Sorry

    As promised, here's an apology for Night of the Batmen! Not for the episode itself, which I think was a good one, and one I'm proud of. Also, I won't apologize for the fact that "The Ballad of Batman" is now stuck in your head forever, because that's what a good song is supposed to do. No, my apology is not for anything that was in the show, but something we left out.
    In the original script, from first draft all to the final version, Joker was accompanied by his cute but calamitous companion-in-crime, Harley Quinn. But as we started to get ready to board it, I asked James Tucker if he'd mind if I replaced her with one of Joker's previous sidekicks, Gaggy - which he obviously agreed to, because in the show, we did this -

    So to all of the Harley Quinn fans out there, I'm sorry I removed her from the show. But here's the thing - in an 22 minute episode with five guest heroes and six villains with talking parts already, there was no time to include Harley, except as a silent partner. And if you're gonna use Harley, you want her to have some dialogue - it's just out of character for her to hang around quietly in the background. Not so much for Gaggy. So while I don't regret swapping Gaggy in for her, I know she has a lot of fans who would have liked to have seen more of her in our show, and to them, sorry.

All characters ™ and © DC Comics

The blog that ate itself

I meant to post something about Joker: The Vile and the Villainous! a while back, but I didn't want to post anything before it aired, because I couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't spoilery (even the title itself is a little spoilery for my tastes), so I figured I'd post something after it aired. But then I got really busy, and this is the first chance I've had to sit down and blog, so here we go.

So anyways, Joker: The Vile and the Villainous - this was the first story written for Season 3, and according to Michael Jelenic, the concept for the episode was inspired by none other than this very blog, specifically this post! So that was nice to hear.

We (Michael, James Tucker, Jim Krieg and I) blocked out the structure of the story over the course of a morning, then James left us with one unresolved piece of the puzzle - who would the Joker team up with? So spent a lot of time (most of a full afternoon) trying to come up with a partner for the Joker, running through a couple of candidates that weren't quite right, until James saved our collective behinds by emailing in from nowhere with the Weeper.

This Friday, Night of the Batmen!, our adaptation of issue 13 of the comic book - after which, another blog post, featuring an apology from me to one particular fanbase that's sure to hate me when they find out what we've done (or rather, didn't do)!

Image ™ and © DC Comics