Dark, Brooding, Mentally Disturbed-Man

director’s commentary

July 20th, 2009

POSSIBLE SPOILERS! Read through strip 39.

Time for another round of director’s commentary! As we get into Chapter 2, I should point out that this entire chapter serves as a loose parody of The Dark Knight Returns. For those who are not comic book nerds, that’s not the recent Hollywood movie, but the graphic novel by Frank Miller. It tells the story of an old Batman who returns to action in some kind of 80’s-style future world where all of our worst Reagan-era, Mad Max fears have run rampant. (You know how it goes: liberal types have gone too soft on those punk-rock youths who now terrorize all decent folk, Russia is about to nuke us any minute now.)

It’s a personal favorite of course, and since it helped usher in the first big wave of “dark” superheroes, it’s an obvious target. I figured that I would wind up parodying large parts of it all the time anyway, so why not get it out of the way in one big story arc.

Today’s strip, for example, was a direct parody of a scene from The Dark Knight Returns (Apparently DBMD-Man doesn’t have a butler named Alfred, but he does have a cleaning lady named Doris… and thinking about it now, I should have used that character some more), as was the origin flashback strip. If something really makes no sense to you (like the “What the hell is this? Bubbles?” line) then it’s probably a direct Dark Knight Returns joke.

Going back to Chapter 1, there was another strip I left out. It would have gone between strip 27 and strip 28. You know, having a deadline can be a great thing for producing comics, it forces you to just do it and crank them out. But sometimes you get down to the wire and a strip is mostly done and you realize the joke is not working but it’s too late. That’s what happened with that one. It was a joke about how DBMD-Man found Half-Face, where it’s revealed that Half-Face had been sending him increasingly obvious hints all along. There’s a joke in there somewhere, but it fell pretty flat in the strip. Fortunately the story can live without it entirely.

Thinking about that though, I realize I could do a plotline related to that where a Riddler-type character is sending puzzles and clues to DBMD-Man, who is of course incapable of solving them… and maybe he could be named Sudoku… See, before you know it I really will be drawing new strips.

I should also mention: Sorry about using the invisible boxes gag a THIRD time in this strip. Guess I really thought that was clever.

Strip #30 had the first instance where I felt the need to add some new art, and a new punchline. When I read it back, it made no sense why Janice waited until now to escape, so I added in her broken handcuff. Clearly, the distraction gave her the first opportunity to break it. Clearly. Actually, it would be easier to break off the refrigerator handle she was handcuffed to… and funnier also… oh well.