understaffed, underfunded police department would find themselves further hamstrung by corrupt city bosses, spineless politicians, and a scandal-hungry media eager to turn any lawbreaker into the next criminal mastermind.
And just on the outskirts of town would sit the ominous silhouette of Arkham Asylum, housing the Joker, Two-Face, Mad Hatter, and a legion of similar malcontents thirsting to inflict more grief on an already miserable city.
Clearly, this would be a town that desperately needed a Batman.
PRODUCTION BACKGROUND BY TMS ANIMATION STUDIO, JAPAN.
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Background designer Ted Blackman has often been called the “unsung hero” of Batman. “Besides Eric Radomski," Bruce Timm said, “Ted was the next artist we couldn't have done the show without. He had exactly the right sensibility in terms of designing the series we wanted.”
On Tiny Toon Adventures, Ted had been re-creating the soft but slightly skewed background look reminiscent of the late 1940s Looney Tunes cartoons. When the opportunity came to apply his stylings to Batman, Ted enthusiastically joined Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski, creating the sweeping cityscape pan and rooftop back- grounds seen in the promo short. He then went on to become the chief background designer for the entire series, as well as for the animated Batman features Mask of the Phantasm and SubZero.
“| tried to create as much drama as possible within a static setting,” recalled Blackman, “by using lighting, scale, and contrasts from dark to light, and silhouetting foreground elements that frame the scene. You may not remember the characters or even the action that was taking place, but you remember the backgrounds.”
“Once Ted got going,” recalled Eric Radomski, “it just began flowing out of him. Every background was consistent, no matter if he was doing a skyline of Gotham or if he was designing the Joker's hideout. It was always very bold and striking. Ted mas- tered the look of the city and passed it on to the other designers on the show. You'd see some variance in technique, but it's all got the same nuts and bolts from what Ted had established.”
Enthusiasm for Blackman’s work in the days before the show's premiere was not confined solely to the background crew. “When they'd have tours for the sales and
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marketing people from the lot,” Radomski smiled, “they'd just stare at the back- ground keys in awe, because they were so damned striking. They wanted to take them home and hang them on their walls."
A devout fan of art deco, Blackman cited among his influences one-time Disney stylist Eyvind Earle and painter/satiric illustrator Bruce McCall. These two artists both employ unique forms of what can be called background caricature. In Earle's work, especially his wildly interpretive landscapes, the artist's bold use of color and repre- sentational shapes create the essence, rather than the photographic likeness of his subjects. McCall's work is completely the opposite, striving for a highly realistic look that effortlessly segues into the comically bizarre. McCall's detailed illustrations of old-style vehicles and buildings seem normal at first, until it dawns on the reader that the steamship in the picture he's looking at is roughly the size of Australia. McCall takes the world of art deco and swells it to gargantuan proportions, paying homage to the genre's unique design while lampooning its excesses. “Christmas with the Joker” boasts affectionate nods to both artists’ work, from the Earle-inspired snowy trees to the titanic, clown-faced toy factory.
“Ted was the real driving force behind the look of the show in terms of back- grounds,” Bruce Timm said. “His perspective and draftsmanship were always spot on, but he also had a real cartoony kind of edge to his stuff. He would always throw in weird shadows that aren't actually motivated by light sources but give a kick to the
OPPOSITE AND BELOW: THE CONTRASTING FACES OF GOTHAM, FROM SOARING SKYLINE TO DISMAL CRIME ALLEY, BOTH DESIGNED BY KEITH WEESNER AND PAINTED BY JOHN CALMETTE.
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GOTHAM ACROSS THE RIVER. PENCIL LAYOUT BY GARY MONTALBANO.
ONE OF THE SERIES' STRANGER BACKGROUNDS, THE PENTHOUSE TEMPLE OF MAXIE ZEUS, A CRIME BOSS WHO BELIEVES HIMSELF TO BE THE REINCARNATION OF THE ANCIENT GREEK GOD. DESIGNED BY
TED BLACKMAN, PAINTED BY JOHN CALMETTE.
scene. They help create that kind of chaotic, Caligari look. It's an effect based in part on German expressionism, which in turn influenced Orson Welles and Gregg Toland on Citizen Kane and after them the whole film-noir school. The back- ground styling comes out of character rather than from any kind of hard logic.”
Thus Gotham City, Wayne Manor, Arkham Asylum, and — other notable backgrounds became almost characters them- — selves. Sometimes this was interpreted quite literally with hideouts that reflected a given villain's bizarre personality. The Laffco Toy Company or the funhouse in “Be a Clown” were obvious extensions of the Joker. Two-Face's lair, half nice and pretty, half trashed and dark, in “Shadow of the — Bat" is a bit more understated, and Selina Kyle's often seen apartment, with its sleek styling and deco panther images, gives enticing hints of her Catwoman identity.
To translate Blackman’s black and white drawings into Batman's distinctive muted and moody color palate, Eric Radomski and his crew of background painters, John Calmette, Steve Butz, Russell Chong, and Charles Pickens, would employ a variety of artistic techniques. Chief among these was airbrush. “Art deco is a very beautifully designed genre,” explained Radomski. “We wanted to capture that very classy, intellectual sensibility, and airbrush was appro- priate for that. It was a simple technique to lay in broad areas of color against black paper. Occasionally, when we had to distinguish foreground from background, we would Barman Ext, STALKED DELK NiaR, add some sponge technique or spatter the paint with the air- = 5 ¢-B-7 CniGHT ) Lid J brush to give the illusion of texture to the ground and walls." Prop, 406-585
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ABOVE, RIGHT: GOTHAM’'S NOTORIOUS CRIMINALS-ONLY STACKED DECK CLUB FEATURES PROMI- NENTLY IN SUCH EPISODES AS “ALMOST GOT ‘IM," “SHADOW OF THE BAT,” AND AS SEEN HERE, “BATGIRL RETURNS." BACKGROUND DESIGN BY KEITH WEESNER, PAINTED BY CHARLES PICKENS.
THIS PAGE, BOTTOM: PAINTED BY RUSSELL CHONG.
OVERLEAF: GOTHAM CITYSCAPE. DESIGNED BY GARY MONTALBANO, ! PAINTED BY RUSSELL CHONG.
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Midnight in Gotham City. A family walking home takes a wrong turn into a dark alley. A robber steps from the shadows. There are threats, a scuf- fle, and then two shots. In a heartbeat Dr. Thomas Wayne and his wife, Martha, lie dead before their horrified young son, Bruce. From that moment on, the boy is scarred by the shock of his parents’ murder and obsessed with avenging them. He maps out “a plan” that he will follow for the rest of his life. He spends his youth traveling the world, honing skills that will turn him into the scourge of criminals everywhere. Olympic-level athlete, mar- tial arts master, linguist, inventor, escape artist, scientist-young Bruce excels in each field in turn and then moves on, never wavering in his crusade, never forming attachments, never looking back.
Years later the adult Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham City to put “the plan” into action as the costumed vigilante Batman. In the eyes of the city's populace, Bruce Wayne is the last person to ever be associated with the crime-fighting Batman. His public image is that of a jaded, jet- setting playboy who spends his days writing big checks to various charities, maintaining a figure- head position at his father’s company, Wayne Enterprises, and dating a string of lovely but interchangeable young women. There's no perma- nent person in his life, and Bruce lightly tells his casual socitey friends he “hasn't met the right one.” Translation: A permanent person is not part of “the plan.”
Although the public persona of Bruce Wayne often causes him to be labeled as a selfish elitist, that is the price Wayne is willing to pay. He is no longer the anguished child inwardly blaming himself for the loss of his parents. He has exorcised those ghosts by becoming Batman.
It was our intention to always portray Batman, in words and moving images, as Gotham City’s grim avenger of evil. Appearing only at night, he would use his shrewd detective skills, sophisticated gadgetry, and frightening image to combat Gotham's criminals. He would speak only in short, terse sentences, in a voice that would chill both the good and the wicked.
BATMAN STOCK PAINTING BY JOHN CALMETTE. F, AT M4 4O0€ SOE - Steck RendeteS} Close oP SCH BIZ Clues
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FAR RIGHT: BRUCE TIMM BATMAN DESIGN CONCEPT, REFLECTING THE INFLUENCES OF BATMAN CREATOR BOB KANE AND ILLUSTRATORS DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI AND ALEX TOTH, DONE FOR FLASHBACK SEQUENCE IN “ROBIN'S RECKONING."
BELOW AND RIGHT: EARLY BRUCE TIMM SKETCHES OF BATMAN, DONE YEARS BEFORE THE WARNER BROS. ANIMATED SERIES WAS ANNOUNCED.
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Fear would be the Dark Knight's most powerful weapon. With his forbid- ding costume, near-superhuman speed and strength, and unique weaponry such as the Batarang, Bat-grapple, and smoke grenades, he would perpetu- ate the illusion of an invincible foe—a mysterious figure seemingly impervi-
ous to harm, able to fly, appear from thin air, and disappear without a trace.
Batman's fearsome look is arguably more effective in animation than in live
action. In our series, the artists are frequently able to depict him as liv-
ing darkness, a grim, blank-eyed shadow coming to life to attack
terror-stricken enemies. This gives our hero a visual power no
live-action version of the character has ever quite captured. The
tall, pointy-eared silhouette is unmistakable. When those white-slit eyes narrow, you know there's going to be a fight.
"IN HIS BAT COSTUME,” EXECUTIVE PRODUCER TOM RUEGGER NOTES IN HIS
REVISED SERIES BIBLE, “BATMAN IS NOT TOTALLY HUMAN. HE'S PRIMAL. HE
STRIKES LIKE A JUNGLE CAT. HE LURKS IN THE SHADOWS AT NIGHT, NEVER SLEEPING, ALWAYS ALERT. HE'S OFTEN
BROODING, MELANCHOLY. OBSESSED WITH HIS MISSION, HE CAN NEVER TRULY REST.” BRUCE TIMM'S BATMAN MODEL-LIMITED DETAIL FOR MAXIMUM MOTION.
Throughout the series, one caveat we stressed was that Batman is our hero's true persona, and that billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne is the disguise. “He is Batman,” says actor Kevin Conroy of his alter ego. “He became Batman the instant his parents were murdered. Batman needs Bruce, however hollow that identity feels to him from time to time. Bruce keeps Batman human." Although a com- mon theme in the movies, we did not want to ever have Batman tempted to give up his costume for a normal life-the cos- tume is his normal life. ‘| think the temptation is there,” explains Kevin, “but the temptation is to retreat into the cave and never come out. To give up his disguise as Bruce Wayne and surrender himself completely to the darkness.”
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Resting below Wayne Manor, accessible by elevator or gigantic staircase, is the nerve center of Batman's war on crime-the Batcave. Comprising several enormous caverns beneath the 150-acre Wayne estate, this vast, subterranean ~~ “cathedral” houses a chemical/forensics laboratory, mechanical garage, engineering area, aircraft hangar, gymnasium, boat dock, trophy room, and a sophisticated video surveillance system, which lets the Batman keep tabs on everything from Wayne Manor. to Gotham’s Crime Alley. This network of caves extends to the edge of Gotham City, and Batman has constructed a number of linking tunnels that allow the Batmobile to enter and exit the city undetected. An underground river allows the sleek Batboat quick access to Gotham Bay and the ocean beyond.
Fy, OPPOSITE, TOP; AND THIS PAGE, BELOW: ROUGH ACTION STUDIES BY ANIMATOR DAN HASKETT, 1990.
OPPOSITE, BOTTOM: THE BATMOBILE'S BATCAVE EXIT ROUTE, Pa DESIGNED BY TED BLACKMAN, PAINTED BY RUSSELL CHONG. f
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AIDED BY HIS TRUSTY BATGLIDER, THE CAPED
CRUSADER SWOOPS DOWN ON A TRAIN COMMAN-
DEERED BY TERRORISTS. STORYBOARD PANEL FROM “THE CAT AND THE CLAW, PART TWO,” BY CURT GEDA.
THE TORPEDOLIKE BATBOAT SERVES DUAL PURPOSE AS A SURFACE VEHICLE AND SHORT-RANGE SUBMARINE. DESIGN BY BRUCE TIMM AND SHAYNE POINDEXTER. PAINTED BY RUSSELL CHONG.
