Watch Batman: The Brave and The Bold Season 3 Episodes 6- Night of the Batmen! - Full Episode
Before I address why “Night of the Batmen” is the better episode, allow me to digress a while for the sake of providing some scanty context for tonight’s episode. If you’re allergic to pedantic discussion of a trend in the popular discourse on comics (I remain a contributing writer for The Comics Journal, after all), skim this next graf or just skip ahead to the one after it.
Ahem. The take-away message from “Night of the Batmen” is pretty much the same one that Grant Morrison has been toying around with in his Batman comics for a couple of years now (since 2006!). In Morrison’s hands, that message is “Batman can’t die!” In the hands of “Night of the Batmen” writer Paul Giacoppo, it’s “Gotham needs a Batman.” No matter who wears the mantle or what his costume looks like, Batman has, for all intents and purposes become a modern archetype. That concept is, generally speaking, rather self-serving coming from a professional comic writer. But in Giacoppo’s hands, it’s just another iteration of the staid and ineffectual, if intriguing, argument that contends that superheroes are the latest expression of the classical heroic tradition. Anyone that tries to make that argument is guaranteed an uphill struggle. Because it’s almost nigh-impossible to make flamboyant characters look respectable and immortal (Remember Frank Miller’s scattershot The Spirit adaptation? I thought not.). Which isn’t to say that it can’t be done: Morrison’s doing a great job with his never-ending mega-arc on Batman and all of its attendant titles.
