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That Dredd poster is clearly not real.  It has been shopped, and I know because I have seen some shops in my time.
I think we'd have heard about a Dredd film on here - it would have been in the papers or something, too.

Sounds a bit Light And Darkness War, too.

Does anyone have any anecdotal advice regarding talking about - or even just bringing up - the subject of mortality with younger kids?

Um... you do know to let the computer turn itself off before you unplug it?  It's not good for it otherwise.  Also, make sure you turn Photoshop off before you turn off the computer, as you can lose your preferred setup (assuming you have one) if you don't.

Could be your pc just being tempermental - have you tried opening it in Illustrator or Imageready?  Are you trying to open it through the PS toolbar after moving it to a different folder after you last saved it?  Maybe moving it from its current location to another file, then opening it from there could help - or drag and drop it on the Photoshop icon.  That sometimes works.

Also:  Have you tried turning it off and on again?

You won't get started on Soldier Soldier, fair enough - but what about the Super Army Soldiers in Ultimate Force?  Have they done their homework?

I really liked this episode - it made me think of the old show (which I admit I never watched a great deal of), as it seemed a slower-paced affair.  Came across as confident in itself.
Agree with brick/window sentiments expressed here and elsewhere.  I don't think there's anyone watching this who's not thinking it, so presumeably they're holding back so it can be the deus ex for the next episode.

Still don't like the new theme.  It sounds tacky compared to the orchestrated arrangements of the previous series.

Could be worse - the thing could conk out just as you try to turn on GTA4 for the first time - then you'd REALLY be fucked off.  At least having the crash now has meant that you can look forward to not having it in the future (anytime soon).  It's a bit like those mountain climbers who have their appendix out before attempting Everest.

PS3 version for me, all the same.  I can't be having with all that crashing malarky at this stage.

Bongo-Shark-Repellant at the ready!

My memory isn't that good - I've just read loads of Bat-books from around that period.  They put the repetitive angst of the current books to shame.

I also remember when all this were fields.

Was that Peter Milligan's 'Dark Knight, Dark City' arc?  The Riddler wasn't reinvented as a gritty psycho in that story, he was in thrall to Gotham City/the demon who was narrating the story, and being manipulated into freeing it.
Milligan's Batman run has been derided by many, but I liked that he actually tried to do something with the character beyond the Batman vs Mobsters stuff that cluttered the books post-Burton movies.

"You use yore tongue priddier'n a twenny dollar whore."

It's hard to pick books that stand in isolation as bad, rather than just a bit dull and ponderous for a standalone (graphic) novel.  In retrospect, City of Crime is probably more the latter than the former - not good in isolation, but probably taking on a new dimension of awful if you're following the books on a regular basis and can actually remember where Jim Gordon and Tim Drake are supposed to be at in their lives (retired and high school senior respectively).  I mean, the reader knows that much, so the writer should arguably be aware of it as well.
Meh - it's all pre-Infinite Crisis anyway, so it's been retconned to buggery by now.
 
Even if you didn't buy into my personal distaste for the book, that's a fair and balanced review, Alec.
I did also forget that some of the clean linework on the Gotham vistas were actually quite a break from the over-shadowed rendering of the city prevalent in the books even now, so I suppose that's one thing undeniably in its favour.

You Mean Leslie Thompkins?  They're retconning that - kind of makes a mockery of the big noise DC made at the time about her never appearing again, doesn't it?  Mind you, they're retconning the Spoiler death, too, which is a shame, I think.  They should address the problem they've created honestly, rather than just retcon the trigger event for all their reactionary woes out of canon.
War Crimes wasn't so much bad as dull, and just left me with no opinion of it other than it wasn't very interesting and the main conceit would be retconned before long.  Dull and uninteresting - that makes it pretty much a Bat-book on par rather than hitting a low.



Freckle Monster: you have mail.

Being a long-winded gobshite is 'making a good case'?  Good lord!  More good case-making to follow!

Because you expressed a lack of knowledge of the book (a TPB), Batman: City Of Crime is a David Lapham-penned exercise in offensiveness - partially offensive because of the book's preoccupation with paedophilia in an attempt to be edgy and adult, but mainly offensive because I paid money for the effing thing.  Basic bullet-points include: Bruce Wayne becomes the object of desire for an heiress at her 14th birthday party, but dismisses her with the internal observation that she's not worth bothering about because someone else at the party full of old men will shag her instead of him, so that's all right, and certainly nothing he - Batman - should even consider giving a second thought.  Then we find out that lots of Batman's rogues' gallery are making money from a child sex ring - Penguin, mainly, but also Mr Freeze, who's become sexually preoccupied with one of the kids being victimised by aforesaid ring.
'Offensively bad' is a term bandied about with abandon, but it is utterly apt in being applied here - City Of Crime really is that terrible, and to prove it, I'll give my copy of the TPB gratis to anyone who wants it (I'll even pay postage) if they'll agree to share their honest opinion of it here once they've read it.