Naturally, Batman wouldn't be Batman without his full complement of futuristic vehi- cles. They are as potent a part of the fantasy as the Dark Knight him- self. What kid, watching Adam West and Burt Ward firing up the turbines for the first time, didn't long for a Batmobile of his own? The vehicle designers on Batman were determined to come up with crime-fighting hardware every bit as cool as they remembered from their childhood. The overall look was sleek, limited in detail, but built for speed and power. With their black silhouettes and tinted windows, each vehicle suggested a subtle image of Batman in mechanized form. BATMOBILE DESIGNED BY SHAYNE POINDEXTER, Back when he was trying to land a job on the show, designer Shayne Poindexter worked up several PAINTING BY RUSSELL CHONG. p, AWAY, e y \L= pages of preliminary Batmobile sketches to give Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski an idea of what he could FE of% R ECE GENES do. “Bruce saw two designs he liked,” Shayne reveals, “so he cut the front off one and the back off the : AEE ite other and taped them together.” Batman got his car and Shayne got the job. Nees
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BATWING DESIGNED BY BRUCE TIMM AND SHAYNE POINDEXTER. PAINTED BY RUSSELL CHONG.
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Dick Grayson was born into a circus family. As part of the Flying Graysons, he excelled even as a child at all forms of acrobatics. When his parents were murdered by a gangster trying to extort money
from the circus, Dick was adopted by
Bruce Wayne. Having lost his own par-
ents to crime, Wayne felt a kinship with the young orphan and trained him to be his assistant and partner, Robin.
Robin enjoys the thrill of crime fighting, but Batman sometimes has to restrain him from charging into action without consider- ing every deductive angle first. This is
indicative of their relationship as Bruce
Wayne and Dick Grayson as well. Although Dick lost his parents to crime, he is not driven
by the same demons as Batman. Batman uses
the Bruce Wayne persona as a mask, but Dick Grayson and Robin are pretty much the same young man. In rethinking Robin for the animated series, it was our intention that Dick Grayson would be older than the traditional depictions of his character, about twenty, and operating on his own as a solo crime fighter. We resisted the idea of making the Boy Wonder Batman's constant sidekick because we felt having him around all the time would diminish
Batman's role as a brooding, solitary hero. Yet we recognized Robin's important role in Batman's world, and tried to make a special event out
of each of his rare early appearances. The two-part episode ‘Robin's
Reckoning,” apart from winning the Emmy Award for outstanding animated
prime time program in 1993, still stands as one of the series’ shining moments.
SCENE. BG.
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ACTION on prcx ACTION CLOSE ON JOHN’S TRAPEZE ROPE ACTION
He calls out.
OPPOSITE, TOP: PORTRAIT OF A BOY WONDER BY BRUCE TIMM.
OPPOSITE, BELOW: YOUNG DICK GRAYSON SECONDS BEFORE HIS PARENTS’ MURDER. “ROBIN'S RECKONING, PART ONE,” STO- RYBOARD BY GARY GRAHAM.
RIGHT: ROBIN CONCEPT BY BRUCE TIMM.
The Fox Network, on the assumption that kids won't watch a kid’s show unless kids are in it, soon began insisting that Robin be prominently
featured in every episode. When Fox changed the title from Batman: The Animated Series to The Adventures of Batman & ’ Robin, they laid down the law- no story premise was to be considered unless it was either a Robin story or one in which the Boy Wonder played a key role. Out were underworld character studies like “It's Never Too Late"; in were tradi- y | tional Batman and Robin escapades like “The Lion and the Unicorn.” A potential- ‘xe’
DEMIDNITE
ly intriguing Catwoman/Black Canary team-up was interrupted in midpitch to the network by their demand, “Where's Robin?” When the writers asked if they could omit Robin from just this one episode, Fox obliged by omitting the entire story.
Looking back, there was nothing drastically wrong with Robin's full-time insertion into the series—after all, kids do love him. Our major gripe at the time was that it started turning the series into the predictable Batman and Robin show people had initially expected it would be. For the first season, Batman had been an experiment we weren't sure would work. We were trying out different ways of telling all kinds of stories with Batman as our only constant. For better or worse, having a kid forced him, and the series, to settle down.
BELOW: WITH THE SUCCESS OF BATMAN, FOX BRIEFLY CONSIDERED TWO POSSIBLE SPIN-OFF SERIES STARRING ROBIN AND CATWOMAN. THESE CONCEPTUAL SKETCHES BY GLEN MURAKAMI SHOW A SLIGHTLY YOUNGER, MORE ENERGETIC ROBIN AS HE MIGHT HAVE LOOKED IN
HIS SOLO ADVENTURES.
pac wu!
LEFT: BRUCE TIMM'S PRELIMINARY ROBIN DESIGN, BASED LARGELY ON THE CHARACTER'S DC COMICS REVAMP, CIRCA 1991.
KENNER'S ROBIN DRAGSTER, 1992. AN ACCIDENT AT THE TOY FACTO- RY DESTROYED THIS CAR'S MOLDS, MAKING IT THE RAREST OF THE ANIMATED BATMAN TOYS.
WARNING: CONTAINS SMALL PARTS WHICH MAY PRESENT A CHOKING HAZARD TO CHILDREN UNDER THREE.
Since the mid-fifties, there has always been a Batgirl in one : form or another connected to the Batman mythos. Originally a Robin-like sidekick to the comic's then popular Batwoman, the early Batgirl was phased out in favor of the version popular- : ized by Yvonne Craig in the sixties TV show. In that incarnation
Batgirl was the secret crime-fighting identity of Commissioner Gordon's daughter, Barbara. Since that was the Batgirl most of the crew had grown up with, that was the Batgirl we used.
ve Before she ever became Batgirl, Barbara Gordon | had
already proved herself as a heroic sence in the animated series. In the hand adv (Heart Steek” she bine Batman free a nu ie Officials, includin
‘who had been kidnapp 3 and duplicated by the evil.sup ont puter, H.A.R.D.A.C. Then, in “Shadow of the Bat,” after Commissioner Gordon had been framed for bribery, Barbara donned a costume similar to Batman's in order to clear her father's name by exposing the real mastermind behind the . police conspiracy.
Early on, Batman deduced that the masked redhead who fought to exonerate Commissioner Gordon could only be the commissioner's daughter, but he kept the secret to himself. Meanwhile, a budding romance between Barbara and Dick Grayson was adding to Dick's growing dissatisfaction with his role'as Robin. Hoping to preserve the Batman and Robin team and ‘make Dick happy at the same time, Bruce told Barbara the secret of their dual identities and granted her free access to the Batcave and all its technology. Unfortunately, this only worsened the gap between Batman and his partner. Robin angrily accused Batman of manipulating his life, and hooking Barbara into going along with his Pern left to make his own way in the world, and nap urned to Gotham” as the adult crime fighter g.'In.the interim, Batgirl continued to work as Batman Socan partner, honing her physical and deductive ski il they all but rivaled her mentor's.
4. WARNI
CHOKING HAZARD: Not for children und
KENNER’S WIND BLITZ BATGIRL ACTION FIGURE, 1997.
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THE EVER CAPABLE ALFRED DEMONSTRATES HE'S A MAN OF ACTION IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE. ANIMATION MODEL SHEET BY MIKE GOUGEN.
OPPOSITE: “MY GOD!" ALFRED CAN HAVE NO OTHER REACTION
AS HE WITNESSES BRUCE WAYNE'S FIRST TRANSFORMATION
INTO BATMAN. WE DON'T NEED TO SEE BATMAN FULL-ON IN THIS \
SCENE; ALFRED'S SORROWFUL TO HORRIFIED EXPRESSIONS / Poa
PAINT A MORE VIVID PICTURE IN OUR’ IMAGINATIONS. STORYBOARD FROM BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM. LAYOUT artist BY BRUCE TIMM, FINISHED ART BY BOYD KIRKLAND. NY 3 ee_/
Butler, man Friday, surrogate father, and acerbic cynic: all these describe Batman's trusted friend, Alfred Pennyworth. When Thomas and Martha Wayne were murdered, their loyal ser- vant stayed on to raise and guide their grief-stricken child. Alfred sympathizes with Bruce's loss and shares his desire to see justice done. Although concerned with Wayne's safety, the butler realizes risks must be taken and he is a key part of Batman's operation.
Responsible for Bruce's schedule both in and out of the Batcave, Alfred orches- trates each with the utmost attention to detail. He often needles Batman about a “hero's work” never being done. However, the obvious absurdity of his beloved charge dressing up like a bat is not lost on the long suffering butler. But with or without his sardonic jibes (deliv- ered ever impeccably by Efrem Zimbalist Jr.), Alfred is firmly committed to the Batman and his mission.
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ABOVE: EARLY SERIES PRESENTATION PIECE. CHARACTERS: BRUCE TIMM; BACKGROUND DESIGN: TED BLACKMAN; PAINTING: KATHRYN YELSA, 1991.
LEFT: INKED PRELIMINARY ROUGH BY BRUCE TIMM, 1991. OPPOSITE, ABOVE: STORYBOARD EXCERPT FROM
“THE LAUGHING FISH" BY BRUCE TIMM AND
RONALDO DEL CARMEN.
OPPOSITE, BELOW: “MACHINE GUN" JOKER, KENNER, 1997.
The Joker suddenly leans in nose to nose with Francis
threatening.
Since his introduction in Batman #1 (Spring 1940), the villainous Joker has gone through almost as many incarnations as the Dark Knight him- self. Batman creator Bob Kane, writer Bill Finger, and artist Jerry Robinson originally envisioned their Clown Prince of Crime as a grinning, mirthless ghoul who brought death with a smile to his innocent victims. As Batman's darker edge in the comics faded over the years, so did the Joker's. His crimes moved from murder to elaborate set pieces involving comic antics and oversize props. In the mid-1970s writer Dennis O'Neil and artist Neal Adams returned the Joker to his roots, refashioning him as a trendily dressed killer taking macabre delight in disposing of his former gang members. The team of Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers kept the Joker both - scary and funny in their brilliant “Laughing Fish” stories (Detective Comics #475-476), but it was writer-artist Frank Miller who, in 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, brought a completely different take on the Harlequin of Hate. Miller's fifty-something Joker had the attitude of an aging, degenerate rock star whose ennui with the mod- ern world was offset only by his psychotic passion for Batman. He was cold, frightening, and in a mordantly deadpan way, very funny. Like our Batman, our Joker was constructed from bits that had gone before. From the comics we took the idea of a nameless criminal with a sadistic sense of humor who first encoun- tered Batman during a botched robbery at a chemical factory. Attempting to escape from the Dark Knight, the crook leaped into a drainage vat of chemical waste, which carried him into the river. After dragging himself to shore, the criminal discovered the toxins had dyed his hair bright green, bleached his skin chalk white, and stretched his now
+
red-rimmed lips into a hideous grin. This gruesome, permanent transformation snapped the crook’s already unstable mind, and he vowed to use his bizarre looks to terrify hon- est people the same way Batman used the image of a night creature to strike fear into criminals. Thus the Joker was born.
Although we knew our Joker should be scary, there had to be an element of fun to him, too, a combination class clown and school yard bully—the sort of sicko who gets you to laugh right before he sinks in the knife and twists it. Also, he really gets a charge out of threatening the innocent, as witnessed in the episodes ‘Joker's Favor," “Be a Clown,” and “Harlequinade.” Among his other attributes, we saw the Joker as intelli- gent, theatrical, and in his own warped way, a showman. To him, if a crime isn't worth pulling off with panache, it's not worth doing at all.
The wonderful Tim Curry (of The Rocky Horror Picture Show) was originally cast as the Joker and brought a great sense of menace to the part, but we felt we were miss- ing the character's chaotic mood swings and sadistic playfulness. With regret, we decid- ed to hold new auditions. Mark Hamill, who had voiced a much straighter bad guy for us in “Heart of Ice,” was very interested in doing a name villain for us, but Star Wars’ vir- tuous Luke Skywalker as the Joker? Yet, once we heard Mark's audition tape, we all real- ized we had our clown. Not only was Mark's line reading dead-on, but his laugh captured all the bitter madness of the character. We looked at each other and said, “Brrr!”
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LEFT: EARLY INKED ROUGH BY BRUCE TIMM, 1990. NOTE THAT THE EXAGGERATED CHIN AND TEETH WOULD BECOME MORE STREAMLINED AS THE JOKER'S DESIGN EVOLVED.
BELOW: BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE... THE JOKER'S PADDED CELL AT ARKHAM ASYLUM BY TED BLACKMAN AND JOHN CALMETTE.
