The Grace of Gilda, Part 4: Grace Lamont of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES

[about_faces]

Note: This is the fourth part of my retrospective of Gilda, a complete history of the oft-overlooked woman who loved and lost Harvey Dent. New installments will be posted weekly! Previous installments: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Comments

[ext_5799348]

I always thought it was kind of inferred that the coin thing was a bit of 'Big Bad Harv' psychosis that kind of carried over into Two-Face. I mean, I know it's not very well-explained, but the first episode is full of coin stuff - the sound effect of it flipping through the air torments Harvey in the nightmare he's having; one of the first signs that he's let out Harv is his reaching into his pocket for it, to obsessively flip it throughout the rest of the therapy session, and so on. (Actually, I say 'and so on', but I honestly can't remember if there's more; it just wouldn't surprise me.) Even in his very first appearance in 'On Leather Wings', this is arguably being lightly hinted at, as the first time we see him, he's flipping the coin - not as Harv, of course, but perhaps as a 'tell' that that side of him is close to the surface at the moment. (After all, he's making a bad - or at least rash - decision. He's agreeing with Bullock's 'bring down the Bat' plan, when a cooler head might have come to a different conclusion, such as '

[akselavshalom]

Lord, this one... Again, I might have to only touch upon stuff here, but it can easily be carried over to the next one. But I'll begin with this and come back tomorrow:
While people might forget sometimes forget it these days, Batman:TAS might just be the bedrock of which all modern-day cartoons sprung from. Having said that, watching it again in more recent times, you see that it's brights are as bright as people say it is, but man, it's not quite as bountiful and consistent with its brights as people made/make it up to be. The cracks reaaaally start to show now, especially with stuff like this when the cartoon would just suddenly decide to start throwing its own continuity under the bus and just could not be pressed to give enough of a damn to even give a proper explanation why. They did it with Ivy, they did it with Freeze, and Two-Face just as unfairly, even after they went to lengths to establish him and Bruce to being tight friends. I'm disregarding all of the tie-ins, which are valid, sure, but that's not the show show. What

[ext_5799348]

B:tAS definitely has its weaknesses, all right. It didn't handle any of its characters badly, per se, but there are a few that just didn't land with the impact they were probably supposed to. I think the classic example would be Catwoman - her whole 'animal rights activism' thing is not exactly wrong for the character, but it wound up taking her over to such an extent that every one of her episodes wound up being about that to some degree. This was changed to a degree in her later TNBA appearances, true - we got a bit of the classic cat burglar Selina then - but that was too little, too late.

[lego_joker]

Weirdly enough, Selina probably had the most continuity out of all the original TAS rogues* - which is, IMO, only proof that continuity isn't in itself a good thing. Her debut had Batman finding and arresting her, leading to several episodes where she had to be a damsel-in-distress civilian who only put on the costume in Extreme Circumstances, until Dini finally gave her some actual teeth back in "Catwalk".

* Discounting "Almost Got 'im", where she just shows up to fight the Joker with zero explanation. It's almost like Dini wrote the script thinking the show had already introduced Batgirl.

[ext_5799348]

Yeah, it's a shame. They capture the actual dynamic between the two well enough, all right - if nothing else, the 'Chase Me' short (which was, I believe, the last Bat/Cat interaction in the DCAU) is pitch-perfect, and I actually really like their interactions in 'The Cat and the Claw' - but they just don't quite capture who Selina Kyle is. That whole business with her being one of Bruce Wayne's wealthy, activist peers - that's just not her. That has never been her.

Sure, Catwoman has, at various times, been quite well-off, but it's always been her ill-gotten gains that got her there, and never for long. The modern version of her, of course, is very street-level, but even back in the Golden Age, she had kind of a 'scrappy underdog' feel to her at times. While the Joker and the Penguin and such were wealthy gentlemen of crime, she was more of a working woman (I have, in fact, a story in my collection where her plot involves the use of a beauty salon, and instead of hiring other women to do the work for her, she actually goes to work

[akselavshalom]

Now for what I MEANT to write out yesterday, but spoons not present then. Ties somewhat into my comment on TAS and also... the next one. The BIG one

[ext_5799348]

I've always thought that the best format for these things is primarily episodic, with continuing subplots that every now and then pay off. There's a real value in being able to say to someone 'oh, dude, you want to read this issue', and wow them with one short but well-told story, as opposed to 'you need to read this fifty-issue storyline, plus this other thing for context'. The latter is not exactly friendly to the casual fan.

I mean, longer stories can work, absolutely, but they need to still be good on an issue-to-issue level. Knightfall is one of my all-time favorites, but even it is full of a whole bunch of stand-alone, shorter bits that give a good account of the story as a whole; you don't need to read the entire storyline, beginning to end, to understand what it's about. (If it weren't for that factor, it'd probably be substantially lower on my list of favorites, since I first read it back when the whole thing hadn't been published in trade yet