Batman : The Dark Knight Blog

Archive for January, 2009

here are some pic i’ve find while surfing around the net..
Batman Colored by pochrzas

Batman wallpapper

harlee quinn by Mia Cabrera

In Batman #681, DC Comics apparently killed off the title character in a helicopter crash. The issue gained a fair amount of media attention, but no where near the amount of attention that earlier comic book deaths of major characters like Superman and Captain America gained.

The reason that the story came and went quickly in the media is basically that no one really believed Batman was dead. Even DC Comics executive editor Dan Didio admitted that Batman wasn’t really dead. However, the storyline and information coming out of DC Comics suggested that someone else would soon be wearing the Batman mask, so something had or was going to happen to Bruce Wayne.

Now, it has been officially revealed that Batman didn’t really die in the helicopter crash after all. No, the events of Final Crisis, which Batman appears in, take place after the events of Batman #681. So does that mean Batman is safe and among the living? Not quite, because DC Comics has apparently killed Batman for the second time in Final Crisis #6.

In Final Crisis #6, Batman shoots the villain Darkseid, and Darkseid blasts Batman with his energy beams, which are called the Omega Effect. Then, Superman is shown holding up Batman’s freshly fried corpse. Amazingly, there has been even less media coverage about Batman’s death this second time around, perhaps, because the entire world appears to be infatuated with the Spider-Man and Barack Obama Presidential Inauguration issue. If DC Comics had been thinking, they should have had Barack Obama kill Batman. Now, that’s a story that would have sold some comics.

Seriously though, an even bigger reason that Batman’s death is not the huge media event that one might imagine is that still no one believes that he is really dead. There is already speculation that Darkseid’s beams just sent Batman back into time or to an alternate reality and that he will show up in the next issue of Final Crisis. If by some long shot, the Bruce Wayne version of Batman really is dead, then DC Comics has done what many might have considered impossible in the comic book industry. They have killed off a major comic book character without it becoming a major media event.

While the rumor involving Cher being cast as Catwoman in the next installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman film franchise was always one of the more unbelievable of the bunch (although we’re fond of Rachel Weisz playing the role in a “Dark Knight” sequel), it’s always interesting to hear what the actors themselves have to say about all of the speculation.

During a recent appearance on the “Ellen DeGeneres Show,” Cher laughed off the “Batman 3” rumor, telling DeGeneres she was “too old to be Catwoman.”

“I could be Grandma Catwoman or something,” she added.

You can check out video of Cher’s response after the jump (it starts around the 3:00 mark).

By Alexander F. Remington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 6, 2009; Page B06

Pat Hingle, 84, a pug-faced character actor who played Commissioner Gordon in four “Batman” films and — on the other side of the law — roughed up Anjelica Huston as a bookie in “The Grifters,” died Jan. 3 at his home in Carolina Beach, N.C. He had myelodysplasia, a blood cancer.

His best-known role, as Commissioner James Gordon in Tim Burton’s 1989 re-imagining of Batman, came more than 30 years after his breakthrough in the 1955 Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” as the greedy son Gooper. The play was directed by Elia Kazan, his acting teacher, who also directed him in an uncredited role as a bartender in his film debut, “On the Waterfront” (1954).

After “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Mr. Hingle received a succession of prominent Broadway roles. He was nominated for a Tony Award for best featured actor in William Inge’s “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” (1957) and played the lead role in Archibald MacLeish’s retelling of Job, “J.B.” (1958).

The second show led to his casting in the title role of the 1960 film “Elmer Gantry,” based on the Sinclair Lewis novel about evangelists.

Before the production began, Mr. Hingle fell 54 feet down an elevator shaft, fracturing his hip, skull, wrist and many of his ribs and losing his left pinky. He also lost the movie role to Burt Lancaster.

“I know that if I had played Elmer Gantry, I would have been more of a movie name,” he told the New York Times. But he preferred the stage, telling the Winston-Salem Journal, “I realized very rapidly that in films, an actor has no bloody control over what the audience sees whatsoever.”

He disappeared into roles but with his broad shoulders and barrel chest was never hard to notice. After spending four years on a Navy destroyer, he went to college at the University of Texas and fell into acting because he said every pretty woman he saw seemed to be walking toward the theater department.

Working at an Austin movie house, he found himself further inspired in his craft by watching such untypecastable character actors as Hume Cronyn and Walter Huston.

He later terrified Huston’s granddaughter Anjelica in “The Grifters” (1990), burning a cigar on her skin in a scene so intense that she spent the night retching.

He was frequently cast in positions of authority. He played Clint Eastwood’s boss in “Sudden Impact” (1983) as well as father to both Warren Beatty (“Splendor in the Grass,” 1961) and Sally Field (“Norma Rae,” 1979).

Mr. Hingle also played a Founding Father, portraying Ben Franklin in the 1997 Broadway revival of the musical “1776,” a performance Variety called “the perfect blend of wisdom, compassion and humor.”

Martin Patterson Hingle was born July 19, 1924, in Miami. He was 6 when his father, a building contractor, abandoned the family, and his mother moved around to try to find jobs to support the family.

After World War II, he married Alyce Dorsey. They divorced after 32 years. In 1979, he married Julia Wright, whom he met while filming “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?”

In addition to his wife, he is survived by three children from his first marriage; two stepchildren; 11 grandchildren; and two sisters.

He moved to the North Carolina oceanfront after filming “Maximum Overdrive” in 1986. He remained a prolific actor through recent years but always looked back on his college days as his most vital period.

“In three years I did 35 plays and in one of those plays I finally realized that I felt more comfortable than I did anywhere and I was where God intended me to be. I always feel that way,” he told the Wilmington Star News in 2007, and then interrupted himself: “Well, shoot a monkey tail, I’ve got to get to rehearsal.”