OPPOSITE: STORYBOARD EXCERPT FROM “THE LAUGHING FISH" BY BRUCE TIMM AND RONALDO DEL CARMEN (ABOVE); YELLOW POST-IT REVISION BY BRUCE TIMM.
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DIAL.
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ACTION -e- THEN, HE QUICKL r RELAXES INTO WIS y SMILING SMARMY Mode. i JOKER (Contr) = ¢ DIAL. ved ) SEATS BUT I DIGRESS. yr DIRT Feo MY FATS !: VULNE. We re BL. (=X) Vv we OVOINL. DY.
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ere -)_——.9" “THAT,” THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE: TITLE CARD CONCEPT ¥™ As HE POINTS ser ore Follow PAN TO VAT 9F ACIDS AND STORYBOARD ARTWORK BY BRUCE TIMM FOR 9 ¢ Peesonicienl WITH JOKER : “THE MAN WHO KILLED BATMAN." we ee xu } pia. JOKER * AND ROLL goes Mpa Sr ae q
ABOVE: YIKES! DON'T LOOK! IT'S THE VERY FIRST DRAWING EVER OF HARLEY QUINN! | HAD FINISHED THE SCRIPT FOR “JOKER'S FAVOR" AND SKETCHED UP THIS DISHY BLONDE AS A ROUGH IDEA FOR WHAT HARLEY MIGHT LOOK LIKE. | SHOWED IT TO BRUCE TIMM, WHO LAUGHED AND SAID, “THAT'S GOING RIGHT INTO THE BLACKMAIL FILE!" AND THAT'S WHERE IT STAYED UNTIL BRUCE SLIPPED IT TO CHIP FOR INCLUSION HERE. THANKS GUYS. THANKS A LOT. CAN YOU BELIEVE | WENT TO PREP SCHOOL ON AN ART SCHOLARSHIP? | THINK | OWE SOMEONE SOME MONEY.
OPPOSITE, TOP: “HARLEQUINADE” TITLE CARD ART, CREATED AS A COMPUTER RENDERING BY ERIC RADOMSKI FROM A DESIGN BY RONALDO DEL CARMEN.
LEFT: HARLEY QUINN PORCELAIN FIGURINE, WARNER BROS. STUDIO STORE EXCLUSIVE, 1996. e ™
OPPOSITE, BOTTOM: STORYBOARD PANELS FROM “THE MAN WHO KILLED BATMAN” BY BRUCE TIMM.
BELOW: HARLEY IN HER FINAL FORM AS DONE BY BRUCE FOR ME AS A CHRISTMAS GIFT IN 1992. THE RUG PATTERN WAS TAKEN FROM A REAL CHAIR IN MY LIVING ROOM. EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE DRAWING IS, SADLY, FICTIONAL.
/
Introduced as a foil/hench-wench in the script “Joker's Favor,” Harley Quinn quickly became a favorite character of the audience, the crew, and her creators. A former psychologist who became personally involved with her patient the Joker, Harley (aka Dr. Harleen Quinzel) is a mixture of comedy and tragedy, a funny yet painful reminder of what can happen when someone loves too much and unwisely. Harley's appeal is bolstered by Arleen
Sorkin's snappy vocal performance. Arleen and | had been friends several years before | worked on Batman, and | based a number of Harley's mannerisms on her. Remarkably, she still speaks to me. pai
Eventually each of the directors . wanted to do a Harley episode, so the character began to appear in stories without the Joker. Over the years she allied herself with best gal pal Poison Ivy for occasional romps through Gotham, and has even succeeded in giving Batman a hard time on her own. We now look upon Harley as our series’ wild card, capable of showing up anytime to bedevil our heroes with her screwball antics.
Bruce, Eric, Alan, and | agreed that while we never wanted to delve too deeply into the rotting offal that passes as the , \ Joker's soul, we did want to broaden his \ \' \ character a bit. One way we humanized the \ \ least human of Batman's enemies was to put Y him in a relationship with a woman who, for \ whatever reasons, adores him. Says Mark Hamill of the Joker/Harley chemistry, ( pe SAhahe
“Expressing emotion in any way that's real and meaningful is alien to the Joker, but he's learning those parts of himself, however unconsciously, through Harley. On a physical level they're dynamite together. A lot of relationships are
defined by that. Two people may be
really horrible for each other, but physically they push each other's buttons so clearly they can’t get enough of that person.” Offers Arleen Sorkin, “Everyone else sees the Joker laugh, only Harley has ever seen him cry. It's the only reason she stays with him.”
With Harley in his life the Joker has became = susceptible to the previously alien emotions of : E jealousy, inadequacy, and humiliation. It couldn't FS.
have happened to a nicer guy.
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HARLEY’S BACK. LOOK OUT! OPE 1S PAGE FROM THE AWARD-WINNING DC COMIC BOOK MAD LOVE (1994), THE JOKER STORMS INTO AN ABANDONED NIGHTCLUB TO DISCOVER HARLEY HAS NEARLY PULLED OFF THE ONE COMIC COUP THE CLOWN EVER BEEN ABLE TO ENGINEER: THE DEATH OF . ART AND COLOR GUIDES BY BRUCE TIMM.
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ABOVE: HARLEY & IVY: THE THELMA AND LOUISE OF THE SUPERVILLAINESS SET. HARLEY QUINN AND POISON IVY JOIN FORCES IN A NUMBER OF EPISODES. IN THIS DC COMICS LIMITED SERIES, WE FIND THE GIRLS IN ACTION AGAINST BATMAN, AND THEN EXPRESSING THEIR OPINIONS OF A BIG HOLLYWOOD MOVIE BASED ON THEIR LIFE STORY. PRELIMINARY PENCIL PAGES BY BRUCE TIMM, 1998.
OPPOSITE: COMICS, MAGAZINES, STORYBOOKS, AND NOVELS ALL FEATURING THE BATMAN ANIMATED SERIES LOOK, 1992 TO PRESENT.
To tie in with the debut of the Batman series, DC Comics started a new comic book title in the fall of 1992 that took its visual cues from the cartoon’s dark deco look and limited character designs. But rather than being a simple knock-off, The Batman Adventures (also known as The Batman & Robin Adventures and now Batman: Gotham Adventures) quick- ly established itself as a terrific book in its own right. It featured self-contained stories by writers Kelley Puckett and Ty Templeton; and the artwork was stylishly rendered by Ty, Rick Burchett, and the much missed Mike Parobeck (who passed away in 1996). Mike not only captured the look of the animated series, but added many inspired touches of his own.
Batman editor Scott Peterson was kind enough to invite members of the animation staff to contribute to the books as well. Bruce Timm and | were given a shot to do Mad Love, a graphic novel that not only revealed Harley Quinn's heretofore unknown origin, but also won the comic industry's highest award, the Eisner, for best single issue in 1994. In 1995 we followed it up with another Eisner win, The Batman Adventures Holiday Special, a collection of short Christmas-themed stories drawn by key members of the Batman animation staff: Bruce Timm, Dan Riba, Glen Murakami, Ronaldo Del Carmen, Kevin Altieri, and Butch Lukic.
The animated series Batman comic books continue to thrill ardent fans and win awards, most recently taking home the Eisner award for best title for young readers in 1996.
Among the most successful tie-ins to Batman: The Animated Series is an ongoing publishing program, licensed out of DC Comics. Over the years some highlights have been: Batman and the Missing Penguins by Suzan Col6n, with art by Mike Parobeck and Rick Burchett (Golden Books, 1995). Dual to the Death, an original novel by Geary Gravel based on the animated series origins of Two-Face and Batgirl (Bantam Books, 1994); Joe DeVito's cover painting evokes the works of Bob Kane (Detective Comics #31, 1939) and Neal Adams (Batman #227, 1970). Bruce Timm (artwork), Glen Murakami (colors), and | all jammed on Harley's Holiday, a sound story book for Golden Books, 1996; Arleen Sorkin supplied Harley's kiss and giggles as well as Veronica's scream. Warner Animation artist John Calmette contributed the cover to Little, Brown and Company's Pop-up Playbook (engineered by Keith Moseley), with Mike Parobeck and Rick Burchett handling the interior comic book art (1994). Nominated in 1994 for an Eisner award for best comics-related publication, Welsh Publishing Group's Superman & Batman Magazine lasted only eight short but memorable issues. It featured many DC Comics characters adapted for the first time in what came to be known as the “animated adventures” style; cover of issue #1 by Ty Templeton (Summer 1993).
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THIS PAGE: BRUCE TIMM'S COLORING GUIDE FOR MAD LOVE.
OPPOSITE: THE CLASSIC
CONFRONTATION: BATMAN VERSUS THE JOKER FROM MAD LOVE. ART AND nentclipp neice
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NEXT SPREAD, LEFT: EASILY THE Tome dyes + _ MOST SINISTER-LOOKING TOY EVER i hath er” GIVEN AWAY WITH A HAMBURGER: A gar wd eo, JOKER BIKE HORN FROM cuales °C hye 5 / MCDONALD'S (ENGLAND, 1995). “HI, hid f KID. | GOT YOUR HAPPY MEAL RIGHT Liyanes HERE!” ley > sn o Fs = as * we: ru f tas ” PREAD, RIGHT: THE CLASSIC RESOLUTION: soak gree ealov / MAD LOVE ART AND COLORS BY BRUCE TIMM. pee
" ad -00G)| ACT iti a As Batman: The Animated Series grew \ and evolved, so did its regularly seen Anan BRUS CoMmn ssaneRr GorDow ee ee aie cast of supporting players. Adding to the
overall richness of the series, in time they became as integral a part of the action as Batman, Robin, and their cabal of famous enemies.
World-weary and politically incor- ruptible, Commissioner James Gordon (left) is loved by the law-abiding citizens of Gotham City and commands the unwavering respect of his fellow offi- cers. Struggling to keep the peace in the world's most dangerous city has not completely drained the compassion out of Gordon, though he sometimes finds it hard to hold on to his belief in the intrin- sic goodness of human nature. While he officially can’t condone Batman's actions, he privately welcomes the Dark Knight's help in cases that overwhelm even the most capable members of his police force.
Detective Renee Montoya (opposite, bottom) was a new addition to the Batman canon, created for the animated series by Mitch Brian, Bruce Timm, and myself. The dedicated young Hispanic officer is truly one of Gotham’s finest, and adds ethnic and gender diversity to Batman's predominantly Waspy male world. As Montoya’s evolving character design and costume changes show, she's gone from beat cop to Gordon's aide to full detective. She even once staked out a department store dressed as one of Santa's elves. Hey, it’s all part of the job.
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GOTHAM POLICE HEADQUARTERS. DETECTIVE HARVEY BULLOCK ROUGH DESIGN BY RICHIE CHAVEZ, PAINTING BY STEVE BUTZ. IN TYPICAL ATTITUDE BY CHRIS DENT, 1991,
COMMISSIONER GORDON MODEL SHEET DESIGN FROM THE SERIES PROMO FILM. BRUCE TIMM, 1990.
A mainstay'in the Batman
comics, Detective Harvey
Bullock was transplanted to the
animated series as the Dark
Knight's natural and often funny
foil. Loutish, uncouth, and genuinely
unpleasant, toothpick-chewing
Bullock béljeves his badge is a
legal license to break the rules. He
hates Batman, looking upon the hero as
a “glory-hogging long-underwear
geek.” Two good things you can say
about Bullock: He usually gets results, and Bobby Costanzo's vocal performance gives
the big jerk a certain roguish charm,
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POLICE BLIMP DESIGN BY SHAYNE POINDEXTER, PAINTED FINAL MODEL BY JOHN CALMETTE.
Another cast addition to boost female appeal was investigative reporter Summer Gleeson. As the vivacious host of the tabloid news show Gotham Insider, Summer reports only the most sensational and scandalous events, no small feat in a town like Gotham. She'd love to break the story of Batman's secret identity, but while she has come close to linking the Dark Knight to Bruce Wayne, the billionaire has so far successfully defused her suspicions.
Other characters came and went, usually depending on the needs of a ~ specific story. Some, originally intended as full-time players, never LYNNE NAYLOR'S EXPRESSIVE PRELIMINARY MODELS OF caught on. Artist and”potential Alfred loye interest Maggie Paige OFFICER RENEE MONTOYA, 1991. vanished after her maiden appearance (in the ironically titled “Eternal Youth”) when_the writing staff hit a dead end with her character. It was’often hardenough devising compelling reasons for Alfred to be in the series; burdening him with a steady would have really slowed things down. ye A few other Gothamites proved more adaptable, and contin- ue to add welcome dimension to our cast. Kindly social worker/doctor Leslie Thompkins;'a friend of Bruce's parents, helped raise the orphaned boy aid is, like Alfred, a. counselor to both Bruce and Batman in times of feed. Unaware of Bruce's double life, straight- laced businessman Lucius Fox fills a needed role as the man who runs Wayne Enterprises when its playboy CEO is otherwise engaged.
