BW Media Spotlight

It’s strange how we keep hearing “oh, comics and superheroes are for kids” when I have to search high and low for any comics or superheroes that even qualify as “kid-friendly” outside of preschool shows. I grew up with superheroes for kids, for adults, for families to watch and read together, and that was fine. Now it apparently isn’t.

Meanwhile, DC Entertainment has been having a hard time getting animation past cartoon-hating Hollywood. You’d think already having a family network with a ton of cartoons would make David Zaslav unafraid of cartoons, but Boomerang hasn’t live up to its original mission statement in years, Cartoon Network is still a shadow of its former self to the point that MeTV decided they could do it better, and two shows that should be a boost for Max got picked up by other networks. My Adventures With Superman, for all the issues i have with it, was intended to be a superhero show for older kids but not quite teens. Instead it’s on Adult Swim because Williams Street recognized having Superman is usually a benefit.

Meanwhile, Batman: Caped Crusader had to leave the Warner Brothers Discovery group altogether, ending up on Amazon Prime. I don’t have Amazon Prime, but they do release older and first episodes at times on Freevee. Thus was I able to check out the first episode of “Batman for adults” by Bruce Timm, who used to be considered the architect of the DCAU in general and the Batman cartoons of Fox Kids WB specifically. Now people are wondering given some of his works in DC animation since haven’t lived up, including an adaptation of The Killing Joke that missed some of the nuance of the original book but did give us his Batman/Batgirl shipping fetish in a story that really didn’t need it. “In Troubled Waters” introduces us to this new take on Batman and how this world will operate. Therein lies the big problem.

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