The whole furore with Girlwonder.org came up after War Games finished, as it centered around the not-unreasonable request from female fandom that Stephanie Brown (aka 'The Girl Robin') get a memorial in the Batcave just like Jason Todd did - and still does, despite coming back from the dead as an unrepentant serial-murderer and aligning himself against Batman (even trying to kill Robin and Nightwing).  DC editorial's reasoning was that the character didn't deserve a memorial because "We don't consider her a Robin" - a statement they've contradicted in interviews and - more crucially - in the Bat-books themselves (Batman's final words to the character on her deathbed were that he thought of her as Robin), but which has also been viewed in isolation as dismissive of the character on the basis of gender.  For that reason alone, War Games should be considered a noteworthy stinker, as it did a lot of harm to DC's image that they're still suffering from - a lot of their books feature direct commentary on DC's place as a whipping-boy for online commentators (Power Boy in the Supergirl books, the metatextual references in Nightwing as to how the character should have died in Infinite Crisis, Superboy/Man Prime quoting online reviews of Countdown in his dialogue, Batman hallucinating a trophy case for the Stephanie Brown character), which is unnecessarily defensive on DC's part, but also leaves a lot of their books with baffling content for those whose comics appreciation isn't a communal experience.

But as I say, this came up after War Games was finished and done - I didn't like the story at the time because not only did it add nothing to the Bat-mythos (Batman is on the run from the cops, Batman has plans that he doesn't share with others, Gotham suffers a wave of violence), but it also removed some things from the franchise.  Yes, there's the death of a couple of characters, but to be honest, Orpheus was a blank slate, and Spoiler was out of place in the main Bat-titles - what struck me as pointless was the one-panel dismissal of the whole 'Batman as urban legend' angle from the books, despite it being the one entertaining and original thing to come from the various Crises and Zero Hour retcons DC seem obsessed with doing every two years.  It served no purpose in the actual War Games story, and afterwards, nothing was made of it.
Dull, pointless, repetitive, and most of all, it's damaged DC to this very day.  I'd say for these reasons War Games counts as a bit of a miss.

But if you enjoyed it, fair enough.  Taste is a personal thing, after all.

Isn't the "God-damn Batman" a rehash of the very first spoken dialogue in the legendarily-awful Sam Hamm screenplay for Watchmen that was doing the rounds on the internet a few years ago?  "Oh no - it's the God-Damn Watchmen!" or something like that?

Hush - without doubt, one of the worst comics I've ever read, and whose only half-decent moment is a cliffhanger - lifted wholesale from the story 'the Mud Pack' during Alan Grant's Batman run alongside Norm Breyfogle - when Jason Todd turns up at the end of the issue.  The writer even lifts the reveal that it's Clayface for the next issue, despite it making no sense whatsoever for him to be there - then lifts a scene from the Batman animated series where Clayface disappears in pouring rain.  Awful.

Batman: City Of Crime is also terrible - like a sixth-former's angsty poetry told over several hundred pages.  It's hard to accurately describe it - have you ever seen the cut-scenes from the Max Payne videogame series?  Pretty much identical to that - it's just a relentlessly juvenile attempt to be adult and edgy, but unlike Max Payne, it's not even funny.

The Larry Hama Batman run - the one where he stole an old Eisner Spirit story beat-for-beat (because, y'know, The Spirit is pretty obscure and no-one will notice) and featured the Batman toys in every other issue, like the Batman Aqualung action-figure turning up because he needed to fight a half-woman, half-whale villain called Orca.
I'm not making that up.

War Games was a disasterous event, not just for Batman (because it was pretty dull and added nothing of interest to the series beyond pointlessly ending Bats' 'urban legend' status), but for DC in general, as the treatment of one character led to an outcry from female readers and the creation of Girlwonder.org, a website for female comics nerds of a feminist inclination.  Of late, DC have resorted to retconning the whole affair in the Robin title, so that gives you an idea of how bad it was that they won't even bother to try spinning the whole thing anymore.

A lot of Morrison's Batman stuff is too self-indulgent and misses the mark, so I'd say that counts as pretty bad - especially when we know he's capable of doing better.

Another vote for Digital Justice and DK2 - the latter especially really was as bad as people say, and certainly doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt some have given it.  Miller with nothing to say and it shows.