; i
A consummate politician, Mayor Hamilton Hillis ever fearful of his stand- ing in the community and always checks the polls before taking a position on any issue. The weak-willed mayor refuses to take a stand either for or against Batman, but invariably rallies behind the Caped Crusader when it's politically expedient. More entertaining is flighty, image-conscious socialite Veronica Vreeland).an upper-crust “acquaintance of Bruce Wayne's whose naiveté-and considerable fortune are easy targets for Gotham's super criminals. Of the character she voices, actress Marilu Henner observes,"Veronica's the type of person who would reject Bruce for being too boring, then sit around wondering why Batman hasn't called her.”
Rich, glamorous, and stunningly beautiful is how Gotham high society sees Selina Kyle. A darling of the jet set, Selina is apparently indepen- dently wealthy and famed for giving generous donations to animal pro- tection organizations.
But few people know Selina Kyle leads a double life as a predatory figure who stalks the fortunes of Gotham's idle and corrupt rich. The same socialite who shares a glass of champagne with Selina one night might find her private safe ransacked by Catwoman the next.
Voiced by Adrienne Barbeau, the Catwoman of the animated series is neither hero nor villain, but combines aspects of both—-depending on which works to her best advantage at the time. There is undeniable heat between Batman and Catwoman, and the Dark Knight often finds himself emotionally torn between his feelings for her and his desire to see jus- tice done.
In the storyboard that follows from the episode “Batgirl Returns,” Catwoman spars with Batgirl in the Gotham State University museum. The two are soon joined by Robin, who naturally assumes Catwoman is up to no good-although Batgirl isn’t so sure. Artwork by Ronaldo Del Carmen.
PRECEDING SPREAD AND OPPOSITE: CATWOMAN SHOWS OFF A NEW LOOK CREATED FOR AN UNSOLD SPIN-OFF SERIES. HER SLINKY “GRAY CAT" LOOK (RIGHT) IS THE ONE MOST FAMILIAR TO BATMAN VIEWERS. ALL ARTWORK BY BRUCE TIMM.
BELOW: UNUSED BRUCE TIMM “BLACK SHADOW" TREATMENT THEORIES, 1993.
) EXAMPLES ~ EXAMPLE: 9 \ - ee a7 os | REGARDLESS AG a . OF WHEeE | THe UcHT-souecé Jouece e 1S COMING O Fem IN ANY GIVEN Sc, KEEP N ! HEM CATWOMAN SHADOW CosTUM, HER. PeepowuspnrtY pe 90 CATWOMAN oad” Lew SoUtCé; “BLACK, 4, ” BUT KEé fe] CATO AW RIM- LIGHT: CosTume, set No} 3 “eiM-LIT'F RE wuat NOT $ Bt TO Dof 3-93
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TOP: TITLE CARD STUDY BY ERIC RADOMSKI FOR “TWO-FACE, PARTS ONE AND TWO.”
LEFT: TWO-FACE REVEALED. STORYBOARD FOR “TWO-FACE, PART ONE,” BY KEVIN ALTIERI, WITH-YELLOW POST-IT REVISIONS.
OPPOSITE: SCULPTED TWO-FACE BUBBLE BATH BOTTLE BY PRELUDE UK LTD., 1995.
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Thematically, Batman has always been about the duality in a man’s soul. No figure from the Dark Knight's Rogues Gallery per- sonifies that more than the tragic creature now known as Two-Face. Originally, District Attorney Harvey Dent was Bruce Wayne's best friend and Gotham's most handsome and charismatic crusader for justice. Then, given the pressures of running for reelec- tion, the D.A. snapped and tried to revenge himself on a gangland boss who was black- mailing him. Though Batman tried to inter- cede on his friend's behalf, an explosion in the gangster’s chemical-plant hideout hideously and permanently disfigured the left half of Dent's face. Now he blames Batman for his monstrous condition 2 will not rest until he's hunted down th Dark Knight and killed him.
Two-Face is obsessed with the number two. He has a psychotic attraction to objects in pairs or anything that even sug- gests a dual nature—black or white, good or evil, life or death. He hinges every deci- sion on a flip of his silver dollar good luck charm; like its owner it boasts two faces— one side clean and polished, the other side tarnished and scarred. His unpredictability makes him one of Batman's most danger- ous enemies. When we cast Two-Face, actor Richard Moll perfectly voiced both the outward charm and inner rage of Harvey Dent's double-edged personality.
LEFT: BRUCE TIMM'S EARLY CONCEPTUAL SKETCH OF TWO-FACE CAP- TURES A CHARACTER CLEARLY SPLIT BETWEEN SANITY AND MADNESS,
1990.
BELOW: THE GOTHAM MINT, SITE OF THE BATMAN/TWO- FACE BATTLE IN “ALMOST GOT 'IM." LAYOUT BY TED BLACKMAN, PAINTING BY JOHN CALMETTE.
RIGHT: THE HORROR OF HARVEY DENT'S DISFIGU- RATION IS REVEALED AT THE HEARTBREAKING CLIMAX OF “TWO-FACE, PART ONE."
OPPOSITE: BRUCE TIMM ADMITS TO BASING HIS HARVEY DENT/TWO-FACE DESIGN IN PART ON THIRTIES MOVIE STAR RALPH BELLAMY. A HINT OF THE RESEMBLANCE CAN BE SEEN IN THIS MATINEE IDOL “PHOTO” DONE BY BRUCE FOR
THE TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL SAN DIEGO
COMIC-CON PROGRAM BOOK, 1992.
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PRELIMINARY PENGUIN SKETCH BY BRUCE TIMM, 1990.
OPPOSITE: “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” STORYBOARD BY RONALDO DEL CARMEN.
Always in formal dress and never without his trademark top hat and umbrella, the Penguin remains one of Batman's most beloved villains. However, one of the basic problems with Pengy has always been the virtual impossibility of making him appear physically threatening—he is, after all, almost a dwarf, and Batman could knock the little waddler cold with a love tap. Therefore, in the early stages of development, we started thinking of the Penguin as a more cerebral vil- lain who relied on his wits rather than his fists to com- bat the Dark Knight. One funny notion briefly considered was to turn him into a bird-loving, Norman Bates-style mama's boy always under the thumb of his overly protective but never seen mother. Batman would have even gone so far as to mock- ingly call Penguin “mama's boy" to his face, another blow to the proud bird's easily ruffled feathers. The depiction of the Penguin in 1992's Batman Returns scrapped those
ae plans. Warner features insisted we make our version of the Penguin (as well as that of Catwoman/Selina Kyle) more like their live-action counterparts, so Penguin was given a look very close to that of actor Danny DeVito in the film. ' Bruce Timm even visited the set to sketch DeVito in full costume (left). Along with a change in look came a change in character. Our “mama's boy” became a small but ruthless hoodlum who nevertheless still craved acceptance from a society that shunned him. Arguably, Penguin's best moment came in the episode “Birds of a Feather.” Chuck Menville’s story and Brynne Stephens's witty teleplay placed the bane- ful bird among Gotham’s upper crust, where he is first courted and then jilted by socialite Veronica Vreeland. Storyboard artist Ronaldo Del Carmen's rendering of the interplay between Penguin and Veronica (opposite) is some of the best character work in the series.
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THE PAINTING AT THE TOP, BY LAURA LEE LIZAK, REPRESENTS BRUCE TIMM'S FIRST CONCEPT FOR BACKGROUND TREAT- MENT: LOUDER, WILDER COLORS, AND A MORE FUTURISTIC BUILDING DESIGN. THIS WAS BEFORE JEAN MacCURDY'S SUG- GESTION TO ADOPT THE DARKER, MORE “FLEISCHER-Y" LOOK FOR THE SERIES, THOUGH GOTHAM'S ACRID RED NIGHT SKY WAS TO REAPPEAR WHEN BATMAN MOVED TO THE KIDS’ WB! NETWORK. THE PENGUIN'S POSE IS REMINISCENT OF A FAMOUS POSTER ILLUSTRATION FROM 1966 BY BATMAN COMIC BOOK ARTIST CARMINE INFANTINO, AND BATMAN IS RIDING A GLIDER SIMILAR TO THE ONE DEVISED BY DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI FOR 1986'S BATMAN: YEAR ONE COMIC BOOK SERIES.
LEFT AND RIGHT: COMIC ARTIST KEVIN NOWLAN'S FIRST DEVELOPMENT SKETCHES FOR THE FOUL BIRD OF PREY, 1991.
THE STORYBOARD (OPPOSITE) BY BUTCH LUKIC, PRESENTED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME ANYWHERE, IS A RARE TREAT- A DELETED SEGMENT FROM THE FULLY ANIMATED SEGA BATMAN CD-ROM GAME, 1995. IT SEEMS THE GAME WAS RUN- NING HEAVY ON VILLAINS AND PENGY GOT THE AXE. THE SEQUENCE FEATURES CLASSIC BATMAN-VERSUS-PENGUIN ACTION, AS WELL AS THAT LONG CHERISHED CHESTNUT OF CHILDREN'S CARTOONS, THE OLD “THREAT OF DEATH BY CIR- CULAR SAW" ROUTINE.
Permanently altered by an experimental chemical force-fed to him by mobsters, once handsome movie star Matt Hagen now revenges himself on the world as the shape- shifting monster Clayface. Like so many mem- bers of Batman's Rogues Gallery, Clayface was a soul who fell victim to sin (in his case, vani- ty) and became a poetically ironic caricature of his baser nature. He can regain the illusion of his lost humanity for a time, but it's only skin-deep. His inner self is now as ugly and distorted as his exterior, and it eventually comes through in whatever form he wears.
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OPPOSITE, ABOVE: CLAYFACE KENNER ACTION FIGURE REPAINT FROM THE LIMITED EDITION ROGUES GALLERY SET, 1997.
THIS PAGE, TOP; AND OPPOSITE, BOTTOM: MODELS, ATTI- TUDES, AND ACTION POSES FOR THE ORIGINAL “FEAT OF CLAY” STORYBOARDS. DRAWINGS AND SHADOW COMPOSITIONS BY BRUCE TIMM AND MIKE GOUGEN.
THIS PAGE, BOTTOM: LOSS AND DESPAIR ARE AT THE CORE OF MANY BATMAN VILLAINS. NOWHERE ARE BOTH ELEMENTS MORE POIGNANTLY CAP- TURED THAN IN THE EXPRESSIVE TITLE CARD DESIGN FOR THE EPISODE “MUDSLIDE,” BY ERIC RADOMSKI, PAINTED BY JOHN CALMETTE.
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Equal parts sorcerer, James Bond villain, and Fu Manchu, Ra's al Ghul has been a major player in Batman's comic book adventures since 1971. His name literally translates as "the Demon's Head” in Arabic, and provides more than a little insight to his personality and origin. Six hundred years ago he was a Middle Eastern mystic who learned the secret of extending his life through periodic dips into a pool of glowing goo called the Lazarus Pit. Unfortunately, in addition to granting immortality, the Lazarus Pit also lays on a heavy dose of insanity. After several
centuries of immer- — sions, Ra’s' judgment _ has become somewhat — one-sided, and he won't © be happy until he has te transformed the world | back into the pristine natur- | al paradise of his youth, wt destroyed it.
Originally created in comics by writer Dennis O'Neil and artist Neal © Adams, Ra's made his first animated \ : appearance in “The Demon's Quest” two-part episode, coscripted by O'Neil as well.
At right and on the following pages is a scene from his next appearance, “Avatar,” storyboarded and shaded by Bruce Timm. It seems that Ra's has ticked off the wrong ancient Egyptian zombie she-demon, and Batman and Ra's’ gorgeous daughter Talia (who has the mega-hots for Batman) are caught in the middle. Woe be unto them—angry demon glop doesn't give up so easily.
BELOW AND TO THE RIGHT: THE MANY MOODS OF RA'S AL GHUL BY ANIMATOR CHEN-Y! CHANG.
LEFT: COLOR MODEL CEL OF RA’S AL GHUL BASED ON BRUCE TIMM'S DESIGN.
