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DC and Marvel’s Animated Epics

Comicscape: DC and Marvel’s Animated Epics
© Mania

With the release of the Planet Hulk feature last week, Marvel Comics made another foray into the realm of animated film, a realm that up to this point has been dominated by their Distinguished Competition. While Marvel is better known for their string of successful big screen adventures, DC has had a firm grasp on the animated side of things. Marvel has made a few stabs in this direction, but early efforts fell flat. However, the Hulk vs. Thor and Hulk vs. Wolverine two-disc set proved to be nothing short of amazing and Planet Hulk has followed suit.

So now we’ve got some real competition. And competition pushes both sides to up the ante. Since both Marvel and DC are producing some quality work, it’s safe to say that all this ante pushing is going to pay off in spades for fans. But the question is: what’s next?

We don’t know about you, but we thought that DC’s New Frontier set the bar so ridiculously high, neither company can hope to top it any time soon. But now that we’ve got Planet Hulk from Marvel as well as Superman: Doomsday and Superman/Batman Public Enemies from DC (with a sequel on the way), it got us thinking… the stories are already there, so why not just adapt some of the classics? Origin stories are great but we already know how Green Lantern got his ring and why Wonder Woman fights crime in star-spangled panties. There have been so many epics from DC and Marvel that fans hold dear to their hearts years after reading them, it makes sense to bring them to life in an animated format. And let’s face it; we’re never going to see a live-action Dark Knight Returns in theaters.

So without belaboring the point, let’s get down to brass tacks. Here are a few classic Marvel and DC storylines we’d like to see adapted to animated form.

Days of Future Past

This tale of a post-apocalyptic future is beyond classic. It’s so classic that it’s almost gotten to the point where it’s kind of annoying. There have been enough crappy sequels, spin-offs and parodies to make your head spin. But go back and re-read it and try to tell us this story isn’t 110% pure dynamite. There’s a reason why writers keep mining this fertile ground: it’s good.

Yeah, it’s already sort of been adapted in the X-Men animated series from the ‘90s and elements of it were used in a recent Wolverine and the X-Men episode, but we think it deserves the 80-minute treatment. Give us Sentinels and Rachel Summers, a grown up Kitty Pryde, Wolverine getting scorched until there’s nothing left but a shiny skeleton and don’t forget that ominous shot of the superhero graveyard. And of course, give us a cover that looks like Uncanny X-Men #141.

Kingdom Come

PG-13 is all the rage these days and Kingdom Come is definitely the type of story that can appeal to older fans as well as new ones. Along with New Frontier, it’s a modern classic that remembers fondly the halcyon days of the Silver Age while putting a new spin on characters. Like the Dark Knight Returns, it projects a bleak future for superpowered beings while still offering a glimmer of hope. It’s a story of a new generation trying to find (and losing) its way only to be guided by the voices of the past.

It also pits all the heroes against each other in a battle royale supreme! Honestly, who doesn’t love this story? We’d love to see it adapted and we don’t think we’re alone. Even better – don’t go for an Alex Ross style realism: do it in the art deco style of Bruce Timm’s Batman, Superman and Justice League cartoons, thereby tying it in to that continuity and deepening the nostalgic appeal. If we’re talking about adapting modern classics, Kingdom Come is one of the biggies.

Avengers: The Kree/Skrull War

With its allusions to McCarthyism, this storyline could easily be adapted to fit modern conflicts and racial prejudices – there are a lot of folks currently mired in a “your next door neighbor could be the enemy” mindset so this type of story could work well as a Twilight Zone-esque metaphor. And of course, the star-spanning action and enormous cast featuring a classic Avengers lineup doesn’t hurt either. We’ve got shape-shifting aliens disguised as cows, a love story between Vision and Scarlet Witch and that whole “Fantastic Voyage” sequence where Ant-Man goes inside Vision to fix him up. And we’ve got Hawkeye during his Goliath era! Okay… maybe that last part wouldn’t make the cut.

A storyline like this one could also continue with Marvel’s recent “universe building” technique that we’re seeing in both the big and small screen films. Packed with cameos from a variety of Marvel characters, it can lay even more groundwork for a Marvel Animated Universe as well as set up an eventual Secret Invasion feature.

Teen Titans: The Judas Contract

This one was actually announced way back at Comic-Con 2006 but has been shelved due to a “lack of broad fanbase appeal”. We respectfully disagree.

The Teen Titans animated series that ran on Cartoon Network was popular while it lasted and actually did an adaptation of this storyline. An incarnation of the team has appeared on Batman: The Brave and the Bold and with a Young Justice series reportedly in the works, it seems that DC is willing to promote a team of younger heroes. It only seems logical to us that if you’re going to promote young heroes, you might as well have steak rather than hamburger and The Judas Contract is the most choice cut of steak Titans fans have ever eaten.

We don’t want to see a goofy anime-influenced version though. Give us something that lives up to dramatic weight of the original Wolfman/Pérez classic.

And, of course...

The Dark Knight Returns

Kinda seems like you just gotta do this one at some point, right?