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A constant frustration to Batman as well as our writing staff, the quizzical Edward Nygma, better known as the Riddler, earned the dubious honor of being our series’ most difficult villain. For starters, he’s not much of a physical threat and his reliance on riddles, games, and puzzles brings him awfully close to self-parody. (There are at least half a dozen full or partially completed Riddler stories in our dead script file that proved ulti- mately too complex or too silly to produce.) Another drawback is that the Riddler is a verbal, cerebral char- acter who seems to work better in comics than he ever has in animation. In a comic book, mystery novel, or live-action drama the writer has the luxury of time to set up and solve a brain-wracking crime. In a twenty- two-minute cartoon, the action has to keep moving, and gimmick-heavy characters like the Riddler have to make their point quickly and get on with it. Quite often the only thing propelling a Riddler story was the clev- ONE OF BRUCE TIMM'S FIRST ATTEMPTS AT THE PRINCE OF erness of his riddles and traps, and if they weren't par- PUZZLERS (1990) GIVES A NOD TO THE HYPERACTIVE PERFORMANCE ticularly original, the episode turned into a snooze. OF FRANK GORSHIN, THE RIDDLER IN THE 1966 BATMAN TV SERIES. THIS Fortunately, writers Martin Pasko and Randy Rogel TAKE ON THE CHARACTER WAS ABANDONED WHEN THE RIDDLER BECAME A
CREATURE OF COLD INTELLECT AND SARDONIC WIT, GREATLY ENHANCED BY chose to delve into E. Nyoma’s twisted psyche for their ACTOR JOHN GLOVER'S SUPERCILIOUS DELIVERY. most inspired Riddler stories, concentrating on the vil-
lain's quirky motives for revenge against Batman and
TOP: RIDDLER STORYBOARD RENDERING BY BRUCE TIMM FROM “IF YOU'RE SO SMART, th he believed had dhi mee WHY AREN'T YOU RICH?” others he believed had wronged him.
ABOVE: SCULPTED RIDDLER BUBBLE BATH BOTTLE BY PRELUDE UK LTD., 1995.
FAR LEFT: AN ARTFULLY RENDERED RIDDLER BY JOHN CALMETTE FOR “IF YOU'RE SO
SMART, WHY AREN'T YOU RICH?” IN CONTRAST TO THE WAY THE OTHER CHARACTERS IN THIS SCENE WERE ANIMAT- ED,-THE RIDDLER WAS PAINTED WITH AN AIR OF MENACE AS HE SPOKE FROM THE SHADOWS. (HIS MOVING MOUTH WAS ON A CEL OVERLAY.)
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Injecting himself with a Jekyll and Hyde-style serum, zoologist Kirk Langstrom transforms himself into a nightmarish creature: part human, part bat, and all monster. Man-Bat, created by writer-artist Frank Robbins in 1970 for Detective Comics #400, easily wins top honors as Batman's most hor- rific foe. He also proved to be an ideal character for animation.
In the series pilot episode “On Leather Wings,” a giant batlike creature commits a series of attacks at several pharmaceutical plants. Since this story takes place early in Batman's career, the police, who have not yet started to seek his help on criminal cases, suspect the Dark Knight of the attacks. This, according to Bruce Timm, is the purest depiction of Batman in the entire series. “We probably did better shows,” the producer states, “but for a first show, a show that sets the mood, | don't think we could have done a better episode than that. It had everything we wanted to push: horror, excitement, humor, Batman acting like the Dark Knight, and the few little jokes that were in there were very dark and creepy. It literally set the tone for everything that followed.”
TOP: KENNER'S MAN-BAT ACTION FIGURE, 1993. LEFT: MAN-BAT ANIMATION BY SPECTRUM STUDIO FROM THE EPISODE “ON LEATHER WINGS.” BOTTOM: TITLE CARD CONCEPT INCORPORATED INTO THE “ON LEATHER WINGS” STORYBOARD. ART BY BRUCE TIMM.
MAN-BAT STUDIES BY KEVIN NOWLAN, 1991.
A weird-looking guy with a hat fetish. Hmm. Not the most imposing of adversaries. Yet Jervis Tetch, the Mad Hatter, has been a major player in Batman's Rogues Gallery since his first appearance in Detective Comics #230 (1956). As with a number of other villains, we rethought the Hatter to bring him more in line with our series. In the script for “Mad as a Hatter,” | made him a brilliant but lonely scientist working for Wayne Industries. When Tetch stumbled onto the secret of mind control, he used it to make people respect and obey him in the hopes it would impress Alice, a pretty co-worker with whom he was smitten. When she rejected him, Tetch went off the deep end and used his mind device to turn Alice into a catatonic puppet. Batman came to Alice's rescue, freeing her from the Hatter's spell, while becoming the new target of the madman’s hatred.
Roddy McDowall's vocal performance created the perfect balance between Tetch’s shyness and the Hatter’s dementia. No longer a comical baddie obsessed with swiping hats, the Mad Hatter had become a real threat, fixated on ruining Batman's life the way he believed Batman had ruined his. In “Perchance to M A D he i iF Dream,” the Hatter went so far as to mentally imprison the uncon- scious crime fighter in his own private dream world. Here Bruce Wayne's parents were still alive, he was engaged to Selina Kyle, and someone else was Batman. When Bruce finally discovered it was all a dream, he had to con- front his Batman doppelganger and literally fight his way back to consciousness.
This traditionally has been one of producer Alan Burnett's favorite themes-the hero in con- flict with his inner self. It was also Kevin Conroy's favorite script. As an actor, it gave him a chance to perform four variations of the same character: Batman, Bruce Wayne, Bruce's father, and the alternate Batman.
University Professor Jonathan Crane was obsessed with the use of fear to trigger responses in test subjects. After subjecting his unwitting students to his experiments in terror, his teaching credentials were revoked and he was dismissed from Gotham State U. Embittered and seeking revenge on the world at large, Crane dressed his loose-limbed form in the rags of a scare- crow and set out to bring his special brand of fear to the weak and innocent of Gotham City. ‘
True to his name, the Scarecrow has a scrawny, cadaverous body and pos- sesses little physical strength. His real power is in his brain, and he's a mas- ter manipulator. Sadistic, analytical, and precise, Scarecrow’s modus operandi is to discover what his target's greatest fear is— and then use that fear against the person.
Once under his control, helpless victims will promise him anything: money, posses- sions, or total, blind obedience.
TOP, LEFT: MAD HATTER CONCEPTS BY KEVIN NOWLAN, 1991
TOP, RIGHT: MAD HATTER COLOR MODEL BY ERIC RADOMSKI
BOTTOM: TITLE CARD FROM “FEAR OF VICTORY” BY ERIC RADOMSKI
Easily the most tragic figure in Batman's Rogues eae the cold- blooded Mr. Freeze was once ae
her by placing her body in an experimental freezing chamber. But Ferris Boyle, the heartle: executive funding the project, felt his company had fost enough money on cryogenics and tried , to shut it down. Fries rebelled and triggered
fi ight i in the cryo lab that ended in the de Tu
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With Mr. Freeze we had the chance to create a more sympathetic villain. Bruce and | initially came up with the notion that as a result of the accident, Freeze considered himself dead to emotions; they had been literally frozen out of him. Yet he was motivated by passion for his doomed wife, which showed there was still a spark of humanity i him. Now, how would we convey that to the audience? When | wrote the script for “Heart of Ice," | came up with the final images first, a tear trickling down Freeze’s face and turning to snow, and then a of Freeze's cell from outside. A flurry of rising snowflakes through the cell window would indicate the man inside was With that scene in mind, | began working backward, fashioning a sto that would bring Mr. Freeze to that emotional climax. “Heart ale was the first episode Bruce Timm directed, and he captured every b of buried passion we wanted to bring out in Freeze’s character. It st stands as one of our best shows.
TOP: VICTOR FRIES’S CRYOGENICS LAB FROM “HEART OF ICE.” DESIGN BY FELIPE MORELL, PAINTING BY JOHN CALMETTE.
ABOVE: A MASTERLY BLEND OF TENDERNESS AND FROZEN RAGE. DIRECTOR BRUCE TIMM'S STORYBOARD FOR “HEART OF ICE.”
RIGHT: KENNER'S ANIMATED MR. FREEZE ACTION FIG- URE. STILL ONE OF THE BEST PIECES IN THE ENTIRE BATMAN LINE, 1993.
OPPOSITE, TOP: THE TITLE CARD ART FOR “DEEP FREEZE" PRESENTS A CHILLING PORTRAIT OF BATMAN’S FROSTY FOE. DESIGN BY ERIC RADOMSKI, COMPUTER RENDERING BY ERIC MAHADY.
OPPOSITE, BOTTOM: WE WERE LUCKY TO GET COMIC ARTIST PAR EXCELLENCE MIKE (HELLBOY) MIGNOLA TO CREATE THE ORIGINAL MR. FREEZE DESIGN, 1991,
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shade, Poison Ivy (real name POISON IVY Pamela Lillian Isley) is another of CHARACTER B , : sos atman’s former! nd-string villains STUDIES BY eeiycecand striag LYNNE NAYLOR, 1991.
given fiendish new life in the animated series. An eco-terrorist long before the phrase was coined (her comic book debut was in 1966), Poison Ivy prefers the compa- ny of plants to people and will wreak a ter- rible vengeance on anyone who harms the floral kingdom, intentionally or not. Owing to her unique body chemistry, lvy can gen- erate pheromones strong enough to 4 enslave any man, and her kisses are # Chernobyl-level toxic. A toxicological 73
73 : = - genius, she's equally adept at using g 7 : a : plant-based poisons, animal venom, or 4 2 4 ne NT Te pmo ce at : .
<< : ae weoew@e-chemical compounds as weapons. For == . & close fighting, she employs a small wrist-crossbow that shoots poison-tipped darts. Sadly, the once brilliant
- side of Pamela Isley's mind has been fully subverted by Poison Ivy and she is completely mad. Paradoxically,
Ivy has formed a fast friendship with the Joker's henchgirl Harley Quinn, proving even the deadliest supervil- lainesses need a gal pal to hang with now and then.
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BELOW, OPPOSITE, AND FOLLOWING PAGES: BRUCE WAYNE AT THE NOT-SO-TENDER MERCY OF POISON IVY'S CACTUS-
MAN HYBRID. ARTIST RONALDO DEL CARMEN GIVES A DOSE OF HITCHCOCKIAN SUSPENSE TO THIS STORYBOARD SEQUENCE FROM “HOUSE AND GARDEN.”
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MADE FROM EQUAL PARTS LEAF AND BEEF, THIS SPINY MUTANT BOASTS LIMITED INTELLIGENCE AND NO WILL OF HIS OWN. IN OTHER WORDS, HE'S POISON IVY'S IDEAL MAN. FROM THE EPISODE “HOUSE AND GARDEN,” DESIGN AND COLORS BY BRUCE TIMM.
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The design sketches on the first page of this section and to the right and below are by the tremendously talented Lynne Naylor, animation designer, director, and formerly one of the artistic big shots on the original Ren & Stimpy series. Bruce Timm felt he had stiffened up with the designs of such female characters as Officer Renee Montoya (‘Supporting Characters’ section) and reporter Summer Gleeson and had made them too realistic-looking. He assigned those characters to Lynne because her softer style was influenced by Warner Bros. cartoon director Bob Clampett, animator Preston Blair (“Red Hot Riding Hood”), and famed Disney “girl” artist Freddie Moore. By cartooning the women slightly, Lynne gave them much more appeal than they had before. From there Naylor went on to design Poison Ivy, making her look very dif- ferent from the other females in Batman.
“Lynne borrowed a lot of stuff from my library,” Bruce Timm recalls. “Will Eisner Spirits and Al Capp Li’/ Abner books. That's where Poison Ivy comes from. She’s sort of an amalgam of all of Eisner's and Capp’s women: the big bold lips, the round cherub face, and the big eyes.”
LEFT: POISON IVY ACTION FIGURE, KENNER, 1993.
BELOW: IVY IN SENSUOUS REPOSE; COMMISSIONED COLOR MARKER SKETCH BY BRUCE TIMM.
A mutant reptile-man, Killer Croc was a freak-show wrestler until he took up the life of a Gotham City crime boss. While not the brightest of Batman's adversaries, Croc embodies cruelty, tenacity, and sheer animal rage. Still, there is a heart, of sorts, inside the monster. In Michael Reaves and Brynne Stephens's introspective “Sideshow” script, Croc takes refuge with a group of retired circus freaks who wel- come him as one of their own. It's a safe place where he can just be himself, they tell the suspicious mutant. Though at first he plans to rob them and flee, Croc later remembers their kindness and has second thoughts. Sadly, the reptile’s vicious nature resurfaces when Batman discovers his hiding place. Croc tries to kill the Caped a
Crusader, and the freaks now see him as
the menace he is. Croc is ultimately cap- SCENE. (O47, BG.
tured, but before he is taken away, one of them asks why he did it. Croc grimly * sighs," Just bein’ myself.”
RIGHT: KENNER'S KILLER CROC ACTION FIGURE, 1994,
BELOW: CROC TURNS IT LOOSE ON BATMAN IN THIS DRAMATIC SEWER BATTLE SEQUENCE FROM “VENDETTA.” STORYBOARD BY JOE DENTON.
’ WARNER BROS,
ACTION ACTION
A STRONG JACK KIRBY INFLUENCE GUIDES BRUCE TIMM’'S EARLY DESIGN FOR BANE, 1993.
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Created in 1993 by writers Chuck Dixon and Doug Moench, and artist Graham Nolan for the Knightfall story line in the Batman comics, the Venom-enhanced Bane has quickly muscled his way to the forefront of Batman's enemies. In our series we reshaped him into a highly paid South American hit man employed by gang boss Rupert Thorne to kill Batman. Bane was agreeable to the task, but he also planned to rub out Thorne and take over the mobster'’s rackets himself. It all ended in the most violent fight ever done for our series, culminating with a show-stopping image of Batman pulling the steroid tube out of Bane's head. Cool.
BELOW: THE BATMOBILE, REMODELED BY BANE. PAINTING BY CHARLES PICKENS.
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ABOVE: KENNER’S PHANTASM ACTION FIGURE (1994) LOOKS EVEN SCARIER THAN ITS MOVIE COUNTERPART, THANKS TO PHOTOGRAPHER GEOFF SPEAR.
BELOW: ROUGH MOVIE POSTER CONCEPTS BY BRUCE TIMM.
BOTTOM, LEFT: CONCEPT SKETCH OF BRUCE AND ANDREA'S FIRST MEETING BY DOUG MURPHY.
BOTTOM, RIGHT: AN ATMOSPHERIC GRAVEYARD, THE SITE OF ONE OF PHANTASM'S MURDERS. LAYOUT BY TED BLACKMAN, PAINTED BY JOHN CALMETTE.
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Encouraged by the success of Batman's first season on Fox, Warner Bros. gave the go-ahead to produce Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, a direct-to-video feature-length animated film. The story, written by Alan Burnett, introduced a mysterious assassin bent on destroying members of a powerful crime syndicate. The assassin, Phantasm, is mistaken for Batman, and soon both the police and Gotham’s underworld believe the Dark Knight has become a killer. While Batman struggles to clear his name, Andrea Beaumont, a woman from Bruce Wayne's past, returns to Gotham. Soon Bruce and Andrea are swept into a deadly con- frontation with the Joker, hired by the fearful gangsters to fin- ish off both Batman and the elusive Phantasm. Aiding Alan in writing the final script were Martin Pasko, who handled most of the flashback segments, Michael Reaves, who wrote the climac- tic Batman/Joker/Phantasm face-off, and myself, who filled in holes here and there. Regular cast members Kevin Conroy, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., and Mark Hamill were joined by Dana Delany as Andrea Beaumont, Abe Vigoda as mobster Sal Valestra, Hart Bochner as duplicitous councilman Arthur Reeves, and Stacy Keach Jr. as Phantasm.
Although the Joker does play a pivotal role in the picture, it was Alan's intention to tell a story far removed from the series’ regular Rogues Gallery rumbles, one that would deal with Bruce Wayne and the reasons he became Batman. Alan cites another reason: “| wanted to do a big love story with Bruce because we hadn't really done it on the TV show. | wanted a story that got into his head.”
The feature format also gave the artists opportunities for newer, more elaborate set pieces. The opening title sequence featured a flight through an impressive computer-generated
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ABOVE AND RIGHT: INSPIRATIONAL SKETCHES FOR THE GOTHAM WORLD'S FAIR SEQUENCE. ALL ARTWORK BY KEITH WEESNER, EXCEPT WORLD OF THE FUTURE EXTERIOR
BY TED BLACKMAN.
TWO VISIONS OF THE FAIR'S-HOUSE OF THE FUTURE-THE FIRST AS AN ULTRAMODERN RIDE ATTRACTION VISITED BY YOUNG BRUCE WAYNE AND ANDREA BEAUMONT. BELOW, THE SAME RIDE A DECADE LATER. ABANDONED AND SHABBY, IT NOW SERVES AS THE JOKER'S HIDEOUT. LAYOUTS FOR BOTH BY RAE
MCCARSON, PAINTED BY STEVE BUTZ.
—
ABOVE, LEFT: NEARLY FINAL PHANTASM DESIGN BY BRUCE TIMM. THE BLADE H, ND
ABOVE, RIGHT: POSTER CONCEPT BY RONALDO DEL CARMEN.
OPPOSITE, RIGHT: THE GOTHAM. PERISPHERE. KEITH WEESNE
Gotham City. Much of the third act finale takes place in the imaginatively realized ruins of the Gotham World's Fair. A mainstay of the classic Batman comics often fea- tured the hero fighting against a backdrop of gigantic props. As a visual joke, sequence director Kevin Altieri set the final battle inside a miniature automated model of Gotham, where Batman and the Joker were giants. The sight of Joker wear- ing the top of the Chrysler Building as a disguise is not easily forgotten.
Early in production, Warner's feature division decided to bump Phantasm up into a theatrical release. That left less than a year for production time (most animated features take well over two years from finished story to final picture) and codirec- tors Radomski and Timm had to scramble to change the storyboard from television
format to feature film. “I thought it turned out really well for all the limitations we had," Radomski recalled, “especially because it was a very tight schedule and a very tight budget and we didn’t know whether the studio was really committed to it from the beginning.”
Warner opened Mask of the Phantasm on Christmas day 1993. It played for a few weeks almost exclusively at matinee showings, then disappeared from theaters, only to resurface the following April on video, as originally intended. The video sold very well and garnered many positive notices, including a rousing “two thumbs up” from film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who had, not surprisingly, missed Phantasm during its brief theatrical run.
WARNER BROS.
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ABOVE: MR. FREEZE KEEPS THE DYNAMIC DUO ON THE RUN IN THIS SEQUENCE FROM SUBZERO. STORYBOARDS BY ROBERT VALLE (TOP) AND PHILL NORWOOD (BOTTOM).
BELOW: THE BEGINNING OF THE SAME SCENE AS IT APPEARS IN THE FINAL FILM.
OPPOSITE, TOP: THE BATWING, BATCAVE, AND ALFRED, ALL DIGITALLY RENDERED BY FOUNDATION CGI.
OPPOSITE, BOTTOM: FREEZE'S MAKESHIFT OPERATING ROOM AS DESIGNED BY TED BLACKMAN. NOTE THE FEATURE'S ORIGINAL TITLE, THE ICEMAN COMETH.
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In 1996 Warner commissioned a direct-to-video Batman feature, SubZero. Originally intended to tie in to the excitement surround- ing the 1997 release of the live-action Batman & Robin, SubZero was the brainchild of producer-writer-director Boyd Kirkland and producer-writer Randy Rogel. The studio's edict was to feature Batman, Robin, and Batgirl united against one of the colorful villains from the movie. When an initial treatment pitting Batman against Bane was turned down, Boyd and Randy decided to focus on Mr. Freeze. Building on the plot threads from “Heart of Ice” and “Deep Freeze,” they fashioned an action-filled story that brought the saga of Victor Fries and his stricken wife, Nora, to a bittersweet ending. It also allowed director Kirkland the opportunity to exper- iment with a greater variety of computer-generated imagery, sequences involving a CGI submarine and Batwing being particular standouts.
Within weeks of the video's planned premiere, the decision was made to delay SubZero. It was released in spring 1998 and has since gone on to become a critical and commercial success.
OPPOSITE, TOP: A GRIM BATMAN PREPARES FOR THE FINAL SHOWDOWN WITH MR. FREEZE.
OPPOSITE, BOTTOM: MR. FREEZE'S ARCTIC RETREAT ALSO SERVES AS A SHRINE TO HIS STRICKEN WIFE, NORA. PENCILLED BACKGROUND BY TED BLACKMAN.
BELOW: MR. FREEZE'S OIL RIG OPERATING ROOM. LAYOUT BY TED BLACKMAN, PAINTED BY JOHN CALMETTE.
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96 the decision was made to create new jodes. The reasons were twofold: first, the in reruns for several years, was moving to the ork and Warner wanted to freshen the pack- the live-action film Batman & Robin was due for 1997 and Warner demanded new episodes that film's newest star, Batgirl, as a full-time member am. as the operative word because Warner was insisting on es from Robin, too. The producers had always pre- Of a younger Robin, and as the WB! had fewer prob- ith putting a youngster in jeopardy, we decided to Tim Drake from the current Batman comics as our rting from his comic book origin, we made Tim 1 son of a crook with ties to Two-Face. The boy's | town and Tim found himself going head-to- us gangster. Batman
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Face and, upon discovering Tim's father f been killed on the run, took the boy on as fi new partner. We would also explain that Dic Grayson had come to a tumultuous parting of th ways with Batman and had walked out on his for u mentor. For nearly three years Dick had been on fi own, traveling the world not unlike the way young Bi Wayne had, gaining life experience before puttin together a new identity and returning to Gotham as thi masked crime fighter Nightwing. In the interim, Batman, who had deduced Barbara Gordon's Batgirl identifi almost from the start, revealed his secrets to the entht siastic young heroine and often called upon her as an all in Dick's absence. After Nightwing had reestablished hi m self in Gotham, he, along with Batman, Batgirl, and th new Robin, might work together on important cast but there would always be a certain di
tance between them:
NEW LOOK BATMAN BUST FROM WARNER BROS. STUDIO STORE, 1998.
BELOW: NEW BATMAN TURNAROUND MODEL BY BRUCE TIMM.
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WE WERE GOING TO CALL THE NEW SHOW BATMAN: GOTHAM KNIGHTS, BUT LOST OUT TO THE MORE DESCRIPTIVE NEW BATMAN/SUPERMAN ADVENTURES.
WE ALSO INTRODUCED STEVE DITKO’'S MANIC COMIC CREATION, THE CREEPER, INTO THE SERIES, THOUGH CONTRARY TO THESE BRUCE TIMM LOGO ILLUS- TRATIONS, HE DID NOT BECOME A REGULAR PART OF THE BAT-TEAM.
BELOW: INSPIRATIONAL PIECES BY GLEN MURAKAMI SHOWING THE FOUR HEROES FRAMED AGAINST GOTHAM'S NOW BLOOD-RED NIGHT SKY.
PRELIMINARY SKETCHES BY BRUCE TIMM.
The pickup by the network was good news for the Bat-crew because we loved the show and had felt we could have easily done another season or two after production was stopped on the original series in 1994. Unfortunately, we'd be without producer Eric Radomski, who had left Warner a few years before to go to HBO Animation. A number of other key talents, including Ronaldo Del Carmen, Ted Blackman, John Calmette, and Kevin Altieri, had left the studio for other high-profile projects as well. They were all missed when production began on Warner's new animated adventure show, Superman.
While Superman boasted a umber of visual similarities to Batman (as well as to the earlier Fleischer cartoons that inspired them both), the characters were even more streamlined than their Gotham City cousins. Bruce Timm had simplified his animation design style to bring a “sleeker, more futuristic look to Superman’s world, and was pleased with the results. Now turning his attention to Batman once again, Bruce was not content to simply repeat the old look of the series, and he began , experimenting with the character designs, starting first with the Dark Lkniott himself. Figuring the years between the series had made Batman Beit much darker emotionally, Bruce dropped all color from his costume, keeping him in gray and black, with an unadorned bat chest emblem sae strikingly reminiscent of the character's first comic book costume. Once NIE Bruce was happy with Batman, he moved on to Bruce Wayne, slicking back his hair, putting him in a sharp black suit, and removing all excess wrinkles and bulges.
OPPOSITE, TOP: BRUCE TIMM LAYS DOWN THE RULES ON THE NEW BATMAN.
OPPOSITE, MIDDLE: NEW BRUCE WAYNE HEAD-TURNS BY BRUCE TIMM.
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“NEW-LOOK” BATMAN
BLACK-OVERLAP
Bra /2/6/47/ | NOTE: ALL LULES APPLY zo ROBIN 4s we!
THE SECRET BATBOAT ENTRANCE TO THE BATCAVE FROM “SINS OF THE THE FATHER.” DESIGNED BY MICHELE GRAYBEAL. PAINTED BY ELLEN SUH.
MAN, DOES THIS GIVE ME THE WILLIES! | TRIED TO CUT IT OUT OF THE BOOK BUT EVERYONE VOTED ME DOWN. CREEPY BEHEADED TIM DRAKE SCULPTURE BY GLENN WONG.
Jo DKEe = XFRESSION
BATMAN'S NOTORIOUS ROGUES GALLERY WAS NEXT ON BRUCE AND ART DIRECTOR GLEN MURAKAMI'S LIST FOR REDESIGN. THEY PROCEEDED TO SLIM THE VILLAINS DOWN, CHANGE COLORS, ELIMINATE DETAILS, AND IN SOME CASES RETHINK THEM FROM THE GROUND UP.
GARBING THE JOKER ONLY IN GREEN AND PURPLE, BRUCE NARROWED HIS EYES TO TWIN EVIL DOTS, GIVING HIM THE LIKENESS OF A GRINNING SKULL. ALTHOUGH MORE LIMITED IN HIS DESIGN, THE NEW-LOOK JOKER RETAINS EVERY BIT OF HIS MANIC PERSONALITY, THOUGH HIS TRADEMARK RED LIPS WOULD BE OMITTED IN THE FINAL MODEL. MODEL SHOT (LEFT) AND EXPRESSIONS (ABOVE) BY BRUCE TIMM.
BELOW: JOKER HEAD-TURNS BY GLEN MURAKAMI.
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RIGHT: THE NEW, CREEPIER MAD HATTER BECAME LESS HUMAN AND MORE AN EXTEN- SION OF ILLUSTRATOR JOHN TENNIEL’S CHARACTER DESIGN FROM ALICE IN WONDERLAND.
FAR RIGHT: IN THEIR REDESIGN, NOW FREED FROM THE CONSTRAINTS OF BAT- MAN RETURNS, PENGUIN AND CATWOMAN SWIFTLY RETURNED TO THEIR COMIC BOOK ROOTS. NO LONGER A GROTESQUE HUMAN-BIRD MUTANT, PENGUIN IS NOW THE STYLISH GENTLEMAN HE'S ALWAYS WANTED TO BE, RECALLING THE INFLU- ENCES OF SUCH CLASSIC BATMAN COMICS ARTISTS AS DICK SPRANG AND JACK BURNLEY. FOLLOWING AN INSPIRED NOTION PUT FORTH IN DETECTIVE COMICS BY WRITER CHUCK DIXON, WE REFORMED PENGUIN AND MADE HIM THE PROPRIETOR OF THE ICEBERG LOUNGE, GOTHAM'S HOTTEST NIGHTCLUB. NATURALLY, THE DIRTY BIRD HASN'T COMPLETELY CLEANED UP HIS ACT-HE STILL RUNS HIS SMUGGLING, FENCING, AND INFORMATION RINGS OUT OF THE BACK ROOM.
RIGHT: MORE DRASTIC WERE THE CHANGES TO POISON IVY, STILL LOVELY THOUGH MARKEDLY LESS HUMAN-LOOKING. DISPLEASED WITH THE WAY IVY WAS ANIMATED IN SHOWS LIKE “ETERNAL YOUTH" (AS A BUSTY AMAZON WHO COULD HAVE FLATTENED BATMAN JUST BY TURNING AROUND), BRUCE REWORKED HER INTO THE SMALL BUT DEADLY NYMPHLIKE BEING WE HAD IMAGINED ALL ALONG. TO ACCENT HER NEW LOOK BRUCE ADDED DEAD- WHITE SKIN, UNDERLINING THE FACT THAT IVY'S BEAUTY IS INDEED A FATAL ONE.
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LEFT: THIRD TIME IS APPARENTLY THE CHARM FOR SCARECROW, WHO HAS GONE FROM BEING A SKINNY GEEK WITH A BAG OVER HIS HEAD TO A MORE IMPOSINGLY MASKED AND WIGGED FIGURE, AND ULTI- MATELY TO HIS CURRENT TERRIFY- ING INCARNATION AS A HANGED CORPSE. THE DESIGN WAS SO COOL WE RESOLVED TO NEVER AGAIN SHOW HIS ALTER EGO, PROFESSOR JONATHAN CRANE, WITHOUT HIS MASK. IN FACT, WE'RE NO LONGER SURE IT IS A MASK.
RIGHT: APART FROM HER WHITE MAKEUP AND FORM-FITTING BLACK COSTUME, CATWOMAN HAS DEVEL- OPED A NEAR FELINE SILHOUETTE ALONG WITH A PLAYFUL, THOUGH PREDATORY ATTITUDE. SHE HAS ALSO DISPLAYED MORE THAN A PASSING INTEREST IN THE FORMER ROBIN, NOW THE GROWN-UP CRIME FIGHTER NIGHTWING. “HE'S A MAN WONDER NOW,” SHE PURRS, IMPRESSED.
OUR MAJOR MUSCLEMEN- CLAYFACE (OPPOSITE, RIGHT), KILLER CROC (LEFT), AND BANE (RIGHT)-WERE ALSO OVERHAULED: CLAYFACE BECAME ROUNDER; CROC MORE REPTILIAN; AND BANE SLEEKER, OPTING FOR A MUCH MORE DANGEROUS LEATHER AND STUDS LOOK.
ALL MODELS BY BRUCE TIMM, EXCEPT POISON IVY BY SHANE GLINES.
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LEFT AND RIGHT: BATMAN AND ROBIN ANEW. ARTWORK BY BRUCE TIMM.
GATEFOLD INTERIOR: DETAILED SCULPTURES CALLED MAQUETTES ARE PROVIDED TO ANIMATORS AND LICENCEES SO THAT THEY CAN SEE THE CHARACTERS FROM EVERY ANGLE. NEW-LOOK BATMAN AND ROBIN MAQUETTES, OFFERED THROUGH THE WARNER BROS. STUDIO STORE. SCULPTURES BY GLENN WONG, 1997.
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FAR LEFT: ART BY BRUCE TIMM AND GLEN MURAKAMI.
LEFT: THE NEW BASIC-BLACK LOOK BATGIRL. ART BY BRUCE TIMM.
BELOW: LAYOUT BY TED BLACKMAN, PAINTED BY DAVID McBRIDE.
OPPOSITE, TOP LEFT: THE DAYTIME SKY IS NEVER BLUE IN THE NEW GOTHAM, JUST KIND OF SICKLY YELLOW. POLICE HEADQUARTERS AND BACKGROUND DESIGN BY RICHIE CHAVEZ, PAINTED BY DAVID McBRIDE.
OPPOSITE, TOP RIGHT: GOTHAM'S RED NIGHT SKIES GIVE IT THE INTENDED AURA OF URBAN HELL. BACKGROUND DESIGN BY MICHELE GRAYBEAL, PAINTED BY DAVID fol =1 5019) 2
OPPOSITE, BELOW: KENNER'S NEW- LOOK ACTION FIGURES FROM PRO-
TOTYPES ORIGINALLY SCULPTED BY GLENN WONG, 1997.
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AGES 4 AND UP 4 WARNING:
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ASST.NO. 64115 NO. 63939 { AGES 4 AND UP
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RIGHT: KENNER'S CREEPER ACTION FIGURE PROTOTYPE, 1998.
BELOW: CREEPER/JACK RYDER PRELIMINARY MODEL BY BRUCE TIMM, 1997.
“| have a story | want to pitch you," Bruce Timm announced after calling Alan and myself together one day last year. “It’s called ‘Legends of the Dark Knight,’ and it's about some kids who each have a dif- ferent take on Batman. One thinks he's kind of friend- ly and goofy, like the old fifties Dick Sprang Batman, and tells a story we'd see animated in that style, and another kid says, ‘No, that's not Batman at all, Batman's this really old mean guy,’ and you'd see her story with Batman as the gritty Frank Miller Dark Knight. At some point the kids would actually see Batman trying to stop a villain or something, but at the end, they still wouldn't agree on what he was really like.”
It sounded like a fun idea and we put it in the works. Writer Robert Goodman's script fleshed out Bruce's premise, incorporating many action beats either inspired by or taken directly from the original Batman comics. Director Dan Riba and his crew faith- fully captured the nuances of both Sprang and Miller's styles while adding many inventive touches of their own. Not only would this be a different way to tell an entertaining story, it also would bring together three very different visual definitions of Batman. The Caped Crusader is one of the few comic heroes whose per- sona as a crime fighter, properly handled, offers writ- ers and artists no end of possibilities. Right or wrong is arbitrary; each story adds a worthy chapter to the : Batman mythos. Notes writer Eddie Gorodetsky:
SACANG "People talk about Batman and someone might
ABOVE: THE CLASSIC DICK SPRANG VERSIONS OF BATMAN AND ROBIN, KOBIN see him as a demon while another sees him as AS FAITHFULLY REINTERPRETED BY BRUCE TIMM. pe aS Pee a savior and they're both viable interpreta BELOW AND OPPOSITE: CLASSIC JOKER MEETS CLASSIC BATMAN. NoT- FINAL |. tions. Whereas with Superman, what you see is STORYBOARD BY JAMES TUCKER. ms what you get.”
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HONOR OF A CERTAIN COMPOSER WE LIKE) WITH A THICKER, CHUMMIER BATMAN LEAPING INTO ACTION WITH HIS WISECRACKING YOUNGER PARTNER, ROBIN. WHEN | FIRST SAW THE POSE OF THEM SHAKING HANDS, | WAS HALF EXPECTING THE NEXT PANEL TO BE BATMAN TURNING AWAY WITH HIS
ABOVE: BRUCE TIMM ADAPTS FRANK MILLER WITH HIS ANIMATION MODELS OF MILLER'S DARK KNIGHT BATMAN AND CARRIE KELLEY ROBIN.
RIGHT: PRELIMINARY ROBIN TURNAROUND MODEL BY GLEN MURAKAMI.
OPPOSITE, TOP: BATMAN LUNGES INTO BATTLE WITH THE MUTANTS LEADER. STORYBOARD BY DARWYN COOKE, COLORED BY GLEN MURAKAMI.
OPPOSITE, MIDDLE: THE DARK KNIGHT'S RAGE, AS BOARDED BY DIRECTOR DAN RIBA.
OPPOSITE, BOTTOM: BATMAN DOWN, BUT DEFINITELY NOT OUT. STORYBOARD BY DARWYN COOKE, COLORED BY GLEN MURAKAMI.
THE FIGHTS BETWEEN THE FIFTY-YEAR-OLD BATMAN AND THE SAV- AGE LEADER OF THE MUTANTS GANG MAKE FOR SOME OF THE MOST DRAMATIC MOMENTS OF FRANK MILLER'S SEMINAL GRAPHIC NOVEL BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS (1986). AIDED BY A YOUNG FEMALE ROBIN, BATMAN BATTLES THE MONSTROUS LEADER IN HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT, WITH GOTHAM CITY AS THE ULTIMATE PRIZE. AS IS EVIDENT IN THESE DRAWINGS, THE CREW HAD A GREAT TIME ADAPTING THOSE SEGMENTS, AND MILLER HIMSELF GAVE ENTHUSIASTIC APPROVAL TO THE ANIMATED VERSION OF HIS DARK KNIGHT.
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©1997 Warner Bros. This material is the PROPERTY OF WARNER BROS. TELEVISION ANIMATION. It is unpublished and must not be taken from the studio, duplicated or used in any manner, except for Production purposes, and may not be sold or transferred. Pa)
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ABOVE: FRANK MILLER'S ORIGINAL BATMOBILE CONTROL CENTER AS REINTERPRETED BY DARWYN COOKE (DRAWING) AND GLEN MURAKAMI (COLORS).
LEFT, RIGHT, AND BELOW: THE DARK KNIGHT BATMAN, THREE HUNDRED POUNDS OF AGING, ANGRY MUSCLE. TURNAROUNDS BY GLEN MURAKAMI.
OPPOSITE: FRANK MILLER’S BATMAN AND ROBIN IN BATTLE WITH THE MUTANTS. STORYBOARDS BY DARWYN COOKE, COLORED BY GLEN MURAKAMI.
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© 1997 Warner Bros. This material is the PROPERTY OF WARNER BROS. TELEVISION ANIMATIQN. It is unpublished and must not be taken from the studio, duplicated or.used in any manner, except for production purposes, and may not be sold or transferred.
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© 1997 Warner Bros. This material is the PROPERTY OF WARNER BROS, TELEVISION ANIMATION. It is unpublished and must i ~ Not be taken from the studio, duplicated or used in any manner, except for production purposes, and may not be sold or transferred. N p, Wy o tages CH,CIS Cl3 PAGE SS
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It's late Friday night and the studio is empty except for a small cluster of artists in Bruce Timm’s office. They are watching the finished cut of a new episode called “Over the Edge.” It's a much darker story than usual, a nightmarish what-if account of Batman's final adventure. In this episode all the rules are broken-old friends are betrayed, Batman's identity is exposed, and major characters are killed. Of course it's a dream, but still powerful stuff. The crew digs it big time.
After six years, three title changes, two networks, and a complete visual overhaul, one might think the gang at Warner Bros. have had enough of Batman. And certainly there are moments when everyone involved wants to seal him in his cave and call it a day.
But as my friend Chip pointed out in his magnificent book Batman Collected, Batman is about obsession, and | know from personal experience, once you start telling sto- ries about the Dark Knight, it's damned hard to stop. His quest for vengeance, his grim world, and his colorful cabal of archenemies (each worthy of a volume of his own) fire the imaginations of artists and writers alike. And just when we think we've done it all, someone comes up with another story we've just got to tell.
As of this moment, new stories are being written, new characters are being created, and new episodes will be premiering for at least the next two years. The classic animated Batman is alive and well, and soon to be joined by a new Bat-series, Batman Beyond. The series is set in a futuristic, neon-lit twenty-first-century Gotham City and follows the saga of Terry McGinnis, a rebellious seventeen-year-old who is the latest hero to assume the role of Batman. Tutored by an aging but still formidable Bruce Wayne, the new Batman will fight a deadlier breed of criminal equally adept at operating on the street or within the massive corporations that now dominate Gotham and its people. Bruce Timm and Glen Murakami's designs are exciting and different, and writers Hilary J. Bader, Stan Berkowitz, Rich Fogel, and Robert Goodman are crafting imaginative sto- ries about this new world.
Down the hall the screening is over. The crew is packing up, getting ready to head out into a Southern California night decidedly less atmospheric than one in Gotham City. But reality holds sway only for the weekend, and Monday morning will bring new images, inspirations, and adventures.
FADE OUT
TO BE CONTINUED...
BELOW: BRUCE TIMM'S TOY SHELF, WARNER BROS. ANIMATION, DECEMBER 1997.
BATMAN BEYOND POSES BY BRUCE TIMM, 1998.
FPISODE GUIDE
BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, Fox Kids Network
1. THE CAT AND THE CLAW, PART ONE = Airdate: 9/5/92 Story by Sean Catherine Derek and Laren Bright; tele- play by Jules Dennis and Richard Mueller; directed by Kevin Altieri; music composed by Shirley Walker, Harvey R. Cohen, and Wayne Coster. Aare Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, is plundering Gotham City ’ to finance a preserve for endangered mountain lions. 4 2. ON LEATHER WINGS Airdate: 9/6/92 Written by Mitch Brian; directed by Kevin Altieri; music composed by Shirley Walker. Batman is blamed for crimes committed by a ram- paging Bat-creature. 3. HEART OF ICE Airdate: 9/7/92 Written by Paul Dini; directed by Bruce W. Timm; music composed by Todd Hayen. Coldhearted Mr. Freeze sets out to punish those responsible for the death of his wife. 4. FEAT OF CLAY, PART ONE Airdate: 9/8/92 Story by Marv Wolfman and Michael Reaves; teleplay by f Marv Wolfman; directed by Dick Sebast; music composed by Jeff Atmajian and Carl Johnson. Disfigured actor Matt Hagen is changed into the shape-shifting monster, Clayface. 5. FEAT OF CLAY, PART TWO Airdate: 9/9/92 Story by Marv Wolfman and Michael Reaves; teleplay by Michael Reaves; directed by Kevin Altieri; music com- posed by Shirley Walker.
Batman squares off against Clayface, out to murder Roland Daggett, the man responsible for his monstrous condition.
6. IT'S NEVER TOO LATE Airdate: 9/10/92
Story by Tom Ruegger; teleplay by Garin Wolf; directed
by Boyd Kirkland; music composed by Lolita Ritmanis.
‘ Batman ends a gang war and reunites an aging mob-
+ ster with his priest brother.
~ 7. JOKER'S FAVOR Airdate: 9/11/92
Written by Paul Dini; directed by Boyd Kirkland; music
Omposed by Shirley Walker.
The Joker forces an innocent man to take part in his
plot to kill Commissioner Gordon.
8. THE CAT AND THE CLAW, PART TWO Airdate: 9/12/92
Story by Sean Catherine Derek and Laren Bright; tele-
play by Jules Dennis and Richard Mueller; directed by
Dick Sebast; music composed by Harvey R. Cohen.
$4 Conclusion: Catwoman and Batman take on a gang of
terrorists who have laid siege to Selina Kyle's mountain
lion preserve.
9. PRETTY POISON Airdate: 9/14/92
ory by Paul Dini and Michael Reaves; teleplay by Tom
er; directed by Boyd Kirkland; music composed by
Walker.
ising as Harvey Dent's fiancé, Poison Ivy makes the
me Day for unwittingly wiping out a rare flower “species.
10. NOTHING TO FEAR Airdate: 9/15/92
Written by Henry T. Gilroy and Sean Catherine Derek;
directed by Boyd Kirkland; music composed by Shirley
3 Walker.
~ The Scarecrow terrorizes the college that fired him,
‘exposing Batman to the villain's fear gas.
BE A CLOWN Airdate: 9/16/92
Tan by Ted Pedersen and Steve Hayes; directed by
~- Frank Paur: music composed by Michael McCuistion.
Mayor Hill's impressionable son Jordon falls under the sway of the Joker.
12. APPOINTMENT IN CRIME ALLEY Airdate: 9/17/92 Written by Gerry Conway; based on “There Is No Hope in Crime Alley” (Detective Comics #457, March 1976) by Dennis O'Neil; directed by Boyd Kirkland; music com- posed by Stuart V. Balcomb.
ein: Batman fights developers bent on destroying Dr. Leslie Thompkins' s Crime Alley clinic.
Three different versions of Batman's involvement in solving a crime, as told from the perspectives. of three different cops.
14. THE CLOCK KING Airdate: 9/21/92 Written by David Wise; directed by Kevin Altieri; music composed by Carlos Rodriguez.
The Clock King (once a compulsively punctual lawyer) is out to settle an old score with Mayor Hill.
15. THE LAST LAUGH Airdate: 9/22/92 Written by Carl Swenson; directed by Kevin Altieri; music composed by Shirley Walker.
The Joker floods Gotham City with laughing gas, turning the entire town insane on April Fool's Day.
16. ETERNAL YOUTH Airdate: 9/ 23/92 Written by Beth Bornstein; directed by Kevin Altieri: music composed by Lolita Ritmanis.
Poison Ivy opens a health spa that fatally preys on the vanity of wealthy Gothamites.
17. TWO-FACE, PART ONE Airdate: 9/25/92 Story by Alan Burnett; teleplay by Randy Rogel; directed by Kevin Altieri; music composed by Shirley Walker.
District Attorney Harvey Dent is blackmailed by gangster Rupert Thorne, who threatens to hand over Dent's violent psychological profile to the press.
18. TWO-FACE, PART TWO Airdate: 9/28/92 Written by Randy Rogel; directed by Kevin Altieri; music composed by Shirley Walker.
Conclusion: Horribly scarred in his fight with Rupert Thorne, former D.A. Harvey Dent embarks on a crime binge as Two-Face.
19. FEAR OF VICTORY Airdate: 9/29/92 Written by Samuel Warren Joseph; directed by Dick Sebast; music composed by Lisa Bloom.
Robin loses his nerve and turns into a liability when he is exposed to the Scarecrow’s fear gas.
20. I'VE GOT BATMAN IN MY BASEMENT Airdate: 9/30/92 Written by Sam Graham and Chris Hubbell; directed by Frank Paur; music composed by Shirley Walker.
When Batman is drugged by the Penguin, his salva- tion rests with a young boy who hides the injured crime fighter in his basement.
21. VENDETTA Airdate: 10/5/92 Written by Michael Reaves; directed by Frank Paur; music composed by Michael McCuistion.
Killer Croc, a freakish man-reptile, returns to Gotham to get revenge on the cop who sent him to jail-Detective Harvey Bullock.
22. PROPHECY OF DOOM Airdate: 10/6/92
Story by Dennis Marks; teleplay by Sean Catherine Derek; directed by Frank Paur; music composed by Shirley Walker.
Wealthy Gothamites, including Ethan Clark and his daughter Lisa, have been taken in by the predictions of a con-man “prophet.”
23. THE FORGOTTEN Airdate: 10/8/92
Written by Jules Dennis, Richard Mueller, and Sean Catherine Derek; directed by Boyd Kirkland; music com- posed by Shirley Walker.
While going undercover to find some missing home- less men, Batman is stricken with amnesia and winds up in a Southwestern slave mining camp.
24. MAD AS AHATTER Airdate: 10/12/92 Written by Paul Dini; directed by Frank Paur; music com- posed by Shirley Walker.
Taking on the guise of the Mad Hatter, lonely Waynecorp scientist Jervis Tetch uses his experimental mind control device to force others to do his bidding. 25. THE CAPE AND COWL CONSPIRACY Airdate: 10/14/92 Written by Elliot S. Maggin; based on “The Cape-and- Cowl Death Trap!” (Detective Comics #450, August 1975) by Elliot S. Maggin; directed by Frank Paur; music com- posed by Beth Ertz and Mark Koval.
Batman's cape and cowl become the ultimate prizes in a series of death traps designed to destroy the Dark Knight. am FERCHANCE 10 DREAM Airdate: 10/19/92
at
Bruce Wayne wakes up one morning to discover his parents are still alive and his crime-fighting career as Batman was just a vague dream.
27. THE UNDERDWELLERS Airdate: 10/21/92
Story by Tom Ruegger; teleplay by Jules Dennis and Richard Mueller; directed by Frank Paur; music com- posed by Stuart V. Balcomb and Lars Cutterham.
Below the streets of Gotham, Batman discovers a group of abandoned kids forced to steal for a brutal vil- lain called the Sewer King.
28. NIGHT OF THE NINJA Airdate: 10/26/92 Written by Steve Perry; directed by Kevin Altieri; music composed by Mark Koval.
A martial arts rival of young Bruce Wayne returns to
systematically destroy the billionaire. 29. THE STRANGE SECRET OF BRUCE WAYNE Airdate: 10/29/92 Story by David Wise; teleplay by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens; based on “The Dead Yet Live” and “I Am the Batman!" (Detective Comics” #471/472, August/September 1977) by Steve Englehart; directed by Frank Paur; music composed by Lolita Ritmanis.
Bruce Wayne's identity as Batman is discovered by corrupt psychiatrist Hugo Strange, who attempts to auc- tion the secret to the highest bidder.
30. TYGER TYGER Airdate: 10/30/92
Story by Michael Reaves and Randy Rogel; teleplay by Cherie Wilkerson; directed by Frank Paur; music com- posed by Todd Hayen.
Batman invades the island of Dr. Emile Dorian, a mad scientist who has transformed Selina Kyle into a true cat-woman.
31. DREAMS IN DARKNESS Airdate: 11/3/92 Written by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens; directed by Dick Sebast; music composed by Todd Hayen.
Infected by the Scarecrow's fear toxin, a raving-mad Batman is locked away in Arkham Asylum, where he is haunted by terrifying visions of his parents’ murder. 32. BEWARE THE GRAY GHOST Airdate: 11/4/92 Story by Dennis O'Flaherty and Tom Ruegger; teleplay by Garin Wolf and Tom Ruegger; directed by Boyd Kirkland; music composed by Carl Johnson.
Batman teams with his childhood TV hero the Gray Ghost to bring a mad bomber to justice.
33. CAT SCRATCH FEVER Airdate: 11/5/92